Is Time Running Out for Obamacare?

The Affordable Care Act — ACA for short — is an intricate watchwork of mutually dependent parts, but a key part has proved to be in short supply. For the
mechanism to work, 35% of participants must come from the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Currently, only 28% have signed on.

The absence of that group, profitable for insurers for its lack of health problems, has skewed policy buyers toward the older, who tend to have more costly ailments. Covering their care is what is forcing insurers to raise premium prices significantly in 2017. That could force out the healthier, who decide to chance it, leading insurers to boost their pricing further to cover the sick who remain. The cycle then repeats.

This is the “death spiral” that conservatives predicted and now gleefully believe is sending Obamacare crashing to earth, a scenario that we said was happening eight months ago in “Obamacare Is Heading for Collapse“.

Insurers in 41 states reported losses as one after another major company dropped out. Across 2014 and 2015, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina lost $400 million and United Healthcare nearly $1 billion. Many states are down to a single provider, ending any hope of competitive pricing for 19% of all healthcare customers. When its rate hike was turned down by the state, Alaska’s sole provider threatened to quit, forcing a $55 million bailout from the state taxpayers. The only providers reporting profits are those that offer bare-bones coverage, which bring deductibles of $5,000 or more and narrow lists of doctors and hospitals that patients must use.

Another intricate mechanism of the ACA — it expires after 2017 once insurers no longer need training wheels — calls for profitable companies to share with insurers posting losses. But it has proved useless, given that none have made anywhere near enough profit to counter the huge losses of others.

self-inflicted

From the outset, the Obama administration took steps that would undercut the success of its own plan by paying little heed to essential funding needs. Companies with over 50 employees were required under the Act to pay for insurance for their full-time workers or pay fines, but right off, the White House issued waivers to several hundred companies, seemingly any who asked, cutting off revenue needed by insurers to pay for the sick who rushed to buy insurance previously denied them. This mandate was then postponed a year, then another year for companies with 50 to 100 employees, then made applicable only to companies with over 100. And a tax that insurance companies were to pay for the added business Obamacare delivered was delayed.

But by far the most damaging have been the “special enrollment” periods the administration created to inflate the insured count. People suddenly finding themselves ill could sign up outside the November-January window, receive treatment, then stop paying their premiums — cheating that made for outsized losses for insurers. Blue Cross Blue Shield says “individuals enrolled through special enrollment periods are utilizing up to 55 percent more services than their open enrollment counterparts.”

no shows

The Obama administration forecast that 20 million would sign up this year. About 12.7 million did, and dropouts will probably reduce that to 10 million still paying by year end. Despite the diminished ranks of insurers and soaring premiums — which officials just acknowledged would rise 22% to 25% for midlevel benchmark plans in 2017 — the Health and Human Services Department puts on a brave face and projects a 9% enrollment increase for 2017. They say that 72% will still be able to find a plan for $75 a month after subsidies at HealthCare.gov.

The averages cited mask huge increases in certain states: 32.5% in Pennsylvania, 51% for Blue Cross Blue Shield in Arizona, 50% to 67% in Minnesota to stave off collapse of its exchange, and in Tennessee 62% for BlueCross BlueShield, 46% for Cigna and 44% for Humana.

For a 21 year old, the average cost in 2016 was supposedly $200 a month, or $2,400 a year (says this source), rising to $244 at age 35 — over $2,900. Failure to sign up means at tax time a minimum penalty of $695 — or 2.5% of adjusted gross income beyond $27,800. The high deductibles for the minimal plans tell them that they’ll get nothing for their money. So they “do the math” and opt out. Some have attitude, judging from a millennial given Wall Street Journal op-ed space to complain about the IRS using “confidential taxpayer information” to send him a heads-up. He wants an explanation “how this doesn’t cross an ethical line” when the IRS uses data he has supplied to warn him of penalties should he not opt in for insurance. Others don’t get the point. A 27-year-old free lance worker from Brooklyn interviewed on the PBS NewsHour said, “The chances of me really taking advantage of the plan are very low, I think. I don’t have any chronic health issues”. The older can be no wiser. A 45-year-old engineer from Sulphur Springs, Texas, who faced a penalty of $1,800 owing to his income, passed up a year of insurance that would have cost just $1,100 more than the penalty. All he has to do is stay healthy, he said to The New York Times. Their outlook was a bit like saying, “Why do I need life insurance? I didn’t die this year”.

