John Oliver: Vaccines

What has happened to my country? It's the 21st Century, yet we've got anti-vaxxers, global warming deniers, creationists who reject the very foundation of modern biology, and all manner of unscientific idiocy.

I know that Donald Trump is president, but are we all eager to return to the Dark Ages?

PS. I'm sorry I haven't been posting. But it's not going to get any better. Everything is just too depressing these days.

The truth about vaccines

He does a great job with this, doesn't he?

It's hard to believe that this bullshit is still going on, but then I posted a video about another measles outbreak just a couple of weeks ago. And we've still got Creationists, after all, even in the 21st Century.

Anti-scientific idiocy never dies, it seems.

Anti-vaxxers cause another measles outbreak

I feel like I should apologize for even posting this. As if there's not enough depressing stuff going on these days, huh?

And our idiot president supports these anti-vaxxer morons! What is happening to my country?

House Repubicans pass Trumpcare

The funny thing is that Republicans were lying when they were talking about 'Obamacare.' But everything they complained about - and more - is what they've done with 'Trumpcare.'

What hypocrites!

Trumpcare and the Three-Bucket Strategy

It's Seth Meyers again. And yes, this is the Republican Party's Three-Bucket Strategy:

• Bucket #1: Repeal Obamacare
• Bucket #2: Gut Medicaid
• Bucket #3: End Medicare

Unfortunately, we seem to be focusing all our attention on that first bucket, without giving anywhere near enough attention to the other two.

Should we just let poor people die?

The other day, I posted a video by John Oliver about the Republican healthcare bill (and I listed Trump's healthcare promises here), but I thought I'd add this one by Trevor Noah, too.

Partly, that's because The Daily Show is now on YouTube, which makes it a lot easier to embed videos. But also, I wanted to point out that example of a 64-year-old making $26,000, who would pay nearly $15,000 a year for health insurance under the Republican plan.

Who could do that? Well, no one, basically. That's just one reason why 24 million people will lose their health insurance. But the extremely wealthy will make out like bandits.

And that's Republican Party policy in a nutshell, Trump or no Trump.

John Oliver: The American Health Care Act

Yesterday, I listed the promises that Donald Trump has made about healthcare. Well, this is what Republicans are pushing and Trump is supporting.

Yeah, I don't even want to think about this crap anymore. It's too depressing. But we have to. Apathy is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Donald Trump's healthcare promises

(TPM)

TPM ran a contest asking readers for quotes from Donald Trump about his healthcare promises. These are what he claimed Republicans would do:

Late Update: TPM Reader JF strikes early with a great contest entry. 1/15/17 Donald J. Trump: "We’re going to have insurance for everybody. There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” ...

Latter Update: Oooooo ... TPM Reader NH is bringing it! 2/19/16: "Obamacare has to go. We can't afford it. It's no good. You're going to end up with great healthcare for a fraction of the price. And that's going to take place immediately after we go in. Okay? Immediately. Fast Quick." (CSPAN, Timestamp 34:23)

Entry #3: "Everybody's got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, "No, no, the lower 25 percent that can't afford private. But-- ... I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now." - 60 Minutes, September 27, 2015. TPM Reader MM.

Entry #4: "We're gonna come up with a new plan that's going to be better health care for more people at a lesser cost." ABC News, 1/25/17. TPM Reader JH.

Entry #5: "There are people who say everybody should have a great, wonderful, private plan, and if you can't afford that, and there is a percentage, a fairly large percentage that can't afford it, then those people don't get taken care of. That's wrong. We're going to take care of that through the Medicaid system. We’re going to take care of those people. We have no choice." Dr. Oz, 9/15/16. TPM Reader JN.

Entry #6: "The new plan is good. It's going to be inexpensive. It's going to be much better for the people at the bottom, people that don't have any money. We're going to take care of them through maybe concepts of Medicare. Now, some people would say, "that's not a very Republican thing to say." That's not single payer, by the way. That's called heart. We gotta take care of people that can't take care of themselves." CNN GOP Townhall, 2/17-18/16. TPM Reader BS.

