You may have heard about the House hearing on Obamacare yesterday. The Republicans brought in six health insurance executives to grill them on the number of people actually paying for insurance on the exchanges. You see, it was supposed to be a bloody good time for them. This followed from a survey that they made of the insurance companies on 15 April that asked how many people had thus far paid for their health insurance. Of course, at that time, a lot of people hadn’t even been billed, so there was no reason that they would have paid their premiums yet. Nonetheless, it allowed the Republicans to crow about how Obamacare wasn’t working because only 67% had paid for it.

Even at the time, just a week ago, there was widespread coverage of the failings of this study, like Dylan Scott’s Talking Points Memo article, EXCLUSIVE: Here’s the House GOP’s “Incredibly Rigged” Obamacare Survey. So there was no reason for the Republicans to walk into the hearing yesterday thinking they were going to stick it to Obamacare once again. At minimum, they should have known that the 67% number was going to be a lower bound on what the executives would report.

When asked, the insurance companies reported that they are seeing a payment rate in the 80% range, and not all the premiums are due. So what we are looking at is what has been reported for a couple of weeks: between 80% and 90% of the signups are paying. According to Sam Baker at National Journal, “Wellpoint, the largest insurer in the Obamacare exchanges, said the payment rate is closer to 90 percent among people who reached their first payment deadline.” Los Angeles Limes‘ Michael Hiltzik has more details on where the insurers are.

According to Elise Viebeck at The Hill, many of the Republican members of the subcommittee made an early exit, I assume because it wasn’t going well. Now this, in itself, is not surprising. These hearings are usually about grandstanding. But this is something else. This is a situation where Republicans are believing their own nonsense.

Think about it. All of these Representatives have staffs. They have people who do nothing but process information and provide it for the Republicans to allow them to do their grandstanding. I understand that the Representatives don’t scour the internet trying to find out what the other side is saying. But their people should be. And that’s especially true when their newest non-Benghazi talking point is based upon a clearly deceptive survey. So they should have known.

The question is why they didn’t. These are not stupid people. Yes, as Jonathan Bernstein pointed out, they live inside the “closed conservative information feedback loop.” But I think it is a cultural issue. It all started in the late 1970s. As I’ve written in the past, supply side economics was not a completely crazy idea at that time. But it was fairly far out and most objective analysis countered it. From there, step by step, they’ve moved inward.

For years, I’ve argued that the problem with Fox News is not that it is biased and just plain bad. The problem is their conceit that they are the only truly neutral news source. The biggest difference between a Fox News viewer and, say, a reader of this site is that readers of this site know that I am not neutral or otherwise unbiased. And the irony of the situation is that I take great care to get my facts right. Errors are not something I ignore around here. That’s not true of Fox News and most right wing information sources; their normal reaction to errors is to ignore them and move on. And that just leaves the impression in viewers that what was reported before was correct.

This is important because of its cultural ramifications. Even though I work very hard to get things right, no one would just assume if they saw it on this little website (or on Talking Points Memo or on MSNBC) it must be right. But apparently, not only do Republican politicians but their entire staffs consume nothing but conservative media. And they think that it is the neutral press.

And here’s the thing: it will only get worse. It has managed to get this bad because despite getting more and more out of touch with reality, Republicans have done quite well at the ballot box. If the Democrats manage to hold the Senate this year, win a landslide in 2016, and lose little in 2018, then the Republican Party might start to change. But even given that unlikely scenario it is not certain they will change. They may react the same way they did to 2008, “We lost because we weren’t conservative [ie, crazy] enough!” Unfortunately, it doesn’t just hurt them. We will all go together when we go.

Susan Svrluga wrote a very interesting article over at the Washington Post, 5 Ways to Help Heroin Addicts. When I saw the headline, I felt like Vladimir at the end of Waiting for Godot, “Off we go again.” In general, the media establishment is a big part of the drug problem in this country. Reporters are generally clueless and they spread misinformation in a sensationalistic way. And when they talk about “recovery,” they are usually even worse—promoting 12-step programs and other quack therapies that do more harm than good.

My theory about drug addition is very simple. People generally get clean after a period of time. The reason is fairly simple: being a drug addict sucks. So if society thinks that drug addition is something that it wants to reduce, it should do as much as it can to help drug addicts who want to get off drugs to do that. All the work of throwing people in jail does almost nothing other than making drug addiction even more sucky—and that’s hardly necessary. So there are two critical things that we can do to help drug addicts: keep them alive until they decide to stop using and provide easy access to effective treatment.

