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The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Cutting the Heart Out of Health Reform

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.

But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)

Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?

It’s impossible to accept the votes as a desire to fix the particular problem of people who got cancellation notices for individual plans.

For one thing, if those people could not get on the federal exchange, they might have been able to go to state-run exchanges but live in states where Republican governors refused to set them up. For another, the bill passed by the House today on a vote of 261-157 is not about providing a temporary fix. It is intended to cut the heart out of the health care reform program by allowing people to go on buying substandard policies next year.

Many of those policies are an illusion with catastrophically high deductibles and out-of-pocket spending ceilings. Take the insurance that the right-wing group Generation Opportunity was hawking last month. As Juliet Lapidos wrote here on Oct. 28, the $40.84 a month plan did not cover office visits for primary care doctors or specialists. It has a $10,000 a year deductible and if you ended up in the emergency room, you would have had to pay 20 percent of the bill after the deductible. The same applied to outpatient surgery and hospitalization.

There’s another word for that – bankruptcy.

It may well be that insurance bought on the new exchanges costs more, but it will provide real coverage.

The insurance industry has already reacted to the idea of restoring cancelled policies, which Mr. Obama proposed on Thursday. It “threatens to undermine the new market, and may lead to higher premiums and market disruptions in 2014 and beyond,” said Jim Donelon, Louisiana’s insurance regulator.

So, if your Congressman is one of these 39 Democrats who voted for that mess today, you might want to ask why.

Taking Note

The News at Neshaminy High

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Such mainline media as Slate and Mother Jones have stopped using the name of Washington’s professional football team, finding “Redskins” a racist slur for all its rah-rah fondness among hometown fans at kick-off time. No less offended, the editorial board of the student newspaper at Neshaminy High School in Bucks County, Penn., has voted to banish the word from their pages, arguing that it’s time for their own Neshaminy Redskins (10-and-1 and a state powerhouses) to be called something less insensitive toward genocidal history. “The word ‘Redskin’ is racist and very much so,” the board explained in its decision to drop the name from editions of The Playwickian. “It is not a term of honor, but a term of hate.”
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Obama’s Health Care Promise

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
President Barack Obama spoke about his health care law on Nov. 14, 2013. Charles Dharapak/Associated PressPresident Barack Obama spoke about his health care law on Nov. 14, 2013. 

There are important questions about whether the fix President Obama offered today for Americans whose insurance policies were cancelled will help them, whether it will hinder the broad goals of the health insurance reform law, and whether it will satisfy the opponents of reform.  We will start to address them later on the editorial page.

But this was also one of those moments when a nation takes stock of its president. And it seemed worth noting here that Mr. Obama has dealt another blow to his own already damaged credibility with this latest reminder of how he and his team bungled the rollout of health care reform.

Hovering over the press conference at the White House today was the question of whether Mr. Obama lied — whether he deliberately said what he knew not to be true with the intention of deceiving people — when he said repeatedly that Americans who like their policies would be able to keep them.
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On Philippines Relief, Comparing the U.S. and China

By CAROL GIACOMO
Tacloban, a city in the central Philippines, on Nov. 14, 2013. Ted Aljibe/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTacloban, a city in the central Philippines, on Nov. 14, 2013. 

American marines landed in the Philippines this week, the vanguard of an operation to help thousands of desperate victims of the worst typhoon in recent decades. The United States is also sending an aircraft carrier, other ships, 5,000 sailors and $20 million, just to start. Meanwhile, China, the world’s second largest economy and the rising power that so many countries in Asia fear, initially donated a paltry $100,000 to the rescue effort. According to Xinhua, it then bumped the number to $1.4 million, still pretty meager.

Why the sharp contrast?

America has many reasons to shift its vaunted military from security-related priorities to such humanitarian causes: It has vital equipment and skills to apply to the crisis that other countries do not. The Philippines is a treaty ally. America has been a Pacific power for decades and the Obama administration has committed to invest even more resources and attention in Asia, although that goal is still in the early stages. Not least, the humanitarian effort is also good politics, reminding regional countries that their partnerships with the United States extend beyond security and trade to munificence in their time of need.
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Homeless Kids in Rough Schools

By BRENT STAPLES

Working-aged adults who lost their jobs, homes and savings to the recession will have a difficult enough time establishing normal lives when the economy rights itself. The trauma will be especially deep and long lasting for the burgeoning population of children who were driven into homelessness — or even given up by their parents — when the world turned upside down in the Great Recession of 2008.