Another problem for Obamacare has been the surprise that few businesses have ended coverage for their employees. The plan expected that employers would gladly shed the cost and responsibility now that there are exchanges for individuals to buy insurance. That this didn’t happen made for another sizable body of missing customers that insurers were counting on to offset the sicker applicants the law forbids them from turning away.

And a major blow, of course, was the Supreme Court ruling that the federal government cannot force the states to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid mandate. That opened the door for 19 states with Republican governors to refuse the deal the government offered. Washington stands ready to pay 100% for coverage of Medicaid enrollees in Obamacare for three years, and 90% of the cost thereafter. The governors say they are uncertain how they’ll be able to pay that 10% when that day comes. So they turn down a bargain of 90% off. Exercising their ideological purity harms some 5 million citizens of their own states and has meant another huge block not showing up to fortify insurance company coffers to pay for the onslaught of the most ill.

on the left

A Hillary Clinton victory would have to be accompanied by Democratic takeovers in the House and a filibuster proof margin in the Senate for her to have the legislative power to fix the ACA. Without that more than unlikely scenario, she will be hamstrung. Republicans have since its inception wanted to destroy Obamacare. They have refused to administer any remedies, intent on watching Obama’s “signature achievement” wither and die from its congenital defects.

Conservatives see a conspiracy afoot, with Obama again calling for the fix of a “public option” whereby the government enters the exchanges so that a state at least has that alternative if insurers defect. “It’s like a trojan horse for a single payer system that has windows so you can actually see the troops inside”, says Seth Chandler, a law professor at the University of Houston, quoted in Forbes.

on the right

Donald Trump could fare better if control of both houses of Congress is retained by Republicans. The Affordable Care Act was passed in a process called reconciliation, reserved only for financial bills and not subject to filibuster. A repeal bill could be sent to President Trump’s desk under that same reconciliation rule, requiring only simple majority votes in both houses.

But how would that be greeted? The majority of Americans have always been against the healthcare act. It makes them buy something they can ill afford or think they can do without. The free-riders whose insurance is largely or entirely paid by employers don’t like the subsidies to others that they think are paid from their tax dollars. But now, some 14 million people in Obamacare’s expanded Medicaid coverage and 10 million people through the ACA exchanges have health insurance they may have never had before. There is bound to be backlash if a Trump government yanks that away. Republicans will need to tread more carefully than they now think.

Trump has adopted the Republican mantra of “repeal and replace”, to which he’d probably never given a thought before deciding to run for the highest office, witness his plan to replace spelled out only as “something wonderful”.

In the six and a half years since the ACA was signed, Republicans have fulfilled half of their “repeal and replace” mantra with 60-or-so pointless repeal votes (only one of which was sent to Obama for veto last January) but have developed close to nothing to fulfill the “replace” half. A sketchy outline by House Speaker Paul Ryan put forth in June comes closest. It would end the mandate requiring people to buy insurance, substituting it with a tax credit, an inducement that people can ignore at no cost compared to the current penalties, so it is unclear how that would be effective. The credit would replace the subsidies. The ban on insurers discriminating against people with preexisting conditions would continue — but only for those who maintain continuous coverage. Beyond that, the GOP proposal is fuzzy: expanded Medicaid is not mentioned. There are no financial projections, perhaps out of awareness that the cost outcome would be far worse than Obamacare.

Because something must be done, and rapidly, doesn’t mean that anything will be done. As time passes Herb Stein’s maxim — he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon and Ford — comes to mind: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

The Syrians Are Coming! And Americans Quake With Fear

We are fond of reciting the words inscribed at the Statue of Liberty that say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, and we regularly brag that we are a nation of immigrants. But the attitudes of so many today betray us as hypocrites.

The nightmare war in Syria has taken the lives of almost a half-million people.
Assad’s and Putin’s forces drop barrel bombs on the populace, turning the cities to rubble easily mistaken for Berlin in 1945. Some 6 million people have been displaced. Of those, 4.8 million have fled the country according to the United Nations, creating the largest flood of refugees since the end of World War II.