And that brings me to Svrluga’s article because it really surprised it. Mostly, it was right in line with my thinking. She suggests making the opioid antagonist naloxone more widely available. The fact that it isn’t proves my point that most of the society just wants heroin users to die. Naloxone is nothing short of a miracle drug: it stops overdoses almost instantaneously. She also suggests “good Samaritan” laws where drug users don’t get arrested because they try to get help for another user.

After years during which I had a libertarian approach to drugs, I’ve come to a very practical place. I think methadone treatment is probably the greatest tool we have for fighting against the harm caused by opioid addiction. Just in the simplest way, it allows an addict to stabilize his life and think clearly about the future. And a future on maintenance is a whole lot better than many alternatives. One of Svrluga’s ways to help is to make methadone and buprenorphine more available. Hear, hear!

I would go further. We should make methadone maintenance free to all addicts who want it. To put every addict in the United States on maintenance would cost less than $3 billion per year. That might sound like a lot, but it is only 0.02% of the size of our economy, and I’m sure it would be more than offset by increases in productivity and decreases in crime. Of course, not every junkie in America wants to get clean at any given time. Many people qualify for treatment through Medicaid, but it depends upon the person and most of all on the state. The point is to make it easy for addicts to get help when they decide to. As it is now, there can be weeks to wait to even start a program. And if the addict has to come up with hundreds of dollars, the chances that he will still have the resolve to start the program are greatly reduced.

The rest of Svrluga’s ideas are not as good: more long-term treatment and more “talk” about addiction. Long-term residential treatment is generally a bad idea because it just reinforces the idea that the patient is an addict, forces them to spend all their time around other addicts, and delays the time until a new life can start. But there is a bit of truth in what she said. She quoted a doctor saying, “It’s not simply the medicine, but a package of services that need to be provided for most patients.” That I agree with. General counseling can be helpful. But most of all, many addicts need job training. They need some way to make it in the world if they don’t already have one.

One of the big problems we have in our society is the way we treat people who are struggling. We plop people from jails onto the streets and then wonder why there is a high recidivism rate. The same is true of drug addicts. Of course, those two groups have a very big overlap. And in addition to everything else, being labeled a felon (and people are so labeled for crimes as simple as having a joint on them), effectively eliminates any chance the drug addict has of changing his life.

This is not the first good article I’ve seen on this subject. Over the last five years, there has been a lot more reasonable discussion of drugs in this country—although it is still a great minority. And even Svrluga is not above the typical sensational story, Fairfax Mother of Young Heroin Addict: “There Were Clues. But We Had No Clue.” It’s part of a genre: Oh my God, nice white suburbanites are turning into heroin addicts! But the trend is good. And the 12-step juggernaut seems to be weakening as people begin to see that prayer is not the best approach to drug addiction. Of course, we have so far to go. But Susan Svrluga’s article is a good sign.

Jonathan Chait wrote an excellent article this morning, Springtime for Obamacare. In it, he goes through a number of arguments that conservatives have made about Obamacare and discusses how recent events have refuted them. I recommend reading the whole article, especially because I’m only going to talk about one small aspect of it.

He used a quote by Tennessee Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield to make a general point. Campfield recently argued that Obamacare is like the Holocaust, because it was the government deciding who lives and who dies. It’s actually a hoot if you brush aside the fact that it was said by a man with a lot of political power. I mean, you need extremely twisted logic to come to that conclusion. You have to assume, for example, that providing more healthcare will actually kill people because it will make the care so much worse. But I suspect that Campfield also thinks that huge numbers of the “right” kind of people don’t have health insurance because they’ve been priced out of the market by the government’s paying for the “wrong” kind of people.

Chait’s point is that wackos like Campfield are actually in an easier position because they make no factual claims to be refuted. After all, they aren’t saying that Obamacare will lead to death. They are simply claiming that the very idea of Obamacare is deciding who lives and dies. No proof needed. But here’s the thing: those who present actual claims and those who do not are against Obamacare for the same reason. They just don’t want the old system changed.

This fact is clear enough in one of the standard arguments against Obamacare: “Health insurance doesn’t make you healthy.” This was a big deal last year when a small study out of Oregon didn’t find health improvements in a couple of categories for people who had health insurance. Of course, since then, a much larger study out of Massachusetts has found that increased health insurance coverage actually saves lives. So that argument ought to be gone, but of course it will continue on because facts don’t seem to matter in these cases.

What’s interesting about this argument is the subtext. It argues that health insurance is not useful. And if its not useful, it isn’t worth helping people get it. That’s what I’ve always said about the conservative position on healthcare reform: they don’t want to do anything. Obamacare is based upon a private market system developed by the Heritage Foundation. But it was never meant to be law; it was mean simply as protection against something like a single-payer system. This is actually a concept that Chait himself pioneered, The Heritage Uncertainty Principle (HUP): as soon as a Republican healthcare idea becomes politically viable, it disappears. He noted this early example of it:

The principle that lies beneath the HUP is that the Republicans absolutely are for the healthcare status quo. Yes, they are for certain changes to the healthcare system, but they are for them for other reasons. The best example of this is tort “reform,” which is just a way of giving more power to powerful at the expense of the powerless.