Entry #7: "I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid." 5/21/15. The Daily Signal. TPM Reader WM.

Of course, it doesn't matter if Republicans lie, right? We expect that. We certainly expect lies from Donald Trump. It's pretty much front-page news when he doesn't lie. And he never pays a price for that.

Nevertheless, I think it's important to document their promises.

PS. Note that Republicans in Congress are already talking about cutting Medicare and Medicaid, and their plan already starts depleting the Medicare trust fund.

Do I need to remind you that none of them actually campaigned on cutting Medicare and Medicaid?

John Oliver: Obamacare

One of the ways in which John Oliver distinguishes himself from the competition is in taking the time for an in-depth look at issues like this.

It's still less than 20 minutes, but that's a lot for a single video clip. He doesn't even break up these videos into smaller pieces in order to get more ad revenue!

I should note that I've had a Health Savings Account for years. They're worthless. They're exactly the wrong way to get health care. And Oliver mentioned some of the reasons why.

But there's another reason. Health Savings Accounts discourage you from getting health care, because you are paying for every doctors visit. Now, sure, that keeps you from getting medical care for every little thing, but it also encourages you to delay long enough for a minor condition to become a major one.

Ordinary health insurance - including what you get in 'Obamacare' plans - has co-pay requirements, so that you won't go to the doctor every other day, just because of the cute receptionist. But they don't encourage you to say away from doctors entirely.

And health insurance isn't expensive because of too many doctors visits. It's expensive because of cancer, heart disease, and other extremely costly conditions, often near the end of your life, which modern medical care can treat these days.

For lower cost and better outcomes, we'd be better off encouraging more doctors visits in the hope of catching these conditions early. Health Savings Accounts encourage just the reverse, unless you're wealthy enough that the cost of health care doesn't really matter at all to you.

Health Savings Accounts might be the absolute worst way to manage health care. Indeed, they might be worse than having no health care plan at all, since the rich use them to avoid paying taxes. And despite what Republicans tell you, we do need taxes.

How big alt-med tried to silence a scientist

So, you thought you'd heard all of the downsides of a Trump presidency? Sorry, but... not even close. I'm sure we'll be learning of new downsides for the next four years. (Let's just hope it's not eight.)

And yes, some liberals can be just as gullible as conservatives when it comes to this alt-med bullshit. But liberals tend to have a lot better attitude towards regulations and libel laws (among other things).

The quack Miranda and weasel words

Supplements and other quack medicine is big business. But another reason why it's hard to protect people from such scams is that the scammed will eagerly fight for the people who are taking advantage of them.

We need smarter, better educated, and more skeptical citizens. We should be teaching our children the scientific method. Once you know how to think, what to think won't be such a difficult problem.

The problem with establishment Democrats

This is one thing that really, really pisses me off about "establishment Democrats" - they keep helping right-wing Republicans rewrite history.

Why is that? Well, as far as I can tell, they're simply so eager to bend over backwards appeasing right-wingers that they just 'go along to get along.' And Nancy Reagan is dead, so you have to say nice things about her, right? Even when they're not true?

Hillary Clinton has faced nonstop Republican opposition for an even longer period of time than Barack Obama has. At what point will they realize that it's hopeless, that Republicans will never like them no matter what they do?

I don't know. Is there any other explanation for this? Hillary Clinton has since apologized - more or less - but how could she be this clueless, anyway? She lived through the 1980s, just like I did. How can she remember the Reagan years like that?

I'm not one of the Clinton-haters. I'd be happy with either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton as president. But I certainly understand how maddening "establishment Democrats" can be. I don't get as hysterical about it as Sanders' supporters, but I certainly understand the feeling, I really do!

John Oliver: abortion laws

John Oliver has been off the air for a couple of months or so. I've missed him. Oh, I've never actually watched his entire show, but I've certainly missed these video clips. He does a great job, doesn't he?

John Oliver makes me miss Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a little less. Well, maybe not much less. But he's definitely their spiritual successor, wouldn't you agree?