Yet here in the home of the brave, our politicians — mostly Republican it needs to be said — cringe in fear of terrorism and propose as a solution to the refugee crisis that America batten the hatches and block all Syrians from entering. No less than leader of the House, Speaker Paul Ryan, has said in the face of urgency:

“When we know that ISIL is already telling us that they are trying to infiltrate the refugee population, don’t you think that common sense dictates we should take a pause and get this right?”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell goes further. Why admit refugees? “What we need is a strategy obviously to give the refugees an opportunity to stay in their own country”. Is he unaware of what’s happened to that country?

Immigration is the prerogative of the President, not Congress, and Obama chose a different path. Ignoring the trembling in Congress, he has been bringing Syrians into the country nonetheless and at the end of August he reached his goal of admitting 10,000 during 2016, added to 2,800 already here. But compared to this wide land of almost 320 million people, that’s just 1% of what tiny Lebanon has taken in. More are coming, but few. The State Department says it is processing another 21,000 applications for relocation across the United States.

states wrongs

“In the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris, effective immediately, I am directing all state agencies to suspend the resettlement of additional Syrian refugees in the state of Indiana pending assurances from the federal government that proper security measures have been achieved.”

That was Governor Mike Pence less than a year ago, demonstrating his understanding of the teachings of Jesus, more recently proclaiming, “I’m a Christian, a Conservative and a Republican, in that order”. More than 25 governors — all Republican save one — issued the same proclamations. “I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria”, said Governor Greg Abbott. Governor Terry Branstad of Iowa said the same.

This was in disregard of law on many counts, the simplest being that a state cannot bar entry to anyone admitted under federal immigration law, nor movement from state to state once in country. Their actions were “…unconstitutional, period”, said the American Civil Liberties Union in filing suit. Pence turned away a Syrian family, and when apprised that he had no authority to do so, retaliated by banning all state agencies from assisting the refugees. “As governor I will continue to put the safety and security of Hoosiers first”.

During the primary season, the Republican candidates were of the same mind, with religious intolerance thrown in. Jeb Bush thought we should only admit Christian Syrians. “We do not have religious tests for our compassion”, Obama reminded them. John Kasich said he
would write to President Obama asking him to stop resettling Syrians in his Ohio and thinks there should be a new government agency to broadcast Judeo-Christian values around the world. Ted Cruz, a Bible toting Christian, expressed astonishment that only 3% of the Syrians who have so far gained entry to the U.S. are Christians. He called it “absolute lunacy” to resettle Syrians in this country. “Who in their right mind would want to bring over tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, when we cannot determine…who is and who isn’t a terrorist?”, he asked. Marco Rubio concurred. He would be “open” to accepting refugees “if there was a way to ensure they were not being infiltrated by terrorists”, an unreachable requirement.

These are people who themselves are victims of terrorism, fleeing their cities, where death surrounds them, shedding their livelihoods and their possessions, walking hundreds of miles out of their country, risking drowning in the Mediterranean, herded into camps, hoping for help.

And then there is Donald Trump, who calls the Syrian refugees “the great Trojan horse of all time…a better, bigger, more horrible version than the legendary Trojan Horse ever was”. He has said that tens-of-thousands of Syrians — mostly young men — are entering the U.S. and we don’t know who they are, because we have no system to vet them”. He would institute “what I call EXTREME VETTING”, he tweeted and repeats it at campaign rallies. Trump is unabashed at spreading extreme disinformation and illustrates his extreme ignorance of the process in place that does in fact screen Syrians for admittance to the United States.

extreme vetting

In fact, those gaining entrance into the United States are evenly split between men and women and 50% are children under age 14, giving the lie to Trump’s “mostly young men”. The vetting, which Trump thinks does not happen at all, typically takes 18 to 24 months. All refugees are first interviewed repeatedly by the United Nations to learn the details of their lives, and from that process emerge only 1% who are then recommended to the United States for additional vetting. For that 1% the next step is a State Department resettlement center in Amman, Jordan, “for a background check led by specially trained Department of Homeland Security interrogators”, reported a recent piece on CBS’s “60 Minutes”.

“Mostly we focus on victims of torture, survivors of violence, women-headed households, a lot of severe medical cases. [There are] so many interviews, so many intelligence screenings, so many checks along the way. They are questioned at least three times by interviewers looking for gaps or inconsistencies in their stories”.

Additionally, their use of social media is searched. The data collected is passed through U.S. intelligence databases looking for any red flags.

