Citizen Cartwright

The millions of people at risk of being kicked off Medicaid

Media have been reporting for months that millions of people are expected to be left without health insurance after a three-year reprieve during the coronavirus pandemic, when the federal government prohibited states from removing anybody who was deemed ineligible.

 

The nationwide review of the 84 million Medicaid enrollees over the next year will require states to remove people whose incomes now are too high for the federal-state program for the poorest Americans. 

 

And the start of Medicaid disenrollments comes as the federal government puts an end to a boost in payments for the tens of millions of Americans who receive food stamps, and as benefits like free coronavirus vaccines and tests associated with the public health emergency that's to expire May 11 are in limbo, says The Washington Post.

 

State-based health insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act are the only places people can buy individual insurance with help from an income-based subsidy, says a March Associated Press article on how people who lose Medicaid coverage can shop for new insurance.

 

Advocacy groups have said for months that confusion and errors will wrongly leave some of the country’s poorest people suddenly without health insurance and unable to pay for necessary medical care.

 

And Medicaid enrollees are reporting that they’ve been erroneously kicked off in states that have begun removing people, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Dakota, according to data gathered by AP.

 

Some people have been mailed pre-populated application forms that have inaccurate income or household information but leave Medicaid enrollees no space to fix the state’s errors. Others have received documents that say Medicaid recipients will lose their coverage before they’ve even had an opportunity to re-apply, says Trevor Hawkins, who works for Legal Aid of Arkansas. 

 

The federal government requires states to tell people only 10 days in advance that they’ll be kicked off Medicaid, AP says.

 

Advocates for health care access say they're most worried about the 7 million people who will still be eligible for Medicaid but unable to surmount administrative hurdles; won’t receive renewal letters because they've moved, will face a language barrier filling out forms; or will be victims of clerical errors. 

 

Note to readers in metropolitan Washington: Virginia is one of 14 states disenrolling people from Medicaid starting May 1; Maryland and D.C. join 22 states starting in June.

GOP efforts to keep abortion rights off state ballots

Last year, voters approved ballot measures that established or upheld abortion rights in all six states where they appeared, says The New York Times.

 

Now, with abortion rights groups pushing for similar citizen-led ballot initiatives in at least six other states, GOP-controlled legislatures and anti-abortion groups are trying to make it harder to pass the measures — or to get them on the ballot at all, the Times says.

 

While some legislators have targeted citizen-led initiatives on redistricting, voting rights for felons and legalized marijuana, abortion opponents and supporters agree that the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has supercharged the push for citizen ballot measures and GOP efforts to deter them, the Times says.

 

The biggest and most immediate fight is in Ohio, where Republicans in the state legislature are advancing a ballot amendment that would raise the percentage of votes required to pass future abortion rights measures to a 60 percent supermajority, says the Times. The measure has passed the state Senate and is expected to pass the House this week.

 

The GOP measure — which would require support from 50 percent of voters to pass — would go before voters in a special election this August. 

Conservative mobilization around transgender issues

When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives lost an issue they'd used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors, says The New York Times. 

 

"Today, the effort to restrict transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as an animating issue for social conservatives at a pace that has stunned political leaders across the spectrum. It has reinvigorated a network of conservative groups, increased fund-raising and set the agenda in school boards and state legislatures,” the Times says.

 

It may be easier for Republicans to talk about transgender issues than about abortion, the Times says. The Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion created a backlash among Democrats and independents that's left many Republicans unsure of how — or whether — to address the issue.

 

An Associated Press article makes the same point:

 

"Privately, at least, strategists involved with Republican presidential campaigns concede that the GOP is on the wrong side of the debate as it currently stands,” AP says. "While popular with Republican primary voters, public polling consistently shows that the broader collection of voters who decide general elections believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”

 

A separate Times article says that before this year, just three state legislatures had enacted full or partial bans on the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transition surgery for people under 18.

 

Ten more states in the past three months have passed such prohibitions. 

 

And bans have passed at least one chamber of seven more state legislatures on the way toward enactment this year, the Times says.

