The Coming Middle Class Healthcare Crisis

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Max West

From an RCP article on “The Middle Class: Uninsured and Hurting”:

Brace yourself for the next health insurance crisis: the uninsured middle class. The Affordable Care Act added millions of mostly poor people to the insurance rolls. But the law is driving premiums so high that middle-class people can no longer afford insurance. Several million are expected to drop coverage in 2018. Under Obamacare, poor lives matter — middle class lives, not so much.

The ACA’s impact on working class families (aka ‘whites’) is, like the impact of the corporately exploited H1-B program, not sexy enough for MSM coverage.

With GOP lawmakers paralyzed about how to repeal and replace Obamacare, Senators Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., are swooping in with a plan to keep the floundering health law afloat. Senate hearings begin Wednesday. The senators cloak themselves in the mantle of bipartisan reasonableness, but don’t be fooled. There’s nothing bipartisan about their scheme. The big losers are middle-class buyers priced out of the individual insurance market and taxpayers footing the bill for the billions in extra spending these fixers are proposing.

The winners are insurance companies.

Insurers are demanding $8 billion a year in taxpayer funds to compensate them for giving breaks on deductibles and co-pays to low-income customers. Although a federal court has already ruled insurers aren’t entitled to the money, they’re threatening to drop their Obamacare plans if they don’t get it. The Senate’s phony fixers are only too willing to cave.

Murray has already laid down the ground rules, demanding that any “fix” supported by Democrats can’t change the Affordable Care Act’s one-size-fits-all coverage requirement. That continues to force single men to pay for maternity coverage and childless couples to pay for pediatric dental care. Murray also forbids changing the ACA regulation that makes the healthy pay the same premiums as people with pre-existing conditions — community pricing. She’s barring the very changes needed to lower premiums.

Also backing the $8 billion payout to insurers is a group of more than 40 Republican and Democratic House members who call themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus. Trouble is, Obamacare’s regulations are the problem, and they’re proposing only minor tweaks.

Of the broader structural problem inherent in ACA’s overtly liberal ambitions:

The ACA is actually two laws glued together: a vast Medicaid expansion to cover the poor and a federal takeover of individual insurance markets, previously regulated by states. Since that takeover, individual premiums have more than doubled, and they’re predicted to rise another 25 to 35 percent next year. The mandatory benefit package and community pricing regulation are to blame, according to actuarial experts. Premiums will never go down until Obamacare’s regulations are repealed. That would liberate the middle class to buy affordable insurance without hurting the poor on Medicaid.

Obamacare’s defenders insist premium hikes are not a problem because whenever premiums go up, so do subsidies for low-income buyers. They pay the same year after year, regardless of how premiums soar.

These Obamacare apologists never mention buyers who don’t qualify for subsidies. Under the law, individuals earning more than $47,520 and couples earning more than $64,080 have to pay the full premium. No compassion for them.

Not to mention the 6.9 million people who buy coverage outside the ACA exchanges, where there are no subsidies. In 2017, the average premium for a family of four buying on eHealth reached $14,300 with a whopping $8,322 deductible. That means shelling out more than $22,600 before seeing a penny from insurance. You can pay your mortgage for that.

Wait until we cross the threshold of another, as-yet-unimagined healthcare crisis of… working class whites — otherwise the paragons of responsible, albeit dying, WASP behavior — voluntarily choosing to not purchase health care… and deal with the consequences later.

How is a white working class family to endure life without health insurance?

There’s always opiates.

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NYT: “Immigrants Shouldn’t Have to Be ‘Talented’ to Be Welcome”

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Max West

So, now it’s come to this: the Left is now pivoting to eliminate any semblance of a criterion for immigration be that immigrants themselves be a positive asset to the U.S. economy (a criterion that, from a completely different perspective, is a canard in the first place.)

Masha Gessen (ahem), who has the requisite vibrant diversity and sufficient ‘Otherness’, lectures us with a NYT op-ed titled “Immigrants Shouldn’t Have to Be ‘Talented’ to Be Welcome”:

As protests broke out across the United States in response to Mr. Trump’s [DACA] move, reporters and immigrant advocates stressed that the administration’s actions will hurt achievers — people who have graduated from college, people who have bought houses, people who work for high-tech companies.

There is nothing wrong with this story. It’s one that most, if not all, immigrants like to tell about themselves — even if their actual story doesn’t neatly fit the narrative…

In a case study of the Left’s recent penchant for cannibalization predicated on virtue-signaling-moral-purification, Gessen is brazen enough (and why shouldn’t he be, his only moral failing being that he’s not an illegal ‘Dreamer’ himself) to lecture the very hand that feeds him — the NYT Editorial board — for their racism and inhumanity:

When the president threw his support behind a reform plan that would drastically reduce immigration to this country, editorial writers argued against it by pointing out that immigrants benefit the economy.

