How the Obamacare Repeal Could Cost Republicans the House
The House’s passage of its new health-care bill is an immediate win for Trump. But he’s not thinking ahead, argues David Frum. According to a recent Pew survey, 60 percent of Americans believe it is the responsibility of the federal government to provide health care for all. The Obamacare repeal may cost the Republicans their majority in the 2018 midterms.
Republican healthcare bill heads to Senate, where it may undergo drastic changes
Senators caution that their version ‘would be a blank sheet of paper’ to start and signal they will pursue budget reconciliation process, which limits scope of bill
As House Republicans cheered the “beginning of the end” of the Affordable Care Act at a celebration in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, Senate Republicans welcomed the bill with muted fanfare.
After weeks of fits and starts, House Republicans had narrowly passed a proposal to repeal and replace Obamacare and voted to forward to the Senate a bill that is both unpopular with the American public and unlikely to pass the chamber in its current form.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, hailed the vote as “an important step” and a “job well done”. But Republicans in the upper chamber swiftly vowed to draft their own healthcare legislation rather than take up the House-passed American Health Care Act.
“We are going to draft a Senate bill,” Iowa senator Chuck Grassley told reporters on Capitol Hill. “That is what I’ve been told.” …
Homeless, a Democrat and in jail: is this America’s most unlikely candidate?
When it comes to unlikely gubernatorial bids, Troy Minton – a liberal, homeless man who is currently in jail – may be in a league of his own
Troy Minton is running for governor of Idaho despite the odds stacked against him: ‘We’re starting to lose what this country was made of.’
Troy Minton is the only Democratic candidate for governor of Idaho. He is also homeless. The idiosyncrasies of his campaign do not end there.
“I know I’m innocent,” he said this week during a video call from a county jail in Boise, the state capital, where he has been held for almost two weeks for a probation violation. “I’m going to push forward.”
When it comes to unlikely electoral bids, Minton may be in a league of his own. Personal difficulties aside, he must contend with three Republican candidates in a place that hasn’t chosen a Democratic governor in decades. That’s not to mention any other Democrats who might run against him for the 2018 vote in the thinly populated Western state.
Even so, Minton is not exactly a political novice – he was once part of a lawsuit about a panhandling ban in Boise – and despite odds that might generously be described as long, he is steadfast. “We’re starting to lose what this country was made of and what this state was made of,” he said. He sees himself as the answer. Government “needs to be solely by the people, for the people”.
Some observers are nonplussed. Justin S Vaughn, a political scientist at Boise State University, hypothesized that if Minton’s goal is to raise awareness of homelessness issues, he could be successful. But if Minton is sincere in his gubernatorial aspirations, he said, “it’s kind of a silly lark”. …
The Cartel Murder That Exposed a Rogue U.S. Border Patrol Agent
When a headless body washed up in the calm waters of the Texas gulf coast, investigators began to unravel a crime that led first to a drug cartel assassin, then to a locked safe containing more than a kilo of cocaine, methamphetamine, a gold-plated pistol— and U.S. Border Patrol agent Joel Luna’s badge.
At a moment when Border Patrol may relax its hiring standards to meet President Trump’s executive order for 5,000 new agents, The Atlantic traveled to south Texas to explore a dark corner of the nation’s largest police force. There, investigators discovered that the victim was killed in a tire shop owned by Joel Luna’s two brothers, and that the agent used drug money to buy homes for them. “Whether he did it out of greed or out of love for his family, only he knows,” said Gustavo Garza, the prosecutor who brought murder charges against Luna.
Though the brutality of the crime is uncommon on the U.S. side of the border, corruption in the Border Patrol is widespread enough to “pose a national security threat,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. More than 140 agents have been arrested, charged, or convicted in the last dozen years. Joel Luna “is not one bad apple,” said James Tomsheck, a former senior official at Customs and Border Protection, “he’s part of a rate of corruption that exceeded that of any other U.S. federal law enforcement agency.” This documentary explores Luna’s case and its implications for the Border Patrol’s new hiring spree. For more, read the story ‘Not One Bad Apple.’
Under the new Republican health care bill, being a woman is essentially a pre-existing condition
America, 2017
After withdrawing the first version of its American Health Care Act (AHCA) in March, the Republican Party brought an updated version to the floor of the US House of Representatives today (May 4), where it passed by a vote of 217 to 213. It will next go to the Senate.
The full version of the bill, meant to replace Obamacare, has not yet been made public. Some pieces of it, though, are already available, including its provisions on how to handle pre-existing conditions.
Perhaps the most widely beloved element of Obama’s Affordable Care Act was the protection it gave Americans with pre-existing conditions from being denied health insurance coverage. House speaker Paul Ryan and his party—as well as president Donald Trump—insist their new bill will preserve those protections.