(Yes, I know that Stephen Colbert is still on the air, but his new show isn't anywhere near as good as the Colbert Report used to be. Right now, I'd say that John Oliver is the best at this sort of thing, followed by Seth Meyers. I watch Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, too, and I enjoy both of them, but I've still got to give the nod to Oliver and Meyers.)

Vaccines - too many, too soon?

This is nothing to do with Christmas, but it's important information which needs to be passed around as widely as possible. Don't you agree?

John Oliver: Medicaid gap

Note that Nebraska is one of those states which rejected expanding Medicaid. (Naturally.)

Why? Politics. Just politics. Who cares about human beings? Who cares about people? Politics is everything to the GOP.

Americans love Death Panels

Sarah Palin was wrong? Wow, that's hard to believe, isn't it? :)

The great mammogram farce

From Amanda Marcotte at TPM:

Over and over during the farce that was supposed to be a hearing on Planned Parenthood, Republican representatives attacked Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards because her organization does not provide mammograms as part of its core set of services. (They do sometimes pair with organizations for programs that offer them to low-income women.) Over and over again, the fact that Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer mammograms was held out as some kind of proof that the organization doesn’t provide women’s health care.

Marcotte points out that most gynecologists don't do mammograms, but instead refer their patients to radiology centers or hospitals with mammogram facilities. (I don't want to copy all of her column here, so I'll keep this short.)

Also, mammograms aren't recommended for most women under 50, and Planned Parenthood is a family planning clinic. "Think 20s and 30s, not 40s and 50s. The overlap between the women who need birth control pills and the women who need mammograms is pretty small."

So why the big focus on mammograms at Planned Parenthood? Are Republican men just that ignorant about women's health?

This obsession with mammograms belies the real agenda here, which has nothing to do with “fetal body parts” or even abortion, but with delegitimizing health care that exists so that people, particularly women, can have healthy and safe sex lives. The implication was clear: Mammograms are real health care, and all those other services—contraception, STI testing and treatment, Pap smears—are not. After all, virgins can get breast cancer, but you aren’t going to get the clap or an unintended pregnancy if you don’t have sex.

Republicans are smart and know they can’t just come right out and denounce the use of health care services in order to have recreational sex, because recreational sex is a nearly universal behavior. Ninety-nine percent of women who have sex have used contraception. Ninety-five percent of Americans had premarital sex. So the slut-shaming is being done sideways, by focusing heavily on non-sexual health care—or prenatal care—while pointedly ignoring the health care people centered around having sex. The omission speaks volumes.

If you thought the religious right had given up on the mission to push abstinence-until-marriage, this hearing should be a reminder that they very much have not, and instead are eager to undermine any care for the non-abstinent out of fear that it gives permission to have sex. Abstinence-only programs haven’t gone anywhere, either. As Erica Hellerstein of Think Progress reported over the summer, most programs were just renamed something like “abstinence-focused” or even, falsely, “evidence-based,” but they are pushing the same message: The only legitimate life choice is to refrain from having sex until marriage.

Why they don’t think married women need contraception is another question entirely, but we are talking about politicians who think you need a mammogram machine in a family planning clinic that primarily serves women in their 20s. Expertise on what women actually need in their health care is not a strong suit.

How to do bad science

Here's an instruction manual:

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily”, page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

The rest of the article explains the details.

This was fraudulent only because the authors of the study knew they were doing bad science. Maybe you think journalists shouldn't be skeptical of such things, but the alternative is to spread misinformation - which they did in this situation.

Also, note that Bohannon couldn't get this study accepted in peer-reviewed scientific journals. That's because other scientists would have checked his research methodology and seen that it was crap.

But he still got it accepted in the 'scientific journal' equivalent of diploma mills, which aren't peer-reviewed and where the only qualification is that your check clears. Actual working scientists wouldn't pay any attention to what they publish, but it would sound authoritative to uninformed laymen.

This is another reason why intelligent laymen should accept the scientific consensus, while being skeptical of sensational claims in the popular media, promoted by celebrities, or pushed by true believers, whether 'scientists' or not. The scientific method includes procedures designed to filter out bad science like this.