These arguments usually begin by stating that America is a “land of immigrants.” This not only is an insult to Native Americans and the descendants of those who were brought to this country against their will but also constitutes a sort of sleight of hand. It turns the stories of individual immigrants into the “story of America.” It’s one thing for individuals to base their sense of self-worth on their contribution to the American economy. It’s quite another to claim that America values immigrants because of this contribution: This paves the way to thinking that America should make decisions about immigrants based on whether they benefit the economy…

In fact, it’s not just the NYT that has been racist and inhumane, but other Democrats as well:

This is neither new nor specific to Republicans. Hillary Clinton’s campaign promised comprehensive immigration reform that would “bring millions of hardworking people into the formal economy.” Bernie Sanders’s platform promised to build an immigration system that would “match our labor market needs.” Responding to DACA’s repeal, the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer mentioned “hardworking” people whose “contributions are vital to our economy.”

You see, we have so many more miles to go before we reach the Progressive Promised Land. Anything less is essentially neo-Nazism.

As long as politicians consider it necessary to qualify the victims as “hardworking” or “talented,” they fail to stand up to the administration’s fundamentally hateful immigration agenda.

Read that sentence above again.

The piece concludes with the the obligatory reference to St. Emma Lazarus (author of what Steve Sailer calls the Zeroeth Amendment) and all that her poem entails:

It’s not immigrants’ economic contribution that makes America proud; it’s its adherence to the words inscribed inside the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — from the Emma Lazarus poem that the White House adviser Stephen Miller waved away last month during a news conference on immigration reform…

If immigration is debated only in terms of whether it benefits the economy, politicians begin to divide people into two categories: “valuable” and “illegal.” When countries make people illegal, the world comes apart. When we agree to talk about people as cogs, we lose our humanity.

In other words, having any set of standards as to which immigrants we allow into the U.S. means we have lost our humanity.

Just when you think the Left can’t get any more surreal, they manage to outmaneuver the frames of the painting, vomiting onto the surrounding wall and floor.

And the floor is getting very slippery.

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Kimball: Inebriates of Virtue

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Max West

From “Inebriates of Virtue”, by one of the best culture critics writing, Roger Kimball:

At Yale, where censorship never sleeps, the Committee of Public Safety—no, wait, that was Robespierre’s plaything. Yale’s new bureaucracy is called the “Committee on Art in Public Spaces.” Its charge? To police works of art on campus, to make sure that images offensive to favored populations are covered over or removed. At the residential college formerly known as Calhoun, for example, the Committee has removed stained glass windows depicting slaves and other historical scenes of Southern life. Statues and other representations of John C. Calhoun—a distinguished statesman but also an apologist for slavery—have likewise been slotted for the oubliette.

But impermissible attitudes and images are never in short supply once the itch to stamp out heresy gets going. Yesterday, it was Calhoun and representations of the Antebellum South. Today it is a carving at an entrance to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library depicting an Indian and a Puritan. The Puritan, if you can believe it, was holding a musket—a gun! Quoth Susan Gibbons, one of Yale’s librarian-censors: its “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” Why not? Never mind. Solution? Cover over the musket with a cowpat of stone. (But leave the Indian’s bow and arrow alone!)

Actually, we just learned that the removable cowpat of stone was only a stopgap. The outcry against the decision struck a chord with Peter Salovey, Yale’s President. “Such alteration,” he noted, “represents an erasure of history, which is entirely inappropriate at a university.” He’s right about that. But wait! Instead of merely altering the image, Salovey announced that Yale would go full Taliban, removing the offending stonework altogether. In the bad old days, librarians and college presidents were people who sought to protect the past, that vast storehouse of offensive attitudes and behavior. In these more enlightened times, they collude in its effacement.

You might say, Who cares what violence a super-rich bastion of privilege and unaccountability like Yale perpetrates on its patrimony? Well, you should care. Institutions like Yale (and Harvard, Stanford, and the rest of the elite educational aeries) are the chief petri dishes for the “progressive” hostility to free expression and other politically correct attitudes that have insinuated themselves like a fever-causing virus into the bloodstream of public life.

As we enter a radical new phase of corporate-sponsored, soft totalitarianism, will things quickly come to a head, or will we, exhausted and afraid of losing our jobs, all slowly succumb and obey?

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Spirit – Colossus (1976)

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

From Spirit’s album Farther Along (1976), with vocals by Randy California, a man whose short life appears to have been lived fully.

