Blackburn and Pallone spar over Obamacare and ‘scam’ insurance policies

By Arturo Garcia/Raw Story

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) accused congressional colleague Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) on Wednesday of being “insulting” toward Americans in the continuing debate over the effects of the Affordable Care Act on individual health care buyers.

“To be so insulting to people to say, ‘The insurance you’ve had is a scam,’” Blackburn said in a joint interview with CNN host Piers Morgan, arguing that President Barack Obama was wrong to assure individual buyers that their plans would be grandfathered into the law.

Pallone countered that the cuts were being caused by insurance companies cutting their customers, rather than raising their plans to meet the new standards required by the law.

“If insurance companies want to continue to offer lousy plans that don’t have good coverage and cost a lot of money to the taxpayer or to the insured, they can,” Pallone told Blackburn and Morgan.

“What percentage of people who want to keep their plan or their doctor, as per the president’s promise, are actually gonna be able to do that?” Morgan asked.

“About 90 percent,” Pallone replied, before Morgan interjected by citing an NBC News report stating that 40 to 60 percent of insurance buyers would be forced out of their plans. However, Pallone clarified that that issue affects buyers in the individual marketplace.

Reports like NBC’s have been criticized by Moyers & Company and the Los Angeles Times,among others, for ignoring the limitations of many of the original plans and the savings many subjects could get through government subsidies.

“So why didn’t the president just say that?” Morgan demanded. “Why didn’t he just say, instead of making this bold promise to sell his plan, why didn’t he just say that? Why didn’t he just be honest.”

“We have to look at this from a practical point of view,” Pallone said in response. “We want people to be insured, and have a good insurance policy.”

“What about telling the American people the truth?” Morgan repeated.

“We’re offering a good insurance policy at an affordable price,” Pallone continued. “If Marsha says I want to keep some lousy plan that’s a scam, well, the insurance company isn’t gonna sell it anymore, because nobody’s gonna buy it. And that’s the bottom line.”

Watch the discussion, as aired Wednesday on CNN, below.

CNN Anchor Challenges Congresswoman To Substantiate Obamacare Criticism, Hilarity Ensues

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

On Friday morning, CNN anchor Carol Costello challenged Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) to substantiate her claim that HealthCare.gov will endanger Americans’ medical privacy. The host pushed the Congresswoman to specify which medical details enrollees would have to turn over to the federal government, causing Blackburn to become visibly uncomfortable and unsure as she strung together various buzzwords about privacy.

The exchange originated from a question Blackburn herself leveled at the primary contractors responsible for HealthCare.gov during a House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on Thursday. Blackburn asked the witnesses why some of their employees had access to “the database servers storing the enrolling information” and suggested that they were in violation of The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the law that guarantees “federal protections for individually identifiable health information held by covered entities and their business associates and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information.”

Asked to explain how requiring enrollees to enter their biographical enrollment information violates a law that only applies to medical data between medical entities, Blackburn demurred:

COSTELLO: So what specifically were you referring to on the website that violates, that could possibly violate HIPAA?

BLACKBURN: We are concerned about privacy overall. Data security privacy and of course applying and complying with the HIPAA laws, and…

COSTELLO: But what question specifically asks that would concern you about HIPAA, what medical question does it ask?

BLACKBURN: Carol, HIPAA requires you to — it’s the way you structure your website and the way you transit the information, the transfer rights that are there, and when you look at privacy on these websites, what you have to do is keep all of the application information in one server [...]

COSTELLO: I’m trying to understand what kind of information you’re talking about. What kind of information are you talking about? What specifically does the website ask that I might be afraid might shared with whomever? Specifically. What information?

BLACKBURN: You should be very concerned not only as you navigate the website but as you make a purchase, and then as your information is handled, what we want to make certain is that an individual’s medical information their financial information is all going to be kept in a private manner. What we do not want is a peeping Tom who is going to look through their PII, their personal identifying information. they want to make certain the federal government has standards and are applying and abiding by the privacy laws that are on the books and by the HIPAA regulations that every hospital and every doctor abide by. so this is a serious investigation, looking at the entire roll-out and launch of this website, how this data is being used.

Watch it:

As Washington & Lee Law Professor Timothy S. Jost explained to ThinkProgress in an email, “HIPAA only applies to health care providers, clearinghouses (and this is a narrowly defined term) health plans, and their business associates.” “Even so, access is available to data without consent for health care operations, which this would be.” Deven McGraw, of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, agreed, adding, “It does not violate HIPAA – it’s not even covered by HIPAA.”

