Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times discusses a policy of having the unvaccinated pay more for their health insurance (which could require changes in law), but concludes that before going down that road, vaccination holdouts should be made keenly aware of the potential for financial ruin stemming from their bad decisions:

...Insured but unvaccinated people who end up in the hospital with COVID-19 already face high costs: They’re likely to breach their deductible and come up against their maximum out-of-pocket charges, which typically run to thousands of dollars.

Uninsured patients will leave the hospital, assuming they recover, with tens of thousands of dollars in bills.

“The community as a whole pays the price for people being unvaccinated,” says Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, the state’s ACA marketplace. “But even more than that, those unvaccinated will pay the price — through illness, and through higher healthcare costs they’ll be paying out of pocket.”

That makes the discussion about imposing costs on the unvaccinated “a good thing,” Lee says.  

“It’s a reminder that we want to educate and encourage everyone to get vaccinated,” he says. “Paying a little bit more premium pales in comparison to the incentive of recognizing that if you end up in the ICU, you’re going to walk out with a $40,000 bill.” Insurance may pay part of it, “but is that really dice you want to roll?”

The WaPo's Greg Sargent has several excellent analyses worth reading this morning.  The first regards if Republicans take back the House in 2022, among the highly problematic issues will be how they would politicize an investigation into the collapse in Afghanistan (much like they politicized the Benghazi! Benghazi! investigations for years to damage Hillary Clinton):

If Republicans take back the House, it will go a long way toward ensuring that we do not get anything close to full accountability for the Afghanistan debacle. They will deliberately circumscribe their investigations to limit them to only the culpability of the Biden administration.

This places big obligations on Democrats. While they control Congress, they should launch much broader investigations into the entire 20-year disaster. Unfortunately, the horrible news might leave them so politically fearful that they insist on a narrower accounting to show distance from Biden. [snip]

Let’s be clear: The administration’s withdrawal should be the subject of congressional inquiries. We need to know whether intelligence failed to adequately register the likelihood of a quick collapse by the Afghan government and army, or whether decisions were made in spite of what the intelligence got right. We need to know about failings in the process granting visas to Afghan refugees. And much more.

But looking only at these things would be insufficient. Surely a genuine reckoning into what we’re seeing now would take as its premise that it is the outgrowth of a much broader series of mistakes and failures.

The second Sargent piece worth a look concerns how the increasingly fascistic Republican far right is conflating the spread of disease (specifically COVID) with anti- immigrant hysteria:

...There’s a peculiarly ominous signal in the way GOP governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida are fusing their rejection of collective public health solutions with demagoguery about migrants.

Abbott and DeSantis, each in their own way, declare that covid-bearing migrants are crossing our border en masse. This has been widely debunked, but the story is what matters: covid and migrants as joint infestation. Meanwhile, they have converted their public positions into platforms to speak to the Trump Rump, the shriveled national minority who sees mask mandates as collectivism run amok.

It’s the fomenting of hysterical opposition to local officials enabling communities to collectively protect themselves, combined with the aggressive redirecting of blame toward migrants instead, that makes this mix so combustible. Why take sensible collective action for the public good when calling for higher walls to keep out the joint infestation carries so much more force?

This conflation is everywhere. Right-wing media propagandists are relentlessly combining fearmongering about vaccines with scapegoating of migrants, positioning nativist, ethnonationalist cruelty as a kind of higher answer than science and collective action.

"Nativist, ethnonationalist cruelty"... sound at all vaguely familiar?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's editorial board wonders if the malignant former guy's "nut-case battalion" is turning on him:

Former President Donald Trump appears to have created a monster he can no longer control. He inspired violent rebellion, and now the rebels are turning against him. He inspired pandemic skepticism, and now the skeptics are rejecting his appeal to get vaccinated. He cultivated wild-eyed conspiracy theories and even gave White House press passes to the worst of those nut cases. Now the leader of the nut-case battalion is reportedly questioning whether Trump is a “dumbass.”

We’ll leave it to the experts to pronounce on the accuracy of Infowars host Alex Jones’ “dumbass” diagnosis of Trump. But Jones’ assessment is an indication of where the Trump brand might be headed. Sadly, Jones attacked Trump regarding a subject on which Trump really might know what he’s talking about: vaccines and the coronavirus.  [snip]

Recall Trump’s unbridled support of the Proud Boys white supremacist group and his stubborn refusal in a presidential debate to denounce them, responding instead: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” They did stand by, and when Trump pointed toward Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and urged his followers to “fight like hell” against congressional certification of his election defeat, the Proud Boys reportedly were among the first to start breaking windows to attack the Capitol.

Now that top Proud Boys leaders are in jail, some are questioning their loyalty to Trump. A convicted leader of the Capitol attack, Ethan Nordean, wrote in an online chat that The New York Times says was obtained by the FBI: “I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. Trump, you left us on the battlefield bloody and alone.”

The editorial concludes with the hope that "moderate Republicans" in Congress would similarly abandon Trump.  That's where things break down.  There are no "moderate Republicans," and the time to have stood up for democracy was after January 6.  Beyond that, what would abandoning Trump mean in the long run?  Only that someone shrewder and even more dangerous than Trump would fill the fascist right's need for a "war leader" who wouldn't leave them "on the battlefield" next time.  The jockeying for that role is already well underway.  The battle isn't over when/ if the "dumbass" falls.

Finally, please check out Infidel 753's excellent link round- up to interesting posts from around the Internet.  There's much, much more than politics there, so if you want to browse a variety of topics, please give it a look.