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David Brooks is Getting Anxious

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

Jewish cuckservative David Brooks starts his “How Trump Kills the G.O.P.” column with this:

It’s ironic that race was the issue that created the Republican Party and that race could very well be the issue that destroys it.

He is lamenting the inexorable racialization of politics in America.

It’s become more of a white party in recent years, of course, and adopted some wrongheaded positions on civil rights enforcement, but it was still possible to be a Republican without feeling like you were violating basic decency on matters of race. Most of the Republican establishment, from the Bushes to McCain and Romney, fought bigotry, and racism was not a common feature in the conservative moment…

But the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.

Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.

Ah, but Brooks is Smarter Than You and sees nuance:

I’d love to see more research on the relationship between white identity politics and simple racism. There’s clear overlap, but I suspect they’re not quite the same thing. Racism is about feeling others are inferior. White identitarianism is about feeling downtrodden and aggrieved yourself.

White identitarianism is not equal to racism. Now, that’s nuance!

From his seat on high, Brooks divines three – three, I tell yee – truths:

But three things are clear: First, identity politics on the right is at least as corrosive as identity politics on the left, probably more so…

Second, it is wrong to try to make a parallel between Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter. To pretend that these tendencies are somehow comparable is to ignore American history and current realities.

Third, white identity politics as it plays out in the political arena is completely noxious. Donald Trump is the maestro here. He established his political identity through birtherism, he won the Republican nomination on the Muslim ban, he campaigned on the Mexican wall, he governed by being neutral on Charlottesville and pardoning the racialist Joe Arpaio.

Yes, Brooks is a genius, and it’s why he has a coveted NYT ‘conservative’ columnist position and you don’t. He’s ‘on the pulse’ of what is happening in the burgeoning Dissident Right.

So, what does the future portend, Mr. Brooks?

Each individual Republican is now compelled to embrace this garbage or not. The choice is unavoidable, and white resentment is bound to define Republicanism more and more in the months ahead. It’s what Trump cares about. The identity warriors on the left will deface statues or whatever and set up mutually beneficial confrontations with the identity warriors on the right. Things will get uglier.

And this is where the dissolution of the G.O.P. comes in. Conservative universalists are coming to realize their party has become a vehicle for white identity and racial conflict. This faction is prior to and deeper than Trump…

Friendships are now ending across the right. People who supported Trump for partisan reasons now feel locked in to support him on race, and they are making themselves repellent…

Like GOP, Inc, the genius David Brooks believes the logic of white identity politics will someone end once Trump leaves office. His type refuse to acknowledge any deeper, more profoundly existential, underlying dynamic which might pre-exist Trump, one that goes beyond Trump. That is why his type will rush to enact DACA legislation and perpetually delay progress on The Wall. After all, once that profane outlier fluke that is Donald Trump leaves office, we can get back to sensible comprehensive immigration reform.

With respect to the growing racialization of politics in America, each ounce of Jewish angst Brooks experiences on the subject is another ounce of joy which I then experience.

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Scruton: “The Threat of Free Speech in the University”

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

As I’ve noted recently, I’m particularly interested in the parallels between current P.C. soft totalitarianism and the experience of Soviet era dissidents. From Roger Scruton’s “The Threat of Free Speech in the University”:

The fear of heresy arises whenever groups are defined by a doctrine. No matter how absurd the doctrine may be, if it is a test of membership then it must be protected from criticism. And the more absurd it is, the more vehement the protection. Most of us can live with false accusations, but when a criticism is true we hasten to silence the one who utters it. In just that way, it is the most vulnerable religious doctrines that are the most violently protected. If you mock the claim of Muslims that theirs is a “religion of peace,” you run the greatest of risks: the Islamist proves his devotion to peace by killing those who question it…

We should recall that, when the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century began their wars and genocides, the universities were first among their targets—the places where discussion was most urgently to be controlled. The behavior of the communist and anarchist student cells in Russia, and the Brown Shirts in Germany, was repeated by the student revolutionaries of May 1968 in France and by many student activists today.

Scruton adds:

The left-liberal worldview is not, on the whole, concerned with the wider situation of the world, for all its global pretensions. It is concerned with us, with the Western inheritance. It is an exercise in self-castigation, designed to show in all matters—history, literature, art, religion—the glaring moral faults of a civilization that has depended on distinctions of sex, race, class, orientation, and the rest in order to manufacture a false image of its superiority. At the same time, the current orthodoxy carefully refrains from any comparative judgments: gender studies will give you an earful of spite about the treatment of women and homosexuals in Western societies, but carefully pass over the treatment of women and homosexuals in Islam. After all, it is important not to incur the charge of Islamophobia. The university must become a “safe space” for Muslims, as well as for other vulnerable and marginalized groups—hence the successful campaign to force Brandeis University to withdraw the honorary degree offered to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She had spoken truths about Islam and was therefore a threat to Muslim students and an invasion of the “safe space” that the university was obliged to offer them.