 

GOP state legislators have called gender-affirming care experimental and harmful and say children aren't mature enough to make permanent decisions.

 

Major medical organizations in the United States support the care, however. And opponents of the prohibitions say they infringe on the rights of young people, parents and doctors, and pose significant mental health risks to a vulnerable population.  

Mobil home residents forming co-ops to protect against speculators

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to this Associated Press article.

 

We’ve talked before about mobile homes — one of the last affordable housing options for people with low- or fixed-incomes — being bought up by private equity, investment banks, hedge funds and other investors.

 

Nearly a third of mobile home parks in the United States have been bought by such big investors since 2015.

 

The investors are lured by reliable cash flow and high returns from raising rents at nearly double the general rental market rate, according to George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Cambridge, Mass., think tank.

 

“They’re trading on the desperation of people living in the parks,” he says. “There’s no place that they can take their homes if they can’t afford to keep paying the increasing rents.”

Park residents often own their home but rarely own the land under it. If a landlord raises the rent, residents can be evicted or forced to sell their home. Older mobile homes often can't be moved.

 

So some residents of mobile home parks are forming cooperatives to buy their parks.  

 

A challenge is that few states provide funding for residents who want to buy their parks. The lack of grants can make it difficult for residents to finance big loans.

New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Colorado and Oregon are among states with laws that have been effective in helping residents buy their parks, says the National Consumer Law Center.

 

Housing advocates say they're hoping $225 million in recently approved federal funding may provide some relief for mobile home park residents. Starting this year, the money will be distributed through grants to states, resident-owned parks, nonprofits, and local and tribal governments to preserve mobile home communities and improve infrastructure.

Wisconsin voters flip control of state Supreme Court

In what could be "the most consequential race of 2023,” according to CBS News, liberals on Tuesday gained control of the court for the first time in 15 years, when Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly.

While the court is technically nonpartisan, the results of the election determined whether the court — which could weigh in on politically charged issues in the battleground state — would have a conservative- or liberal-leaning 4-3 majority.

The race had gotten national attention because of its potential implications for Issues including abortion and voting rights.

The court also is to hear challenges to existing election laws, as well as cases that might relate to recounts, absentee ballots and other facets of election administration that could have material impacts on the outcomes of close elections — including the 2024 presidential election, says NBC News.

Ben Wikler, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, says this election could "shape the rules that will affect the 2024 presidential race, the fight for the House majority, and the fight for the Senate majority."  

"We're living in a national environment in which state supreme courts are being given the opportunity by the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on these extraordinarily important and consequential issues," says Howard Schweber, political science and law professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Other issues that could make it before the court in the coming years are challenges to Act 10, a law enacted under then-GOP Gov. Scott Walker, that eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers. It could also hear cases about redrawn legislative maps. The current map, approved by the current state Supreme Court last year, is one of the most gerrymandered in the nation, NBC News says.

The race was the most expensive state Supreme Court race ever, at about $45 million, according to WisPolitics.com.

What investment firms' home purchases can mean for individual buyers

"Across the Sun Belt, investment firms are extracting wealth where families normally build it: the single-family home,” says an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation.

 

Since the Great Recession, large investors — private equity firms and publicly traded companies — have bought up more than 65,000 homes in metropolitan Atlanta and converted them to rentals, the AJC says. And the Wall Street cash is pushing homeownership out of reach for many middle-class families.

 

Investors are buying in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods, but their homes disproportionately are in African American communities, the AJC says.

 

Priced out of buying, families that end up renting from these same firms "can face deplorable conditions, exorbitant fees and frequent eviction filings by out-of-state landlords driven to maximize shareholder profits," says the AJC.

 

David Howard, CEO of the National Rental Home Council, told the AJC that housing market dynamics are too complicated “to come to a consensus” over whether investors are affecting homeownership. Collectively, NRHC member firms own 450,000 single-family rental homes across the country, the AJC says.

Which America did you see in the State of the Union speech, GOP response?

As you know, we humans like information that reflects what we already think. And as you also know, I believe we’re better off focusing on what we share as humans instead of what divides us.