Nevertheless, our politicians seem incapable of reasoning that, given the length of time a refugee applicant must wait before gaining entry to the U.S., the refugee path is the least sensible way to infiltrate our country. A terrorist could instead simply fly in on a tourist or student visa and go right to work. “That somehow [refugees] pose a more significant threat than all the tourists who pour into the United States every single day just doesn’t jibe with reality,” Obama has said.

Trump, of course, invents freely. He has said Syrian refugees enter this country carrying cell phones with ISIS flags on them and phone plans prepaid by ISIS.

we’re the problem

The far greater risk than families trying to make a new life here is found already within our borders. The Government Accountability Office and The Washington Post’s Wonkblog reported that more than 2,000 on the watch list of terrorism suspects were able to buy guns in these United States between 2004 and 2014. Democrats who have repeatedly tried to close that loophole have been defeated by the NRA and its captive Republicans who view desperate Syrian refugees as the ones to be feared and denied admittance until we “get this right”.

meanwhile, north of here

Canadians, in contrast, were greatly affected by the daily video reports of drowning as Syrians tried desperately to reach Europe. Their government allows them to form groups to adopt a refugee family. The group meets them at airports, provides them with food and rent, sees to teaching them English or French, and finds them work. The Canadian government says that citizens numbering in the thousands have volunteered for this welcoming program.

And why not? Former ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker knows “how highly Syrians value hard work and education”. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed he wrote that, “They’re precisely the people I’d want living next door to me and attending my children’s schools”.

Not Donald Trump. “I’m putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they’re going back”, he said, contending that Islamic State militants could be hiding among them. And, of course, he wants “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. He found legitimacy for that proposal in the internment of Japanese during World War II, seemingly ignorant of that being a shameful moment in our history. He has considered creating a government database to track all Muslims in the U.S. Can anyone think of a better way to radicalize those already in the country?

No Syrian has been involved in any of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. With most admitted only recently, that’s no guarantee. But for Mr. Trump and those cowering in Congress, fear that there may be a needle in the haystack is justification for adding to the misery of the over 12,000 already here and blocking the thousands yet to come. Immediately after 9/11 we rounded up uncounted thousands of Muslims just because they were Muslim, jettisoned the Geneva Convention protocols against torture, passed a law that permitted secret FBI searches that forbid us even from speaking of them, began a clandestine program of collecting communications data on all Americans, and now the Republican Party and its candidate for president argue that we should slam the gates to lock out victims of a genocidal war. The question is: What have we become?

Should Snowden Be Pardoned?

Hero or traitor? Should Edward Snowden be honored for exposing a government that for a decade had been secretly collecting privileged data from all Americans, as well as a more widespread program
called PRISM, covered here, or should he be imprisoned for revealing to the world the spying our government conducts around the globe in the cause of national security?

With three months left in President Obama’s term, the Internet abounds in e-mail that asks you to join petitions to Obama to add Snowden to the list of persons a departing president traditionally exonerates as a final act of office. The ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have banded together to run at least one full-page ad in The New York Times asking for contributions at pardonsnowden.org. There’s even a movie: It’s no coincidence that Oliver Stone chose this moment to release “Snowden” (in theaters, but he’d have had a bigger audience on television). As if to undercut it, the House intelligence committee released a summary of its report on the Snowden affair the day before the movie’s release.

shifting views

Snowden wants to come home. And the administration would apparently like to put an end to the problem. The counsel to national intelligence chief James Clapper (the latter the one who lied to Congress about National Security Agency surveillance, and with no consequences) has reportedly floated the idea of a five year prison term if Snowden would plea to one felony count (in place of the three lodged) but he has refused, partly out of concern that it would deter future whistleblowers.

That’s a marked turnabout from the reflexive reaction to Snowden when the NSA’s snooping was first revealed. John Boehner, House Speaker at the time, called Snowden
“a traitor”. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I think it’s an act of treason”. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Snowden should “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”, claiming that “each of these programs is authorized by law, overseen by Congress and the courts, and subject to ongoing and rigorous oversight” — which was shown not to be true. “For personal gain, he’s now selling his access to information”, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) told journalists.

Rogers belongs to an element in this country that dismisses facts and prefers the bile of its gut feelings. They vilify Snowden because, where did he go? He went to Russia and there’s no question he’s sold his trove of secrets to Putin, after doing the same in Hong Kong. In fact, to this day there is no evidence of his selling anything; he’s rebuffed offers of cash for interviews and even refused book deals.