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BenOp = The Ethos of Not Showing Up

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

Regarding Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, The Anti-Gnostic nails it when he writes:

The future belongs to those who show up, and the “Ben Op” doesn’t seem to be a strategy for showing up. Rather, it strikes me as a rear-guard action by aging converts begging to be allowed to die in peace.

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Heyer Redux

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

Did the morbidly obese Heather Heyer, whose death in C-ville has served as a Reichstag Fire-like pretext for Big Tech’s clampdown on the Alt Right, actually die of a heart attack, more in line with her ill health, and not due to any direct hit by the Dodge Challenger?

Posted in Alt-Right, Left | Comments Off on Heyer Redux

Brown Sugar

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

A natural step towards natural segregation (hat tip: AmRen):

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday launched Brown Sugar, the new subscription-video-on-demand service featuring what it calls the biggest collection of the “baddest” African-American movies for its prime members.

Prime customers would receive a seven-day free trial to access the service at BrownSugar.com and on other devices paying $3.99 per month thereafter, Amazon said in a statement.

The Brown Sugar website tagline describes itself as “a black explosion of hot chicks, cool cats and cult classics”. Its portfolio of movies include “Blacula”, “Black Caesar”, “Cotton Comes to Harlem” and “Foxy Brown”, among others.

The announcement comes at a time when online video-streaming services like Netflix Inc and Amazon Prime are competing to gain traction among young viewers who are shying away from traditional television services.

Brown Sugar, run by African-American TV network Bounce, would be available on Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Kindle and web browsers via BrownSugar.com.

Posted in Black, Culture | Comments Off on Brown Sugar

Haidt: The Fragile Generation

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Max West

Jonathan Haidt discusses ‘The Fragile Generation’:

‘I’m very concerned about a phenomenon called “concept creep” – which has been happening to a lot of psychological terms since the 1990s’, he says. ‘When a word like “violence” is allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence, then this causes a cascade of bad effects. It’s bad for the students themselves because they now perceive an idea that they dislike, or a speaker that they dislike, as having committed a much graver offence against themselves – which means that they will perceive more victimisation of themselves. And it’s also really bad for society because, as we are seeing in a spectacular way in the United States this year, when each side can point to rampant occurrences of what they see as violence by the other side, this then justifies acts of actual physical violence on their side. And there’s no obvious end to this mutual escalation process.’

He adds: ‘Everybody involved in education needs to be dampening down violence and the acceptance of violence. Telling students that words are violence is counterproductive to that effort.’

Most interesting is Haidt’s speculation that SJW Overdrive is limited to elite schools:

While incidents of protests getting out of hand and the censorious policies of student bodies get a lot of press, Haidt points out that these problems do not involve the vast majority of students. ‘The political problems are mostly confined to elite schools where people live together for four years. The problems don’t seem to be arising very much at community colleges or places where people leave the college community to go to work or to go home to their families. So the problems are localised, especially in intense communities that co-create a particular moral order’, he says.

‘I don’t know if most college students, even at those elite schools, are more fragile. What we do know is that rates of depression and anxiety [have been] sky-rocketing since around 2011.’

Such elite schools, however, are naturally highly influential to Culture, to a level of disproportionality normally reserved for class-of-nobility societies.

The heightened vulnerability of college students has had a chilling effect on discussion in the academic world, and Haidt sees this in his day-to-day experience on campus. ‘There is a rapidly spreading feeling that we are all walking on eggshells, both students and faculty. That we are now accountable, not for what we say, but for how anyone who hears it might take it. And if you have to speak, thinking about the worst reading that anyone could put on your words, that means you cannot be provocative, you cannot take risks, that means you will play it safe when you speak… This is what I’m seeing in my classes when topics related to race or gender come up – which we used to be able to talk about 10 years ago, but now it’s painful and there’s a lot of silence.’

This is disastrous for academic life, as Haidt points out: ‘A university cannot function if people will not put their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they think are wrong, will not stand up for ideas that they think are right.’

Increasingly, I have been thinking about the parallels here with late Soviet-era communism, where even Party members (behind closed doors and after a few drinks) would lampoon the core propaganda premises of Communism.

This disconnect from social reality didn’t end well for the official programme of Soviet Communism; in fact, it ended quite badly.

Let’s see if the same thing happens to the P.C. balloon currently casting an oblong shadow over our society.

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