That's why scientists do it. (No, it's not to suppress the truth, and you'd have to be incredibly gullible to think otherwise.)

___
PS. Note that, as PZ Myers points out, there are serious ethical concerns with this whole demonstrate-bad-science idea.

Racism, sexism, and Obamacare

According to Amanda Marcotte at TPM, the fight against Obamacare has always been about race and gender anxiety (in other words, the Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' strikes again).

She makes some good points, starting with a remarkable quote from an Obamacare opponent:

In case the situation with the latest Obamacare lawsuit, King v. Burwell, wasn’t surreal enough, along comes the anti-Obamacare lawyer Michael Carvin, and some of his, um, more colorful ideas about why the Affordable Care Act is bad law. Trying to contrast the ACA with the constitution, Carvin characterized the ACA as “a statute that was written three years ago, not by dead white men but by living white women and minorities.”

It’s startling to see an Obamacare opponent so bluntly characterize efforts to destroy the law as a way to preserve white male privilege in this way, much less taking it so far as to suggest the privileges of dead white men count for more than the needs of living women and people of color. But it shouldn’t be. The race- and-gender-based opposition to the ACA has been baked into the fight against it from the beginning, when the bill was very nearly derailed by opponents claiming that it would somehow override federal bans on funding abortion. ...

Ugly racial attitudes influenced the opposition to Obamacare in two major ways: Hostility to the black President that signed it into law and hostility to the black people who might get better healthcare through it. It’s exceedingly rare to find, outside of Carvin’s bizarre comment, any conservatives overtly mentioning race in their objections to Obamacare. But then again, they don’t need to. All they need to do is whip out the standard conservative talking points that have racially loaded implications built right into them: “States’ rights,” “welfare queens,” loaded warnings about the supposed wave of laziness about to crest over our nation. All these ideas are rooted in our nation’s history of racism—indeed, “states’ rights” was invented to justify slavery and then segregation—and the way that conservatives lean on these ideas now suggest that one of the unspoken but heavily insinuated arguments against Obamacare is that it’s a way for the federal government to steal health care from white people and give it to black people. Adds a new dimension to the fear of “death panels” when you think about it.

Social science, as Paul Waldman showed in the Washington Post last May, bears this out: Attitudes about race and about the ACA are tightly interwoven. Research has shown that negative attitudes about black people increase hostility to health care reform, that opinions about health care reform polarized by racial attitudes after Obama’s election, and that nativist attitudes predicted hostility to health care reform. Research has found that white people with high racial resentment, regardless of their opinion on Obama, view health care reform as a giveaway to lazy black people. You can see why people don’t say these things out loud in public, but the eyebrow-wriggling and hinting has been strong throughout this debate.

The gender-baiting, in contrast, has been way more explicit. Ever since the HHS announced that contraception would be covered as co-pay-free preventive service, conservative media has gleefully portrayed the ACA as a program to give hot young sluts an opportunity to screw on the public dime, an argument that managed to get this narrow provision all the way to the Supreme Court. Never mind that young women with private insurance are no more on the public dime than any other people who have private health insurance. The idea that sexy young things are having fun without you but making you pay for it has been just too provocative for conservative pundits to let facts get in the way.

I've written a lot about the Republican 'Southern strategy' here, but I guess I never thought through the implications when it came to Obamacare.

It has seemed,... well, bizarre that Republican outrage would be so vehement, so angry, so hysterical about a program that was originally Republican, itself. After all, 'Obamacare' was the conservative health care reform plan originally, developed in a right-wing think tank as the free market alternative to Clinton-era proposals, and widely supported in the GOP right up until the moment that Democrats agreed to go along with it, too.

I assumed that this was just part of the agreement among Republicans to oppose everything wanted by President Obama, no matter what it was - an agreement they'd made before Obama even took office for his first term. I assumed, frankly, that their outrage was just faked for political purposes (and among Republican leaders, I'm sure that's still commonly the case).