The AHCA as it was voted on today includes the MacArthur amendment (pdf), which allows states to waive certain Obamacare requirements “to encourage fair health insurance premiums.” The amendment states that “nothing in this Act shall be construed as permitting health insurance issuers to limit access to health coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions.” However, it also doesn’t do anything to actually guarantee that won’t happen. …
Your financial fate is sealed by the time you turn 25
Path Dependence
There are two downbeat facts about the US economy which you hear often lately: incomes are stagnant and inequality is rising. More specifically, the average American man hasn’t gotten a raise since the 1970s (adjusted for inflation) and the gap between high and low earners has been growing wider for decades, too.
New research (pdf) sheds light on these trends in a way previous studies have not. Income changes over your lifetime—typically your income starts low and grows a lot in your 20s and 30s before flattening out in middle age. To understand the drivers of inequality, economists need to consider people’s income over their entire life, not just a snapshot of earnings in a single year.
That has been hard to do, because most detailed income data don’t track people over time. The new paper by a quartet of economists compiled Social Security earnings histories for Americans from the age of 25 to 55. The oldest cohort turned 25 in 1957 and the youngest in 1983. …
Louisiana’s coast was already sickly. Now it’s being hit by a plague.
A swarm of tiny bugs with an enormous appetite has invaded the Louisiana marsh, and is sucking the life out of vegetation that helps keep the state’s fragile coast from further dissolving into the sea.
Scientists and agricultural experts are teaming up to stop the parasites from destroying the critical Roseau cane, but they’re beset by a major problem: They don’t fully know what the bug is, so they don’t exactly know how to attack it, and their early ideas so far — fire, insecticides and possibly the release of a microscopic wasp that preys on the bug — will likely result in nasty side effects.
Louisiana State University entomologist Rodrigo Diaz said researchers only recently discovered the foreign family of insects to which the invasive species belongs, called Aclerdidae, which is native to Japan and China. But the lab tests that identified it couldn’t reveal how it arrived — on a ship, attached to a migrating bird or even on the wind. …
Crooks Are After the Grease From Your French Fries
• Yellow grease prices jump 230% since 2000 as refiners buy more
• Black market growing, and more thefts expected in warm weather
The prize for the caper was more than a ton of used restaurant grease. Two men busted by police near a strip-mall dumpster in Knoxville, Tennessee, were seen March 2 siphoning the gooey waste into barrels on their truck. In the weeks before then, 44 similar thefts had been reported.
Stealing old vegetable oil that’s been used to cook chicken nuggets and french fries sounds a little gross. But a black market for the golden gunk is growing as U.S. refiners process record amounts of grease to comply with government mandates for renewable fuels. Last year, 1.4 billion pounds (635,000 metric tons) were turned into biodiesel — or 3.84 million pounds a day.
Click to embiggen
Most restaurants hire waste handlers to get rid of oil after a few days of use. But the National Renderers Association, an industry group, says as much as $75 million is illegally siphoned every year, much of it ending up in refineries. Biofuel prices have been shooting up, boosting the incentive for thieves who are getting bolder and craftier. With the arrival of warmer spring weather, licensed collectors are bracing for even more heists.
“It’s like crack money,” said Sumit Majumdar, president of Buffalo Biodiesel Inc., a Tonawanda, New York-based collector. “There’s an actual market for stolen oil. It’s almost like a pawn shop or scrap-metal business.” …
Are Britons falling out of love with booze?
Britain has always been known as a nation that loves a tipple. But the latest Office for National Statistics lifestyle survey suggests this may be coming to an end.
The 2016 poll of nearly 8,000 Britons found just under 60% had had a drink in the past week – the lowest rate since the survey began in 2005.
Of those who had not had a drink, half were teetotallers.
Are people really cutting back?
One of the problems with the ONS survey is that it is based on people’s own recollections – and it is well known that we are terrible for underestimating our drinking.
But there is evidence to be found elsewhere that the fall in alcohol consumption is real. …
We’re Probably Imagining Aliens Wrong
Humans have always had the impulse to cast alien life in our image, says British science writer Philip Ball. It’s a tendency that goes back centuries, and has only been propagated by modern science fiction. In this video by Adam D’Arpino for Aeon, Bell argues that this tendency could actually be limiting us in the search for aliens. “When we start speculating about what advanced extraterrestrials are like, we’re really just talking about ourselves,” he says. “Such failures of imagination can become a straightjacket for our thinking. How can we move beyond solipsism and Hollywood tropes?”
Ed. More tomorrow. Possibly. Maybe? Not.