 

So, of course, I prefer what The Washington Post calls President Biden’s "political message of empathy and help for ordinary Americans“ to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders’ Republican response that the choice between Republicans and Democrats is "between normal or crazy.”

 

On Tuesday night, "In the first State of the Union address of a new era of divided government that at times turned strikingly rowdy, Mr. Biden vowed to cooperate with the other party but offered no concessions to it,” says The New York Times. "Instead, he called on Republicans to embrace his program of raising taxes on the wealthy and extending social aid to the needy, citing bipartisan legislation passed when Democrats were in charge."

 

He said, “To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there’s no reason we can’t work together and find consensus on important things in this Congress as well.” 

 

"The president’s first major encounter with the newly empowered House Republicans featured stark moments of unscripted drama the likes of which were rarely seen during State of the Union addresses of the past,” says the Times.

 

When he mentioned the fentanyl crisis, introducing a father who lost a daughter to an overdose, some Republicans heckled him over drugs coming into the country, shouting, “The border! The border! It’s your fault!”

 

"The 80-year-old president seemed to draw energy from the feisty exchanges, speaking for 73 minutes to an audience watching to see how he met the test,” says the Times.

 

Even when he was promoting bipartisanship, Biden "relished jabbing Republicans,” says the Times. At one point, he noted that many Republicans voted against his infrastructure package yet still asked for money from it for their districts.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “I promised I’d be a president for all Americans. We’ll fund these projects. And I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.”

 

Here is a fact check of Biden’s speech, from The Washington Post.

 

And here is a transcript of his speech, from AP.

 

Here is Sanders' response, on YouTube.

Changes to AP African American Studies course

The College Board on Wednesday finalized a plan for its new Advanced Placement course in African American studies, with omissions of subject matter from an earlier draft that in recent weeks had become a lightning rod for conservative critics.

 

In January, based on their read of preliminary documents, Florida officials rejected the course, saying it “lacks educational value.” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, called it a “woke” curriculum and an example of progressive “indoctrination.” 

 

Other politicians pushed back, including Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who denounced “political grandstanding” by DeSantis.

 

There also was the possibility of other opposition: More than two dozen states have adopted some sort of measure against critical race theory, according to a tracking project by the University of California, Los Angeles, law school.

 

“This course is an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African American history and culture,” says David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, in a news release. “No one is excluded from this course: the Black artists and inventors whose achievements have come to light; the Black women and men, including gay Americans, who played pivotal roles in the civil rights movement; and people of faith from all backgrounds who contributed to the antislavery and civil rights causes. Everyone is seen.” 

 

And College Board officials said Wednesday they had a time-stamped document showing that the final changes to the curriculum were made in December, before the Florida Department of Education sent its letter informing the College Board that it would not allow the course to be taught, The New York Times reports.

 

"In light of the conservative criticism, the College Board seemed to opt out of the politics,” says the Times. The revised curriculum framework ranges widely through content on Africa, slavery, reconstruction and the civil rights movement. And there's content on redlining, discrimination and Afrofuturism, as well as stories of individual achievement and heroism.

But study of contemporary topics — including Black Lives Matter, incarceration, queer life and the debate over reparations — is downgraded. The subjects are no longer part of the exam, and are offered on a list of options for a required research project.

And that list, in a nod to local laws, “can be refined by local states and districts.”

 

Gone from the final 234-page document are Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar and writer on civil rights and critical race theory, and Angela Davis, a political activist and academic known for her membership in the Communist and Black Panther parties, says The Washington Post.

 

Also omitted are Roderick Ferguson, a Yale professor who's written about queer social movements; Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author who's made the case for reparations for slavery; and bell hooks, a writer who shaped discussions about race, feminism and class, says the Times.

 

The course, which is being tried out this year in 60 high schools around the country, was designed in consultation with more than 300 professors and aims to replicate similar introductory classes a student would take in college.

More on why the midterm election ‘red wave’ didn’t happen

I’ve been meaning to summarize this New York Times article from Dec. 31:

 

Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality —but they also conducted fewer polls than in the past, according to a Times review.