They forget that Moscow was a stopover on Snowden’s way to seek asylum in South America, that he was stranded for days in the international transit lounge when Obama annulled his passport. “The Obama administration has now adopted a strategy of using citizenship as a weapon”, said Snowden after a week in Russia. “Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person”.

The Russia bias persists. Just now, in an editorial snidely titled “Snowden Misses Us”, the The Wall Street Journal calls him “Comrade Snowden” and assumes he decided to “flee to Russia”. The new House report cited earlier voices the same lie: He “fled to Russia”.

Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met with in Hong Kong. He says he kept none of them. He’s a very careful man. Having fulfilled his objective of getting the information out to the world, what would have been the purpose of keeping a copy? He doubtless reasoned he should not make himself a target of foreign intelligence agencies by carrying the material with his person. He also asserted that he could guard against the documents falling into China’s hands because of his knowledge of that nation’s intelligence techniques; as an NSA contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence.

But that Journal edit wants to keep suspicion alive asking “if Mr. Snowden provided his documents, intentionally or otherwise, to Russian or Chinese intelligence services” and, like some Donald Trump nonsense endlessly repeated after proven a lie, says that, “none of what he exposed was in any way criminal”.

changes made

Yet it was. Snowden’s explosive revelations led to a federal court judge ruling that the NSA’s activity — the wholesale collection of so-called metadata of America’s phone calls — numbers called, time, duration — was “almost clearly unconstitutional” and “almost Orwellian”. (That another judge said the NSA’s actions were “constitutional” was baffling inasmuch as there’s a statute that says if you eaves drop on Americans without a Fourth Amendment warrant you go to prison for five years, and for each offense.)

The NSA argued that the snooping was essential for national security. Then NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca) even made the fanciful claim that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented had the program been in effect then (it was authorized by the George W. Bush administration in reaction to 9/11). Alexander testified to the committee that more than 50 terrorist attacks had been disrupted by the NSA phone program and pledged to come up with “a list” in a matter of days that would support his claim. He didn’t.

Much later, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was apparently handed such a list which he said did not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted and concluded. “If this program is not effective, it has to end”.

End it did. Obama had set up a blue-ribbon commission which recommended 46 changes to surveillance and security practices and last year, after forty years of hands off, Congress curtailed the government’s surveillance liberties, passing a year ago June the USA Freedom Act. It requires NSA to obtain a court order to obtain phone traffic for numbers belonging to suspected terrorists. NSA ceased wholesale phone data collection at the end of last November.

In other words, Mr. Snowden made a convincing case that the government was in serious violation of constitutionally provided civil liberties. In recognition of what he had brought to light, laws were changed.

snowden’s arguments

Snowden reminds his critics that he released nothing to the public. He turned over his trove of documents to four journalists and it was the newspapers represented by two of them, Britain’s The Guardian and The Washington Post, that decided what to publish. Both won Pulitzers. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the Post has just come forth with a editorial that says “No pardon for Edward Snowden”.

the fair trial fantasy

“This is a man who has betrayed his country”, Secretary of State John Kerry said to NBC’s Brian Williams. Like Daniel Ellsberg, a patriot who stayed in the U.S. to “face the music”, Snowden should “stand in our system of justice and make his case”, was Kerry’s pronouncement.

It was former Attorney General Eric Holder’s view that, “Snowden performed a public service” and for that he said he should come back and a face trial that would certainly reward that service with prison. Obama’s previous press secretary, Jay Carney, said Snowden should be returned to the United States “where he will be granted full due process and every right available to him as a United States citizen facing our justice system under the Constitution”. The Washington Post says in its editorial:

Ideally, Mr. Snowden would come home and hash out all of this before a jury of his peers. That would certainly be in the best tradition of civil disobedience, whose practitioners have always been willing to go to jail for their beliefs.

He wouldn’t for a moment be able to hash out much of anything. He has been charged with violations of a law meant for spies, the WWI-era Espionage Act. It does not distinguish between selling secrets to foreign governments and leaks to the press of one’s own country. It has no provision for defendants to make a case that they had acted in the public interest. The government is not required to demonstrate harm from the release of the classified materials.