And sure, race-based hostility to President Obama has long been obvious, and it certainly counts for a lot of the hysterical anger coming from the right, but I still didn't realize the connection that Marcotte has demonstrated here.

This whole thing reminds me of Lee Atwater and the so-called Reagan Democrats. In the 1980s, Republicans convinced working-class white men to vote against their own best interests - to support tax cuts for the rich and ever-widening wealth inequality (with them on the losing side) - by making economic issues all about race.

In the above post, I quoted this article:

Whatever its abstract intellectual roots, conservatism has since at least the sixties drawn its political strength by appealing to heartland identity politics. In 1985, Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist, immersed himself in Macomb County, a blue-collar Detroit suburb where whites had abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. He found that the Reagan Democrats there understood politics almost entirely in racial terms, translating any Democratic appeal to economic justice as taking their money to subsidize the black underclass. And it didn’t end with the Reagan era. Piles of recent studies have found that voters often conflate “social” and “economic” issues.

It's not just racial, either - not these days, at least. It's sexism, too. In fact, as women become better educated - competing with men for the better jobs - many men are becoming positively unglued. I'd swear that misogyny is increasing in America. I can't tell you how many white men have told me that white men are the only real victims of discrimination in America.

So, yes, this seems very plausible to me. I can see how racism and sexism aren't just incidental to the hysteria about Obamacare, but are actually the heart of the opposition.

This explains so much! It's always seemed weird to me that helping more people get health insurance would provoke such anger, such vitriol, such sputtering outrage. I mean,... really?  How angry could you really get about more people getting health insurance (private health insurance, especially)?

Put into a racist, sexist mindset, though, the anger becomes clear. It's not just that Barack Obama is black. It's even worse than I expected. The Republican Party has done even more damage to our country than that.

And as I say, while racism is getting better in America - despite all this - misogyny seems to be growing. It's not just old white men, but younger men, too. (MRA trolls are pretty much everywhere on the Internet these days, and they're as angry as they are obsessive.)

So while I can see the elderly white racists of the GOP dying out over time, I worry that there might be a new pool for Republican strategists to tap: bitter, angry, misogynist men, whatever their ethnicity. (And yes, they will get some women to vote for them, even so.)

With luck, the Republican Party has so pissed off African-American and Hispanic men that non-white misogynists won't bite, even if they hate women. But it's still worrisome. After all, the GOP has had no qualms about using whatever they can use, no matter how disgusting it might be, to maintain power. For their wealthy backers, it's all about the money.

For their backers, it's all about maintaining the political power to continue favoring the rich. They've clearly shown that they'll do whatever they have to do, work with whomever they have to work with, push whatever disgusting stuff they have to push on the ignorant, the hateful, the gullible - as long as they can keep getting tax cuts and corporate subsidies.

A message for the anti-vaccine movement

I'm glad to see Jimmy Kimmel take on issues like this, but I thought I'd post it because the video has received nearly 3,500 down-votes, so far, and angry anti-vaxxers are filling up the comments section.

This is just another example of scientific illiteracy and faith-based thinking in America. You've read some scary stuff online, you've seen a Playboy bunny with her clothes on (so she must be smart, huh?), so you think you know more than the highly-educated medical researchers who've devoted their professional lives to this field.

Just reading their comments shows how little they actually know. Even I can tell that, and I'm no medical researcher. But they brag about how much they know. (They remind me of Creationists, who seem to know absolutely nothing about evolution, but somehow think that they're well-informed.)

It's the worldwide scientific consensus. There's a reason for that. If scientists were unsure, if the evidence wasn't there, you could go ahead and pick whatever answer you wanted to believe (though it would be far smarter, in that situation, just to withhold judgement).

But that's not the case. The science is in. If you understand science at all, if you know the slightest thing about the scientific method, you'll understand why science comes to a consensus and why that's always the best bet.

Everything else is just your enthusiasm for conspiracies. Yeah, maybe it's fun to think like that, but this is serious. There's a reason why intelligent people laugh at conspiracy enthusiasts.