Morning No: No Sense Of Perspective

by: Natasha Chart

Thu Apr 01, 2010 at 06:30

- Everything you wanted to know about the Hutaree militia bust, but were afraid you might remember. Courtesy of the Slacktivist, who points out that militia members were all fans of the Left Behind novels, a badly written series of books imagining the post-Rapture End Times.

- The obscenity of war.

- WellPoint has already started reclassifying administrative costs as health care, so they can pad their medical loss ratio.

- The Archdiocese of Baltimore is suing over truth-in-advertising laws for crisis pregnancy centers, which often advertise as if they were family planning clinics, but then just lie to women and subject them to fact-free religious lectures.

- "The children whose parents never visited the home were the ones who were beaten most."

- Obama promised to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell in the State of the Union, but now White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is hedging.

- Haiti is going to get $10 billion in aid, twice what they asked for, and it's going directly through the government instead of aid organizations. Which is good, because the Haiti earthquake seems to have really brought out the crazies in terms of 'aid' organizations all too willing to take advantage of the great conversion opportunity presented by a terrible natural disaster.

- Phoebe Prince, a 15 year old girl, was harassed by classmates until she killed herself. States are now talking about strengthening bullying laws, but there are already perfectly good laws on the books forbidding stalking, harassment, vandalism and abuse. School administrators have zero tolerance policies for taking aspirin in school and talking back, maybe they should think about taking abuse and harassment seriously.

Natasha Chart :: Morning No: No Sense Of Perspective

Tags: morning no, blogging news roundup, WellPoint, Hutaree, Phoebe Prince, (All Tags)

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Morning No: No Sense Of Perspective | 2 comments

The last link, I tend to think, has not so subtlle ties to several of the links (4.00 / 1)

above. Bullying happens, significantly in part, because kids are role playing for an adult society where ruthlessness is inevitably rewarded. You just would never see adults witnessing physical abuse and then ignoring it otherwise. We have a societal investment in the notion that winners are winners because of inherent worthiness that the losers don't have, and because of that we're willing to look the other way in the face of grotesque behaviors.

And of course this is precisely why we're so societally invested in offering up window dressing-type legislation after the fact- we don't want to face up to our own culpability and allegiances. I mean, statuatory rape, really? Isn't that just a reassertion of social niceties? It certainly doesn't do much to address, say, the witnessed physical bullying. It's a handy way to create a disingenuous line between adult society and its younger counterpart; it emphasizes that the parties involved were minors while absolving all adult witnesses to abuse. Sex is made the scapegoat, and life goes on as it was.

by: sb @ Thu Apr 01, 2010 at 07:53:39 AM CDT

re: mlr (4.00 / 1)

But many health care policy wonks have warned lawmakers that that law does not go far enough in actually enforcing these rules and they argue that insurers will likely game the system. Already, Aetna and Cigna have announced that they plan to jack up rates in the short term and now, Consumer Reports is calling for an investigation into WellPoint in light of an electronic message the company sent "to investors describing how it would simply re-label administrative costs as 'medical care' in response to the new health reform law."
In the March 17th message, WellPoint - the nation's largest insurance company - announced that it has reclassified some of its administrative costs as medical spending in order to increase its medical loss ratio (MLR, a techinical terms which measures how much insurers spend on administrative spending v claims).

I'm shocked!

who could have imagined enforcement would be needed...

by: The Big Hurt @ Thu Apr 01, 2010 at 11:27:38 AM CDT