Under the Act, Snowden would not be permitted to make the case that his actions led to reforms, nor to argue that he exposed government wrongdoing, as a federal district court had already ruled — violations well beyond what Section 215 of the Patriot Act allowed. The government would invoke the state secrets privilege to suppress any evidence presented by Snowden’s attorneys as endangering “national security”, no matter that the classified documents are already in the public domain. And forget about the Supreme Court weighing the question of whether the Espionage Act can be applied to leaks to the American public; it has ducked matters of press freedom under the First Amendment for the last 45 years.

Each of the two counts against Snowden, plus a third charge of theft of government property, carries a maximum prison sentence of ten years, but the government would assuredly pile on as many fabricated and redundant charges as needed to guarantee a life sentence. Look to the case of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning: Charges against him were padded with “Classified cable — 2 years”, “Classified memos — 10 years”, “Military records — 10 years”, Military records [again] — 10 years”, “Army record — 10 years”.)

Kerry refers to Ellsberg as if nothing has changed. Ellsberg was free on bail to inveigh against the Vietnam war for the entire 23 months he was under indictment, and then he was acquitted — both being unimaginable outcomes for Snowden, who would certainly be imprisoned without bail and isolated in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. Once convicted, he would likely remain in solitary for the entirety of his sentence. The United Nations Special Rapporteur found that the U.S. was guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment of Manning. He was kept in solitary confinement and isolated 23 hours a day for months, was kept naked and chained to a bed, and was subjected to sleep deprivation techniques, all three well known forms of torture.

deal or no deal

As for that pardon, not under this president, who has granted few pardons and has acted with a vengeance toward whistleblowers and the press that has led him to bring criminal charges in eight cases under the Espionage Act, whereas all the presidents combined in the last 100 years have resorted to the Act only three times.

You might want to read what we have reported about how Thomas Drake was treated by this administration after exposing government waste to the press; or John Kiriakou for inadvertently revealing the name of a CIA agent, with no appreciation for his heroic takedown in a shootout of the most wanted terrorist of the moment in Pakistan; or James Risen of The New York Times for refusing to confirm a source already known to the government; or Fox News’ James Rosen, accused as an “aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” when he reported that North Korea was about to conduct another nuclear test. (You can find all these stories in detail in our November 2013 article, “Obama v. Leakers and the Press: Bad as Nixon Says Journalism Group“).

And so we would say that, if Snowden ever expects to come home, he is best advised to take another look at the deal that may have been offered. Those in his camp extol what he has done. He has been steadfast and uniquely courageous. No one will hold acceptance against him. But given the government’s treatment of political prisoners, he’d better spell out in exacting detail and make public the contractual terms of his confinement right down to what brand of toothpaste he’d be allowed to use.

Only Trump could destroy Republican Conservatism

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By guest columnist Al Rodbell

Over the last few weeks, while sitting for dozens of hours of interviews on television and newspapers, only one by The Washington Post provided the full audio recording of an hour long conversation that almost magically put the candidate at ease to be more candid than he has ever been. With his defenses down, listening to it confirms the limits of his knowledge of statecraft, but also something he does not allow to be seen, which is his freedom from the constraints of either of the two parties’ ideology.

The mixture of inexperienced showman and potential president is truly disconcerting, and he acknowledges that absent his realty show persona, he would not be the presumptive candidate of his party.

It was a tell-all interview, including how he would have occupied the oil fields of Iraq with a permanent U.S. military-guarded Guantanamo-like enclave never before described. We all know that the era of colonialism ended a while ago, but Trump being unsteeped of this history, is comfortable advocating its return, which given the instability of the world, just may in a modified form be something to investigate.

His statement in March that women should be punished for having an abortion is only incoherent if we don’t think about the assumptions that would criminalize the doctor, but not the woman. This is a reversion to woman as dependent, not deemed to be an adult with full rights, which also implies not burdened by responsibilities.

The pro-life myth is not benign or even coherent. It is based on a concept of patriarchy, where a women who for her own reasons, perhaps economic, or a fetus who will suffer from disabilities, chooses not to give birth. Actually, far from conservative theory, only extreme communitarianism would deign to usurp such a decision from the mother. So, in the metaphor of pro-lifers, it is the doctor who “murders” the child in her womb. Certainly, she hires the person to do the actual killing, and in circumstances such as this, the person who initiates the crime is always culpable.

