Health Insurers Plan To Debunk GOP's 'Rigged' Obamacare Study

I just finished my May, 2014, column for VEER Magazine which looks at the issue of Medicaid expansion in Virginia.  Much of the column looks at the lies and disinformation that is now the norm in terms of GOP talking points and "studies."   Rather than met countervailing arguments with facts and objective evidence, the GOP has a new standard modus operandi: lie and/or cook study results just like Mark Regnerus in his infamous anti-gay parenting farce.  The truth simply doesn't matter in today's GOP.  As Talking Points Memo notes, a number of health insurance companies seem poised to expose the lie in a new GOP "study" that sought to discredit enrollments under the Affordable health Care Act.  Here are highlights:

Insurance companies plan to effectively debunk the House GOP's much-derided Obamacare survey at a Wednesday hearing.

The hearing is a follow-up to last week's report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and is hosted by one of its subcommittees, that found only 67 percent of Obamacare enrollees had paid their premiums as of April 15. An industry source described the survey to TPM as "incredibly rigged" because it excluded any premium payments that were due April 30 or later.

Roughly 3 million of Obamacare's 8 million enrollees would have had payments due after April 15 because they signed up March 15 or later.

A follow-up letter sent to insurers by the committee seemed to indicate that companies had raised that issue. Testimony prepared for Wednesday's hearing, and which was first reported by Bloomberg, is another direct contradiction of the Republicans' methodology.

Dennis Matheis, a vice president at WellPoint, one of the nation's largest insurers, plans to point out the payment percentage is much higher if you count only the payments that have actually come due, up to 90 percent:

The percentage of applicants that have paid a premium will differ depending on whether the percentage is calculated based on the total number of applications and premium payments received during this entire time period (roughly 70 percent) or is calculated based on the total number of applications and premium payments received for policies whose premium deadline has passed (ranging up to 90 percent depending on the state).

Paul Wingle, an executive at Aetna, plans to make the same point, estimating his company's customers are paying at better-than-80-percent clip:

For those who had reached their payment due date, the payment rate, though dynamic, has been in the low- to mid-80 percent range.

A third industry witness, J. Darren Rodgers of Health Care Services Corp., plans to stress that the last segment of payment data "is not yet complete given that deadlines for all of those policies may not yet have passed."

I once was proud to be a Republican.  Now I find myself embarrassed to have ever been involved in the GOP.  Truth, logic, honesty, reason,  have all gone out the window and I remain convinced that the decline of those values directly correlates to the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP base.  To be a GOP elected official requires that one be little more than a pathologically lying whore.

Feel the Love: Christofascist "Expert" Paul Cameron "Open To" Gay Death Penalty

The true horror and moral filth of the Christofascists continues to reveal itself in things as diverse as the "turn the gays away" bill in Arizona, Uganda's "kill the gays" law, and the constant deliberate lies and untruths disseminated against LGBT individuals.  Aiding and abetting these horrors are the faux experts who generate false and untrue "research" and "studies" to justify calling gays "diseased," "pedophiles," and "treats to children." Few faux experts have a more foul history than Paul Cameron who was thrown out of every legitimate professional association that he had belonged to  almost 30 years ago.  Yet time and time again we see "family values" organizations and "Christian" organizations disseminating his manufactured lies and fraudulent studies and anti-gay smears.  Now, with Uganda's enactment of a horrific anti-gay law that includes prison sentences of up to life imprisonment, Cameron says that he is "open to" death penalties for gays.  The Bilerico Project has details.  Here are excerpts:

Crackpot doctor Paul Cameron -- possibly the only anti-LGBT "researcher" in the United States more thoroughly discredited than Mark Regnerus -- went on the David Pakman Show today to endorse Uganda's new Anti-Homosexuality Law.
Host David Pakman summarizes the interview thusly:

Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute said today that he not only favors the Ugandan anti-gay law which indicates prison as a punishment for homosexuality, he added that he consulted with Ugandan officials on the law, and that he would be open to the idea of the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality. Cameron refused to answer, however, the logistics of how he would carry out and administer death sentences for LGBT individuals.

As I've written previously here at The Bilerico Project, Cameron is a certified wackjob. He was kicked out of both the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association for peddling virulently anti-gay junk science; the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him an "infamous anti-gay propagandist" and lists his organization, the Family Research Institute, as a hate group.
Cameron is best known for the thoroughly debunked lie about the supposed "health risks" of homosexuality -- you know, the one about how gay men, on average, live only half as long as their heterosexual counterparts. In a 2012 appearance on a Christian talk radio show, Cameron made the wild-eyed claim that "the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try." Last year, the Russian government flew him in to spread his anti-LGBT propaganda at a Duma roundtable on "family values."
And now Paul Cameron is "open to the idea" of killing gay people.

Read more at http://www.bilerico.com/2014/02/researcher_paul_cameron_open_to_gay_death_penalty.php#4MZtYECkfV4qIKWL.99

Crackpot doctor Paul Cameron -- possibly the only anti-LGBT "researcher" in the United States more thoroughly discredited than Mark Regnerus -- went on the David Pakman Show today to endorse Uganda's new Anti-Homosexuality Law.