But in this way, regardless of the argument—”Premiums will go sky high!” or “Welcome to the Holocaust!”—the conservatives are disingenuous. What they want is to do nothing at all that will upset the power elites. But they can’t say that. So they come up with ridiculous rationalizations. But at least the Nazi comparisons have the advantage of being transparently bogus.

Remember last night when I wrote, Repealing Smart Gun Law Won’t Change Attitudes? It was about this New Jersey law that says if any Smart Gun is sold in the United States, all gun sales in that state must be Smart Guns within three years. So Democrats in New Jersey are offering to repeal the law. I said that it wouldn’t matter, because the same people will just come up with other reasons for being against them. Plus I said they would claim that New Jersey could just enact another such law.

Well, All In had Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America on his show tonight. Hayes asked Pratt if his organization would back down if the law was repealed. Pratt spent most of his time talking around the issue but in the end, his answer was no. And he ended the segment by saying that the legislators were saying, “Do what I say or else.” Along with that, he made a gun with his hand and pretended to shoot the camera. It was both creepy and infantile. Pratt is an excellent example of why we can’t have a sane or honest discussion about guns in his country.

The main part of what Larry Pratt talked about was how Smart Guns only work 80% of the time. For some reason, he thinks that this justifies stopping anyone from selling them. Or at least that’s what he implied. It’s outrageous to think that a gun rights group is really protecting consumers, like a gun-only Consumer Reports. But what about that 80% claim. The All In Twitter feed sent out a link to the study that Pratt is pushing. It is eleven years old (pdf) and it is not about the Smart Gun technology at all; it’s about fingerprint technology. The Smart Guns are not based on fingerprint technology.

Of course, this all makes Larry Pratt a perfect conservative! Once you get a talking point, regardless of how old it is and regardless of the fact that it doesn’t relate to the issue at hand: repeat it! Over and over. I went back and watched the segment. Pratt was on for almost exactly two and a half minutes. He mentioned the “20% failure” point three times, using the vast majority of his time to talk about it.

This isn’t surprising though. Larry Pratt is not only involved with Gun Owners of America. He’s also founded English First and is at least involved with US Border Control and Committee to Protect the Family. So basically, he just hates everyone. Take a spoiled and bullying kindergartener and you pretty much have Larry Pratt. He is emblematic of a certain kind of conservative who think that the government has no right to interfere with gun ownership but thinks that the government should have cameras in every bedroom in America to make sure that people only have the right kind of sex.

Oh, and did I mention that Pratt at least pals around with racists? Here’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center had to say about him 13 years ago:

What a sweetheart! And he is one of the people driving our conversation about guns in this country.

Jon Perr wrote a great article at his website Perrspectives, The Laffer Curve Brings Red Ink to Red States. It seems that over the past few years, Art Laffer has been going around the red states and selling the usual supply side economic nonsense. If you were around in the 1980s, you are very familiar with it, “You will get more tax revenue if you cut taxes!” The idea is that cutting taxes will cause the economy to grow and so more taxes will come in. It sounds too good to be true because it is.

Let’s talk a bit about the Laffer curve. It isn’t actually a concept of Laffer’s, it’s just that he’s the guy who made it popular among Republicans in the 1970s. The idea is that if taxes are too high, people will not work as much or will find ways to avoid paying taxes. For example, a 100% tax rate would produce no tax revenue because there would be no incentive to work. More or less. But a photo in Perr’s article that looks like it is from the 1970s really struct me. You can go over and look at it, but here is my standard Laffer Curve graph and it shows the same thing:

There is no reason to think the Laffer Curve would be symmetrical. Indeed, when real economists (and I have a hard time putting Laffer in that category) deal with it, they don’t make it symmetrical. In fact, an article in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics shows that estimates of the rate are around 70%. So why did Laffer present his curve as being symmetrical?

I think it’s the timing. In the 1970s, when he was first using the Laffer Curve to argue for lowering taxes, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. And this default Laffer Curve says that the optimal rate should be 50%. And what was the first top marginal tax rate that Reagan got? Fifty percent! The Laffer Curve was and always will be a propaganda device. As Laffer admits, the idea was not new to him. But the reason his name was put on it was because he proposed the idea that you could lower tax rates (the top one especially) and increase tax revenues. But that just wasn’t true at the tax rates we had then (which are much higher than they are now).