And “that paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that more readily suited the needs of the sprawling and voracious political content machine — one sustained by ratings and clicks, and famished for fresh data and compelling narratives,” says the Times.

 

"The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media,” the Times says. "It fed the home-team boosterism of an expanding array of right-wing media outlets — from Steve Bannon’s 'War Room' podcast and 'The Charlie Kirk Show' to Fox News and its top-rated prime-time lineup. And it spilled over into coverage by mainstream news organizations, including The Times, that amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom."

 

Other pollsters lacked experience, such as two high-school juniors in Pennsylvania who started Patriot Polling and quickly found their surveys included on the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight, the Times says.

 

Fox News' own polling unit, "respected throughout the news industry for its nonpartisanship and transparency," wasn't detecting a Republican wave, says the Times. But in September, Sean Hannity’s prime-time show began showcasing pollsters Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar and Matt Towery of InsiderAdvantage, who predicted that the GOP would win races in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, among other places.

Unmentioned was that the Fox News Poll, covered in the network’s straight-news programming, showed all those races leaning Democratic.

 

“The culture of programming does not take kindly to narratives of ‘we’re behind’ or ‘we’re losing,’” says Jason Damata, founder and chief executive of Fabric Media, a media and advertising consultancy. “Fox has a profound understanding of what’s going to keep audiences coming back and being engaged.”

 

"Shaping perceptions across the ideological spectrum, the steady flow of data predicting a red wave prompted real-world decision-making that members of both parties now say could have tilted the balance of power in Congress,” the Times says.

“These frothy polls had a substantial, distorting impact on how people spent money — on campaign strategy, and on people’s expectations going into the election,” says Steven Law, chief executive of the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, which spent $280 million on the midterms. Its own private polling didn’t show a red wave, the Times says.

 

"There were ample reasons to expect a strong 2022 for Republicans,” says the Times. "A president’s party tends to lose congressional seats in midterms. Soaring inflation and Mr. Biden’s languishing approval ratings only added to GOP hopes. But the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the stolen-election fantasies of right-wing Republican candidates blew unexpected wind in Democrats’ sails.”

Congress changing electoral law in response to Jan. 6

Included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill passed Thursday by the Senate and to be taken up by the House Friday is an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, the election law that then-President Trump tried to subvert after his 2020 election defeat.

 

The legislation “is the most significant policy response so far to the attack and Trump’s aggressive efforts to upend the popular vote,” says The Associated Press.

 

The legislation amends the 19th century law that governs, along with the U.S. Constitution, the way states and Congress certify electors and declare presidential election winners. The goal is to ensure that the popular vote from each state is protected from manipulation and that Congress doesn't arbitrarily decide presidential elections when it meets to count the votes every four years, AP says.

 

A bipartisan group of supporters in the Senate and House have pushed to enact the overhaul before the start of the next Congress and the 2024 presidential election cycle. More than a dozen Republican senators have publicly backed the legislation, including Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.  

 

The legislation:

— Clarifies that the vice president has a purely ceremonial role presiding over the certification every Jan. 6 after a presidential election and that he or she has no power to determine the results of the election.

 

— Makes it more difficult for lawmakers to object to a particular state’s electoral votes. Under current law, just one member of the Senate and one member of the House need to object to automatically trigger votes in both chambers on whether to overturn or discard a state’s presidential election results. The bill would require a fifth of each chamber to object before votes would be held.

 

 — Ensures that there's only one slate of electors, a response to Trump allies’ unsuccessful efforts to create alternate, illegitimate slates of Trump electors in states that Biden narrowly won in 2020. Each state’s governor will be required to submit the electors, which are sent under a formal process to Congress and opened at the rostrum during the joint session. Congress couldn't accept a slate submitted by a different official, so there couldn't be competing lists of electors from one state. 

 

— The legislation revises language in current law that wasn’t used during the 2020 election but that lawmakers think could be abused. Current law allows state legislatures to override the popular vote in their states by calling a “failed election,” but the term isn't defined under the law. The bill says a state could only move its presidential election day if there were “extraordinary and catastrophic” events, such as natural disasters, that necessitated it.