BREWSTER MILLER, - Dumbout
Stephan: More good news about the expansion of healthcare under the ACA. The lieves of millions have been improved. I think the Republicans have made an historic political miscalculation, since even their base has benefited. And I can see an upside: there could be enough people awakened as to why ACA is a good idea that Republicans lose seats because voters push back. The 2014 election is going to tell us a lot about our future.
The new report published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine indicates a 10.3 million decline in the number of Americans that have no health insurance. This finding has been submitted by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Health and Human Services. A reduction in the rate of uninsured adults in the age bracket from 18 to 64 was noticed from 21% in September 2013 to 16.3% in April 2014. This rate has declined among different racial and ethnic groups of all ages according to surveys and data compiled by HHS. The highest gains have been among Hispanics, blacks and young adults.
MEDICARE
This decline in the uninsured rate has been noticeable in the District of Columbia and in 25 states that have adopted the Medicaid program for Obamacare expansion. The rate of decline in these state were recorded as 6% as against 3.1% in the other 25 non-expanding states.
The CBO project stated that while the reduction of uninsured would total to around 12 million Americans, nearly 42 million will still lack coverage.
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that more Americans were able to afford a personal doctor and pay for medical care in the […]
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NICOLE FLATOW, - Think Progress
Stephan: Here baldly outlined is the truth about the American gulag. The whole concept of a system based on retribution at the meanest level is a failure and a fraud. Here is some proof.
The United States still has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but those few states that managed to significantly reduce their prison population over the last decade saw benefits other than reduced lock-up costs. They also saw their crime rate go down at a higher rate than the national average, according to a new report from the Sentencing Project.
The report bolsters the notion that locking up the wrong people doesn’t improve public safety. In fact, ‘smart on crime” policies not only minimize punishment toward non-violent offenders; they can also re-allocate resources toward violent crime.
‘The experiences of New York, New Jersey, and California demonstrate that it is possible to achieve substantial reductions in mass incarceration without compromising public safety,” wrote Marc Mauer and Nazgol Ghandnoosh of the Sentencing Project.
Between 1999 and 2012, state prison populations in all 50 states increased 10 percent, as states continued their over-reliance on drug war policies and harsh sentencing. But New York and New Jersey simultaneously bucked that trend, each decreasing their prison populations by 26 percent during that same period. Nationwide, crime rates declined over this decade. But in those two states, the crime rates dropped even more, despite their reverse pattern of locking […]
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STEVE HORN, - Firedoglake
Stephan: This is a dreadful story. In the face of the evidence that carbon energy is literally destroying our world, it is mind boggling to me that the Obama Administration is leasing out millions of public acres for drilling and Fracking. I think we have to take this as the measure of how carbon energy interests have corrupted the government -- whether Democratic or Republican. Once again we choose the past over the future.
Deploying the age-old ‘Friday news dump,” President Barack Obama’s Interior Department gave the green light on Friday, July 18 to companies to deploy seismic air guns to examine the scope of Atlantic Coast offshore oil-and-gas reserves.
It is the first time in over 30 years that the oil and gas industry is permitted to do geophysical data collection along the Atlantic coast. Though decried by environmentalists, another offshore oil and gas announcement made the same week has flown under the radar: over 21 million acres of Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas reserves will be up for lease on August 20 in New Orleans, Louisiana at the [Mercedes-Benz] Superdome.
On July 17, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the lease in the name of President Obama’s ‘all of the above” energy policy.
‘As part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy to continue to expand safe and responsible domestic energy production, BOEM…today announced that the bureau will offer more than 21 million acres offshore Texas for oil and gas exploration and development in a lease sale that will include all available unleased areas in the Western Gulf of Mexico Planning Area,” proclaimed a July 17 BOEM […]
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DANIELLE PAQUETTE, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: This article, one of the first I've seen with this slant begins to humanize what is coming with climate change. The election of 2014 is crucial because if it goes to the Theocratic Right, that has now captured the Republican Party, nothing will be done at least not before 2016's election. By then a whole series of tipping points will have been passed.
Note particularly, the Chicago story. This introduces an aspect not previously discussed much, if at all: the failure of our aging infrastructure under the stress of climate change, particularly the underground part such as sewers. We are at a point of compounding errors, shown in the confluence of the failure to maintain infrastructure in favor of war, and climate change. If you have a bond issue on your ballot to improve infrastructure, you would be wise to vote for it.
Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” scientists proclaimed in the Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment, released in May. It’s touching every corner of the U.S., the report claims: We can’t escape inland.
I wrote about Lori Burns, a 40-year-old Chicago woman whose basement keeps flooding with raw sewage. During the past century, downpours that force human waste up pipes and into homes, a particularly devastating effect of combined sewer overflow, have struck the Midwest metropolis more often. And it’s projected to get worse. That means more cleanup costs for residents like Burns.
1. Not everyone worries about climate change. That worries people who worry about climate change.
The data: Only 40 percent of Americans believe climate change is a major threat, according to Pew research. And only 42 percent of Americans think human activity is causing climate change. Meanwhile a review of 12,000 scientific papers that address the causes of climate change found that 97 percent of the studies agree that the phenomenon is being driven by human activity.
The story: Former journalist Wen Stephenson wrote an essay about confronting his old colleagues in the Boston Globe’s editorial department. He believed they weren’t […]
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Thursday, July 24th, 2014
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, - The Sacramento Bee
Stephan: Here, in contrast is a Blue value state. When Jerry Brown was elected California was an economic basket case. Today, under Blue value policies it looks rather different.
Dire predictions about jobs being destroyed spread across California in 2012 as voters debated whether to enact the sales and, for those near the top of the income ladder, stiff income tax increases in Proposition 30. Million-dollar-plus earners face a 3 percentage-point increase on each additional dollar.
‘It hurts small business and kills jobs,” warned the Sacramento Taxpayers Association, the National Federation of Independent Business/California, and Joel Fox, president of the Small Business Action Committee.
So what happened after voters approved the tax increases, which took effect at the start of 2013?
Last year California added 410,418 jobs, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2012, significantly better than the 1.8 percent national increase in jobs.
California is home to 12 percent of Americans, but last year it accounted for 17.5 percent of new jobs, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
America has more than 3,100 counties and what demographers call county equivalents. Eleven California counties, including Sacramento, accounted for almost 1 in every 7 new jobs in the U.S. last year.
The Central Valley is home to nine of the nation’s 335 largest counties. The data show that all nine counties enjoyed better job growth overall than the rest of America. Sacramento County experienced a 2.7 […]
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