The result: tax revenues went down. But somehow this fact is not known by conservatives. That, or they just don’t care:

What Perr noted was that after Laffer did his tour, many red states followed his lead and enacted the same failed policies the Republicans have been pushing for four decades. And the results have been predictable. He discussed New Jersey and especially Kansas. But the truth is that this has been going on in a lot of red states, although generally with less catastrophic consequences. But this is why, for example, Scott Walker and his Republican legislature cut school funding while giving businesses tax breaks.[1] That sounds loony to liberals but it makes perfect sense in the world of Laffer propaganda.

Perr ended the article with a 2012 survey of economists that didn’t find anyone who thought that a cut in the federal tax rates would increase economic growth over a five year period. There’s a reason for that. In a depressed economy, forcing the federal government to borrow less will not make more money available to the private sector to borrow and invest. As I point out all the time, companies are sitting on piles of money not knowing what to do with it. But Laffer wasn’t going around telling red states to cut their top taxes because it would be good for the economy. I’m not even sure how that would happen at the state level. Laffer was doing it because he’s looking out for the interests of the rich. Check out this graph from Kansas on their tax cut:

This is modern conservatism. I don’t think Art Laffer especially wants to make the lives of the poor worse—he’s just looking out for the rich. But the Kansas legislature was certainly trying to send a message with this distribution.

[1] Politifact, in their typical fashion rated this claim false. But if you read the text, you will see that it is actually true. On the issue of school funding cuts, they say the original claim was twice what Jennifer Shilling said. So the schools were not cut by $1.6 billion but by $800 million. In other words: Scott Walker cut school funding by a whole bunch. Politifact gave that a “mostly false” rating. On the issue of tax breaks, Politifact gets into a semantic debate about whether tax breaks actually cost tax payers any money. They give that claim a rating of “half true.” This is why everyone thinks Politifact is a joke.

I may have to subscribe to New Republic just because of Jonathan Cohn. His coverage of Obamacare has been great from the very beginning. If you are going to get your news about the law from one place, he’s the source to go with. He’s insightful of course, but more important, he’s accurate. And that’s something we don’t get much when it comes to coverage of Obamacare.

Yesterday, he wrote, Gallup: Uninsured Rate Is Lowest We’ve Ever Recorded. Of course, Gallup has only been polling about this since early 2008. But that was when the economy was doing pretty well. That was when the unemployment rate was right around 5.0 percent. So that’s when we were somewhere close to full employment. Yet at that time, our supposedly great employer-based health insurance system still left almost 15% of our citizens without coverage.

This number climbed over the following five and half years. I assume this is largely because even as new jobs were created in place of old jobs, they were mostly worse jobs without health benefits. Cohn cautioned us that the numbers are noisy. But the trend is unmistakable. The uninsured rate rose steadily until Obamacare was fully in effect and then the numbers plummeted to a full percentage point below the lowest point they’ve ever been:

It is a mark of Cohn’s seriousness that he noted that being insured is not the purpose of the new healthcare law. The purpose is to allow people to more easily get healthcare and to avoid medical bankruptcy. So the uninsured rate coming down is a good sign but it doesn’t mean anything on its own. But here’s the thing: Republicans have long been fans of coverage alone. That’s why they’ve always pushed high deductible “catastrophic” plans. And that’s not even to mention some of their other favorite policies, like purchasing insurance across state lines that would set up a system where most people got insurance in name only. So they ought to thrilled that the uninsured rate is going down. Right? Right?

Today, Cohn wrote, See How Right-Wing Media “Covered” Obamacare’s Big News Day. Not only is the uninsured rate down, but a study based upon the Massachusetts’ plan that Obamacare is based on shows that the increased access to healthcare is, in fact, saving lives. Great news! The reaction:

This is the very core of why conservatives are generally so ill-informed about what’s going on in the world. Major stories are simply ignored. And no, this is not the same as it is on the left:

And that’s why Cohn, and liberal writers in a general sense, are worth reading. They aren’t going to hide information from you. It’s good news for Obamacare and thus good news for the nation. But because the Republicans are not in power, they see good news for America as bad news. And they don’t report bad news to the true believers who read them.

Afterword

I wonder about this behavior on the part of conservatives. With Obamacare, they can kind of get away with it because Obamacare will triumph slowly. But the same thing happened during the 2012 presidential election where much of the conservative movement was truly shocked that Obama won re-election. The news sources must have known that a fall was coming. And after the conservative base was so badly informed, it amazes me that they didn’t turn on those news sources. But I guess if Dean Chambers is still “unskewing” reality, there must be something deeply delusional about conservatives.