MSNBC host grills Blackburn: ‘Do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country?

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) accused MSNBC host Thomas Roberts of making “inappropriate” comments on Tuesday after he asked if she hated President Barack Obama’s health care reform law “more than you love your country.”

Following the announcement of a House Republican plan that threw a wrench in a bipartisan Senate deal to reopen the government, Roberts pointed out to Blackburn that the House wascontinuing to demand that part of the Affordable Care Act be repealed or delayed even after the president said the law was nonnegotiable.

“Do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country?” Roberts wondered.

“I think that comments like that, that you are making, are just incredibly inappropriate,” Blackburn replied.

“You don’t think it’s incredibly inappropriate to shut down our government and take all the hostages of Americans that you’ve taken?” Roberts pressed. “No, no, no. It’s not inappropriate because you’ve taken the government hostage through a shutdown. And all the American people, you’re now walking them to a cliff, the economy, and you’re going to push them over, one by one, based on the fact that you don’t like the ACA. That’s all it is.”

“Listen to yourself! We didn’t want a government shutdown,” Blackburn insisted. “Just listen to the way you’re sounding. My goodness! We didn’t want a government shutdown. We don’t want a government default.”

Roberts reminded the Tennessee Republican that she had told the Economic Club of Nashville that conservative lawmakers should do “everything we can do” to derail the health care reform law, and then she praised the efforts of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

“You have been planning a shutdown since August!” Roberts charged.

“Not at all!” Blackburn shot back. “What you are doing is so inappropriate. We didn’t want a shutdown. What we want to do is solve problems.”

Watch this video from MSNBC, broadcast Oct. 15, 2013.

GOP Congresswoman: I Opposed Domestic Violence Bill Because It Protected Too Many Groups

By Annie-Rose Strasser and Josh Israel/Think Progress
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday openly admitted that she opposed the latest reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) because it included protections for LGBT, Native American, and undocumented victims of domestic violence.

In an appearance on MSNBC, Blackburn pointed out that the latest iteration of the law protects “different groups” and thus dilutes funding for straight, non-Native American women with the proper documentation:

When you start to make this about other things it becomes an “against violence act” and not a targeted focus act… I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups. What you need is something that is focused specifically to help the shelters and to help out law enforcement, who is trying to work with the crimes that have been committed against women and helping them to stand up.

Watch it:

Domestic violence is domestic violence, period. And there is no way to justify Blackburn’s suggestion that some victims of this violence are more deserving than others. The reauthorized VAWA allows programs targeting LGBT victims of domestic violence to compete on equal footing for grant money with other groups serving underserved populations, and it ensures thatLGBT victims will not be turned away from shelters and other services because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. These victims of violence deserve the same protections as anyone else caught in domestic abuse.

Additionally, the reauthorized VAWA includes provisions to prevent serial rapists and similar abusers from preying on Native American women. If Blackburn considers Native American women a “different group,” then it’s one she should be most concerned about: Three out of every five Native American women has been assaulted by an intimate partner.

OOPS: GOP Rep. Inadvertently Makes The Case For Nearly Doubling The Minimum Wage

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

President Obama’s State of the Union proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour and index it to inflation so that it keeps up with growth in the economy was quickly rebuked by top Republicanslike Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who claim the minimum wage will kill jobs and hurt small businesses.

Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R) chose a different reason to oppose the proposal today. A stronger minimum wage, Blackburn said, would negatively affect the ability of young workers to enter the workforce as teenagers, and would prevent them from learning responsibility like she did when she was a teenage retail employee making a seemingly-measly $2.15 an hour in Mississippi:

BLACKBURN: What we’re hearing from moms and from school teachers is that there needs to be a lower entry level, so that you can get 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds into the process. Chuck, I remember my first job, when I was working in a retail store, down there, growing up in Laurel, Mississippi. I was making like $2.15 an hour. And I was taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions. And I appreciated that opportunity.

Watch it:

Making $2.15 an hour certainly does sound worse than today’s minimum wage, which federal law mandates must be at least $7.25 an hour. But what Blackburn didn’t realize is that she accidentally undermined her own argument, since the value of the dollar has changed immensely since her teenage years. Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between$12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.

At that time, the minimum wage was $1.60, equivalent to $10.56 in today’s terms. Today’s minimum wage is equivalent to just $1.10 an hour in 1968 dollars, meaning the teenage Blackburn managed to enter the workforce making almost double the wage she now says is keeping teenagers out of the workforce.