Host David Pakman summarizes the interview thusly:

Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute said today that he not only favors the Ugandan anti-gay law which indicates prison as a punishment for homosexuality, he added that he consulted with Ugandan officials on the law, and that he would be open to the idea of the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality. Cameron refused to answer, however, the logistics of how he would carry out and administer death sentences for LGBT individuals.

As I've written previously here at The Bilerico Project, Cameron is a certified wackjob. He was kicked out of both the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association for peddling virulently anti-gay junk science; the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him an "infamous anti-gay propagandist" and lists his organization, the Family Research Institute, as a hate group.

Cameron is best known for the thoroughly debunked lie about the supposed "health risks" of homosexuality -- you know, the one about how gay men, on average, live only half as long as their heterosexual counterparts. In a 2012 appearance on a Christian talk radio show, Cameron made the wild-eyed claim that "the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try." Last year, the Russian government flew him in to spread his anti-LGBT propaganda at a Duma roundtable on "family values."

And now Paul Cameron is "open to the idea" of killing gay people.

Cameron is nothing short of a monster - as are those who use his lies and untruths to  denigratee gays and deprive us of equality under the civil laws.  In short, these are NOT nice or decent people and the larger public needs to come to the realization that it is not gays who are sick and "inherently disordered," but rather their opponents, especially the "godly folk."

Christofascists'" Gays Bad-for-Children" Argument to Face Court Scrutiny

One of the recurring themes of the anti-gay Christofascists is that gay parenting is bad for children and that, therefore, gays should not be allowed to marry.  This specious argument was made in briefs recently in Bostic v. Rainey and other recent same sex marriage rulings all decided at the Summary Judgment point.  But in none of these cases were the faux experts utilized by the anti-gay forces required to testify under oath in open court.  Indeed, the last time that such testimony occurred was in Hollingsworth v. Perry where the Christofascist witnesses either failed to show or were demolished on cross examination.  Now, a case in Michigan will pit the paid faux experts of the far right against virtually every legitimate medical and mental health association in America.  One can only hope that the match up is a catastrophe for the haters which may kill this disingenuous defense of bigotry once and for all.  The New York Times looks at the coming court case and the manner in which extremist groups have funded the faux research.  Here are highlights:

As they reel from a succession of defeats in courtrooms and legislatures, opponents of same-sex marriage have a new chance this week to play one of their most emotional and, they hope, potent cards: the claim that having parents of the same sex is bad for children.

In a federal court in Detroit starting Tuesday, in the first trial of its kind in years, the social science research on family structure and child progress will be openly debated, with expert testimony and cross-examination, offering an unusual public dissection of the methods of sociology and the intersection of science and politics.

Scholars testifying in defense of Michigan’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage aim to sow doubt about the wisdom of change. They brandish a few sharply disputed recent studies — the fruits of a concerted and expensive effort by conservatives to sponsor research by sympathetic scholars — to suggest that children of same-sex couples do not fare as well as those raised by married heterosexuals.

That view will be challenged in court by longtime scholars in the field, backed by major professional organizations, who call those studies fatally flawed. These scholars will describe a near consensus that, other factors like income and stability being equal, children of same-sex couples do just as well as those of heterosexual couples.

“The overwhelming evidence so far is that there’s not much difference between children raised by heterosexual or same-sex parents,” Andrew J. Cherlin, a prominent sociologist of family issues at Johns Hopkins University who is not involved in the case, said in an interview.

The last time these issues were debated in a federal court, in California nearly four years ago, social science opponents of same-sex marriage underwent withering challenges in pretrial depositions and did not even appear in court.   As he struck down Proposition 8, the California amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman, Judge Vaughn R. Walker of Federal District Court in San Francisco said he had heard “no reliable evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry will have any negative effects on society.”

This time, four social science researchers, all of whom attended at least one of the Heritage Foundation meetings and went on to publish new reports, are scheduled to testify in favor of Michigan’s ban.  The most prominent is Dr. Regnerus. 

The [Witherspoon Institute] institute gave Dr. Regnerus $695,000; the Bradley Foundation, a grant-making organization that supports conservative causes, gave him $90,000, according to his résumé.

[P]professional rejections of Dr. Regnerus’s conclusions were swift and severe. In a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court last year in two same-sex marriage cases, a report by the 14,000-member American Sociological Association noted that more than half the subjects whom Dr. Regnerus had described as children of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” were the offspring of failed opposite-sex marriages in which a parent later engaged in same-sex behavior, and that many others never lived with same-sex parents.

Wendy D. Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and the main author of the association report, said of the wider literature: “Every study has shortcomings, but when you pull them all together, the picture is very clear. There is no evidence that children fare worse in same-sex families.” . . . .  “Are we going to hold same-sex parents to a different standard than heterosexuals?” she asked.