This was not an example of Trump having “mis-spoke” or even a reversal of his position. In his revised statement which was comically a claim to be like the Republican saint, Ronald Reagan, he tacitly affirmed that his thinking through the principles and consequences of being “pro-life” would logically lead to criminalization of the instigator of the killing, the mother. Trump, on-the-fly, enunciated the above principle, and only then did he learn that being pro-life incorporates this myth of the evil doctor, as if he is descending on vulnerable pregnant women and persuading them to kill their child. It is telling that Trump had previously been pro-choice, and by internalizing its principles just assumed that being a pro-life Republican was also logically coherent.

It could be that anyone who checked all the boxes to become a “legitimate” candidate of one of the two parties has also internalized their truisms and the toxic partisanship that follows. We are fixated on Donald Trump not only for his showmanship, but how this performance has demonstrated the rigidity of our two party system. For him to implement the changes that he so glibly advocates will take a personal transformation from carnival barker to scholar-administrator that as of now are only capacities he has hinted at. Anger at this hubris for promising more than is possible, or admiration for his courage to destroy our current system? It will be an interested choice for the American voter.

                       Al’s other essays can be found at AlRodbell.com.

Government Squeeze Shutters For-Profit Colleges Years Late

Some 35,000 students at 137 campuses had nowhere to go this semester when the Obama administration said federal loans could not be used to pay for classes
at the big ITT chain of for-profit colleges. But the students will someday look back to realize that they’ve been spared paying back a loan spent on a worthless education.

ITT is dependent on those student loans or other government programs for 80% of its funding. Loss of that revenue source forced the company immediately to close its doors nationwide (with a single exception in Massachusetts). ITT denounced the Education Department’s decision, resorting to calling it “unconstitutional” — a misfire because no law requires the government to qualify all schools no matter their performance record. The government relies on accrediting agencies that appraise that performance and ITT’s independent accreditor had concluded in April that the colleges would be unlikely to meet standards.

That was only one reason for the administration’s chokehold. ITT’s deceptive marketing practices, its steering students into taking out ill-afforded loans to pay to the colleges, its poor educational quality — all have been under scrutiny by federal regulators and state prosecutors for years. In 2004, federal agents closed schools for a time in eight states while they searched company offices for evidence of fraud related to “student recruitment, enrollment, dropout rates, grade inflation, loans, and reported job placements and salaries”, says this New York Times report. The 50-year-old school is currently under investigation by more than a dozen state attorneys general and two federal agencies.

And yet The Wall Street Journal, always the friend of business, fraud no obstacle, said in an editorial that, “The government has never had to prove its claims in court. When angry voters refer to a ‘lawless’ government, this is what they mean”. “Lawless” does fit if instead taken to mean there is no law requiring the government to go to court to prove why it does not owe loan privileges to whatever shady educational pretender comes along. It’s an eligibility threshold set by policy that says to enroll students paying with federal loans a school must meet standards. The Journal copies the company’s press release that the school was shut down “without proving a single allegation” in spite of the history of complaints just cited, in spite of ITT having to pay a $725,000 settlement to California as far back as 2005 when whistle-blowers reported that the company was inflating grades so that students could qualify for state money.

bonanza

With the 1990s came the belief that schools, privately run by professionals as profit-seeking businesses, could do a more efficient job educating the nation’s youth. Capital poured in. From 2000 to 2003, the sector led the stock exchanges, climbing 460% while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index declined by 24%, according to one source.

There’s no reason why for-profit colleges should not be able to provide good educations. Donald Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, wrote an impassioned
op-ed in the Journal defending the school the Post company owns, the 41,000 student Kaplan University. But funding by investors rather than donors creates a strong bias toward emphasizing profits more and college less. Wall Street’s demands for growth and higher profits brought pressure on the field to cut the costs of educating — lower instructor pay, larger classes, etc. — and to enroll ever greater numbers of students, with slackened concern for whether they were prepared for college or would ever earn enough to repay their loans. Like all colleges, the for-profits raised tuition year after year. Why not suck in ever more money from a government that paid whatever was the going rate?

