This story from the NYT would warm my black heart if I thought for a nanosecond that those half-wits in the Administration would learn anything about making deals with jackals from it:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan on Monday, asserting that the company, the state’s dominant health insurer, had violated antitrust laws and secured a huge competitive advantage by forcing hospitals to charge higher prices to Blue Cross’s rivals.

…

In the Michigan case, the Obama administration said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield had contracts with many hospitals that stifled competition, resulting in higher health insurance premiums for consumers and employers.

…

The lawsuit took direct aim at contract clauses stipulating that no insurance companies could obtain better rates from the providers than Blue Cross. Some of these contract provisions, known as “most favored nation” clauses, require hospitals to charge other insurers a specified percentage more than they charge Blue Cross — in some cases, 30 to 40 percent more, the lawsuit said.

Christine A. Varney, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, said these requirements were “pernicious.”

Yes indeed, after betraying the American people and signing a corporatist takeover bill that taxes you to line the pockets of big insurers if you can’t afford their lousy product, the Obama administration is waking up to the fact that they are in bed with some of the most evil people on the planet, running a system of mass murder that would make most brutal third world despots green with envy.

It was so important for Obama to protect an industry that kills 45,000 Americans a year. Yes sir.

If there is, by some shockingly remote chance, a hell, Obama’s personal punishment should be to suffer an agonizing disease for all eternity while forced to fill out paperwork to desperately beg for medical treatment that his HMO refuses to provide. Perhaps due to cost? Who can say.

Ah, another day, another pathetic argument in favor of requiring Americans to pay Wellpoint a tithe or else the IRS comes after their paychecks.

After a bit of rambling on how health-care and health insurance aren’t the same thing (no shit, Sherlock), and a bit of history on how ERs are supposedly forced to cover the uninsured (a practice that works far better in theory than in reality, as hospitals deny urgent care all the damn time), Kay over at BJ rolls out with this chestnut:

You don’t have to buy health insurance. You don’t have to pay a private insurer. What you do have to do is contribute to the costs of covering the pool called “the uninsured” because if you don’t purchase the subsidized policy and instead pay the tax penalty, you’ll be uninsured. And it costs to provide emergency care to “the uninsured”. A lot. And the federal government reimburses part of that cost.

This is fantastic logic! When a law extends penalties enforced by the executive branch, it’s not really saying you *can’t* do something, or that you shouldn’t, it’s just, you know, trying to recoup costs. Let’s extend the reasoning:

You don’t *have* to avoid beating your neighbor to death with a ball-peen hammer; you just have to contribute to the costs of burying them by working the rest of your life making license plates.

Oh wait; that’s fucking stupid sophistry, isn’t it? The law’s primary purpose is clearly to deter murder, just like the primary purpose of the Individual Mandate is *clearly* to coerce people into paying for insurance. Handy hint, Kay: that’s why it goes up from 1 to 2.5% of income. It doesn’t do that because ER costs are anticipated to go up 150% in two years.

But, riddle me this, Kay: if the penalty for the Individual Mandate was really to cover emergency room care, as you claim, then surely it would, in fact, be collected into a separate fund and dispersed to hospitals as needed to reimburse said care, or else set aside specifically to reimburse the costs of ER care in some other fashion, perhaps pooled with other money that goes to that purpose and so forth.

So, is it? Is the Individual Mandate in fact used to raise money for ER care?

Show me the section of the bill where that occurs. I’m intensely curious to know how fining people who don’t want to spend up to 20% of their income annually on insurance they can’t afford to use ends up paying for ER beds under this legislation, because I just can’t find the section. Please, illuminate me on the funding mechanism you’ve outlined here; specific citations to relevant portions of the law would be helpful.

Please do that, or stop making shit up.

Update: The law Kay cites that forces hospitals to cover (limited) ER care regardless of insurance? The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act? It doesn’t provide any funding to hospitals for covering said care. Rather, it uses a big stick, that you have to do so to participate in Medicare.

So, in other words, Kay’s entire argument is full of shit, since the Federal government does not pay for uncompensated ER care today. There is absolutely no mechanism in place to do so, and therefore the Individual Mandate penalty must serve some other purpose.

I wonder what that could be.

Jim Moss has a piece up on FDL outlining the realistic limitations of the scare scenario Dems are peddling to get Progressive votes this fall. Shorter version: Republicans might take the House, but can’t take the Senate and obviously Obama’s not going anywhere, so don’t worry too much, the Senate will gridlock anything important.

Slight quibble. Yes, the Dems retain the Senate under Moss’ scenario, going down to 52-54 seats, enough to block by majority vote anything patently offensive. *But* that’s including wastes of human skin like Joseph Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad and Max Baucus.

Now, will these tools get in line behind some theocratic Republican pipe dream? Probably not, except with abortion, as many of said wastes of skin are also vicious panty-sniffing misogynists. Will they side with Republicans to pass overtly corporatist bills which our corporatist President can then sign with lightning speed?

Absolutely. So the idea that the bulk of the Republican agenda will be stymied by a narrowly Democratic Senate just doesn’t fly. In reality what you can expect is that the Corporatist wings of the Republican and Democratic parties will, in everything but name, merge into one unholy amoeba of suck, and pass bill after bill to take us further down the road to serfdom, which President Obama, as the duly appointed rubber stamp of the gentry won’t hesitate to enact into law.

In spite of all this, I approve wholeheartedly of the plan to punish dems in the fall election; I will participate in doing so myself by voting against Russ ‘Where are my Principles Now?” Feingold and Tammy ‘Who Said Healthcare was my Signature Issue?” Baldwin, because, as letsgetitdone says summarizing my post on game theory and the 2010 elections, the only way to induce cooperative behavior in a treacherous potential ally is with a big stick and a sharp whack now and then.

Heh. I am a tiny bit amused by the idea that the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is experimental, though; the actual experiments and theory were conducted before I was born, and I’m getting *old*. That aside, he’s right; unlike the standard iterated prisoner’s dilemma, where the costs/benefits of winning and losing don’t vary from round to round, in the real world they do. This is a non-Presidential election, and the costs to Dems of losing power are far higher than the costs to us of gaining temporary Republican overlords, at least in comparison to a Presidential election year.

I mean, rain or shine, Democrats can cash campaign checks, so it matters to them that they stay in power; if they don’t, who’s going to pay them to sell out their voters?