A new federal analysis released by the National Center For Homeless Education — and discussed recently in Education Week — shows that the census of homeless school children has grown dramatically in recent years. Forty states saw increases in their homeless student populations in 2011-2012, and ten states saw an increase of 20 percent or more. According to Education Week, nearly 1.7 million homeless children are enrolled in schools across the country, making this the largest school district in the country, ahead of the New York City public schools.
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A Hostile Bank Takeover

By VIKAS BAJAJ
Grameen employees protested in Dhaka on Nov. 7, 2013.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGrameen employees protested in Dhaka on Nov. 7, 2013.

The government of Bangladesh has played its trump card in its long-running campaign against Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus. Last week, legislators passed a law that effectively nationalizes the bank, which pioneered the idea of making small loans to poor women, by wresting control of it from the 8.4 million rural women that own a majority of its shares.

Unlike in other countries that have taken over failing banks in recent years, Bangladesh had no compelling reason to seize Grameen, which won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Mr. Yunus in 2006. The bank is not facing a financial crisis and its depositors are not lined up outside its branches demanding their money back. There is little doubt that the only reason the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina passed the new law was to exact revenge for Mr. Yunus’s brief foray into politics in 2007, when a caretaker government backed by the military was ruling the country.
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Global Warming, College and Partisanship

By JULIET LAPIDOS
Giant tabular icebergs surrounded by ice floe drift in the Australian Antarctic Territory.Torsten Blackwood/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiant tabular icebergs surrounded by ice floe drift in the Australian Antarctic Territory.

It’s well known that Democrats and political independents are more likely than Republicans to believe that global warming is mainly due to human activity. But here’s something from the latest Pew poll on climate change: College has a significantly larger effect on Democrats’ understanding of the issue than on Republicans’.

From the Pew summary:

Among Democrats, there are sizable educational differences over the main cause of global warming. Fully 86% of Democrats with college degrees say that the earth is warming and this is mostly due to human activity. Among Democrats with less education, 57% express this view.

By contrast, similar percentages of Republican college graduates (28%) and those who do not have a college degree (23%) say that human activity is mostly responsible for global warming.

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YouTube Cleaning Up Its Comments

By JULIET LAPIDOS
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

It’s sometimes a little frightening to read the comments on a YouTube video.  Let’s say you’ve just watched a cat video and want to find out how others responded to that moment when one kitten massaged another. You scroll down and find … a large helping of inanity as well as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and pure nonsense. It’s well known that the YouTube comments section is a virtual septic tank. In the immortal words of BuzzFeed: “YouTube IS the room with the million monkeys and the million typewriters.”

Now Google, which runs YouTube, has decided to clean up the site. It’s rolling out new moderation tools for video up-loaders and channel owners, enabling them to review comments before they’re posted. It’s requiring would-be commenters to sign up for a Google + account — a matter of some controversy. And instead of showing the most recent comment first, it will rank comments according to “relevance,” by considering up-votes, a commenter’s reputation, and whether or not the commenter is a member of one’s Google+ social network.
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Trouble for the Contraception Mandate

By DOROTHY J. SAMUELS
Multiple methods of contraception.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesMultiple methods of contraception.

With a ruling on Friday by the Seventh Circuit, a total of five federal circuit courts have weighed in on religious challenges to the health care law’s contraception mandate.

It now seems virtually certain that the Supreme Court, which is due to consider pending petitions for review on November 26th, will agree to decide the issue this term.

Among the federal circuit courts that have spoken so far, three – the Seventh, Tenth and D.C. Circuits – have ratified the dangerous view that secular, profit-making private employers can claim a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act, and  deny female employees an important health benefit.  Two – the Third and Sixth – sensibly rejected the religious liberty claims.
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No Health Insurance? Just Drink.

By JULIET LAPIDOS
Beer.Terry Kole, via Associated PressBeer.

This is the strangest P.R. campaign yet against the Affordable Care Act. Generation Opportunity, the Koch-funded group behind the Creepy Uncle Sam ads, is throwing tailgate parties to “educate” young people about the exchanges. Read: To convince young people to forgo health insurance.

The group’s communication director, David Pasch, wrote an email to The Tampa Bay Times describing a drunken event at Saturday’s University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game:

“We rolled in with a fleet of Hummers, F-150’s and Suburbans, each vehicle equipped with an 8’ high balloon bouquet floating overhead. We hired a popular student DJ from UMiami (DJ Joey), set up OptOut cornhole sets, beer pong tables, bought 75 pizzas, and hired 8 ‘brand ambassadors’ aka models with bullhorns to help out.”
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