While the for-profits account for only 12% of students, they account for nearly half of all loan defaults. Only 32% of students stay to graduate from the four-year programs, earning degrees viewed as inferior by employers. The other two-thirds drop out with nothing to show for their mistake but debt. At peak before some housecleaning began, of 21 institutions that were running default rates so high that they could lose the right to accept federally issued students loans, 20 of them were from the private, for-profit ranks.

honoring the troops

Veterans have been a prime target for the for-profits. There’s a 90% limit on the amount of total revenue that can come from federal loans to students. One would think that absurdly high cap is enough, but the colleges went for still more government funds through the loophole that places no limit on money coming from the G.I. Bill. In May, an alliance of some of the largest veteran and military groups asked the administration to crack down on colleges that prey on veterans. A 2014 report they cited found that state or federal authorities were investigating seven of the eight for-profit colleges that received the most money from the Veterans Affairs Department for deceptive recruiting and other violations of federal law.

collateral damage

Paying the price for all of this are the students, and soon to follow, we taxpayers. The low percentage of students that actually completed courses at ITT is left paying off loans for a so-called education from a now infamous institution tainting their résumés. To obtain a loan discharge, that group would have to prove they had been defrauded.

Students stranded midway through ITT are the likely to see their loans wiped clean, but there is no guarantee, says The Washington Post. And, of course, “wiped clean” means money that will never come back to the government and will ultimately accrue to taxpayers.

Students hoping to transfer to other schools are most likely to find that their course credits at ITT will not be recognized, such is ITT’s reputation. Nursing candidates especially seem to see their ITT credentials counting for nothing. And in the for-profit arena in general, law students find no bar association accreditation for the schools they have chosen without foresight. Even beauty schools produce graduates who cannot get jobs; their loan default rates are “staggering” as a consequence.

What is remarkable, however, is that there are still students enrolling at colleges such as ITT — that even with an Internet that knows everything, they have not done the minimal research that it would have taken to warn them off.

But at least it can be said that enough awareness of trouble has seeped into the culture to have caused the decline of for-profit schools. In July, ITT signaled investors that it expected this fall’s new student enrollment to plunge by 45% to 60%, and that after losing half the student body since 2010. Another behemoth, University of Phoenix, saw its peak of 460,000 students dwindle to 213,000 for the 2015-2016 school year.

ITT is not the only large for-profit college system to fall after the shutoff of student loan eligibility. After a year of closing or selling the 120 schools that it operated, Corinthian Colleges filed for bankruptcy in May of last year after accusations that it had systematically misled both investors and students with false graduation and job placement rates. In March of this year California won a $1.2 billion judgment against the defunct company for its fraudulent advertising methods, an empty victory considering that the company flamed out with $143 million in debts against assets of $19 million. Corinthian, too, was defended by blistering editorials in the Journal.

And then there’s the Education Management Corporation, under investigation or sued by attorneys general in a dozen states. The school system — 110 schools that train for trades such as chefs — is accused of illegal incentive-based payment of its recruiters. In this case, even investors filed a class action law suit. The company agreed to settle with the Obama administration and attorneys general of 38 states with a refund $102 million of private student loan debt.

slow motion

The question is: Considering years of complaints against ITT, what took Obama’s education department so long to crack down, leaving it as last minute business as its term comes to an end. The government has placidly relied on regional accreditors to decide which schools should be allowed to accept government loans to students. Why did those agencies invite attention only lately for rubber-stamping so many sham institutions when it was clear that default rates on students loans were soaring? As the Journal reported, “The six agencies that approve more than 1,500 four-year colleges have in the past 15 years revoked accreditation for, wait for it, 18”.

How is it that the Education Department only now is putting in place “gainful employment” criteria for qualifying colleges to accept student loans in payment, which has led them to the discovery only now that about 1,400 programs serving 840,000 students will not pass the new standards, and that 99% of those problem programs are at for-profit institutions?

How is it that this publication was on the case four years ago, in 2012, with “For-Profit Colleges — A National Disgrace“, when it was barely a subject in the media. It took two further years for the Obama administration to act against Corinthian and four to move against ITT.

Every year that ITT was allowed to continue meant another $500 million (our estimate) of government loans going to students for pass-on to ITT; loans that, given ITT’s sorry record for job placement, students may not be able to repay, loans that this year will most likely be waived, loans that will be charged to the rest of us once the soon to be very wealthy Mr. Obama deposits his multi-million dollar book advances and sets off on a tour of the world’s best golf courses.