Pennsylvania Man Confronts His Governor For Refusing To Expand Medicaid: ‘How Many People Have To Die?’

BY TARA CULP-RESSLER/Think Progress

This week, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) had a run-in with one of his constituents as he was leaving a fundraising event. Scot Rosenzweig — who identified himself as a fellow Republican — showed Corbett a large photograph of his fiancee, Dina Nelson, who died at the age of 41 because she was uninsured and couldn’t afford a liver transplant. “I think maybe we should consider accepting the Medicaid expansion,” Rosenzweig told his governor, explaining that people like Nelson need access to lifesaving health treatment.

“I can’t do that,” Corbett responded.

Corbett is one of 25 governors who have declined to accept Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion, a move that is preventing an estimated 700,000 low-income Pennsylvanians from accessing public health insurance. Rather than accepting the federal funds designated for expanding his state’s Medicaid pool, Corbett is trying to win federal approval for analternate plan, called “Healthy Pennsylvania,” that would give low-income people subsidies to buy private coverage. But Corbett’s plan has been sharply criticized by anti-poverty advocates, who say it could actually reduce benefits for the state’s neediest constituents.

In his exchange with Rosenzweig, Corbett reiterated his desire to implement “Healthy Pennsylvania,” which he hopes to put in place by 2015. He said he can’t both accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and fix the existing problems he sees with the Medicaid program. But that didn’t satisfy Rosenzweig.

“How many people have to die while we work on the problems?” he asked Corbett.

Watch it, courtesy of SEIU Healthcare PA:

Rosenzweig was one of several activists protesting outside of the closed-door luncheon that Corbett attended on Tuesday with representatives from the Chamber of Commerce. Press was not allowed at the event. The handful of Pennsylvania residents — all of whom knew Nelson, and some of whom were involved in the Homecare Workers Union with her — protested for a chance to have a seat at the table and discuss Medicaid expansion with the governor.

“If Dina had access to good, preventative healthcare services when she needed it, her life would have been saved,” Rosenzweig told the Sun Gazette. “Gov. Corbett needs to hear more stories like Dina’s about the real impact of his decision to delay Medicaid expansion. How many lives lost are enough?”

Pennsylvania residents have been pushing for Medicaid expansion for months. This past summer, health care advocates staged a “sick-in” outside the governor’s mansion to pressure Corbett to consider the human cost of neglecting to expand the public program. One activist was arrested after chalking a message on the sidewalk — “Governor Corbett has health insurance, we should too” — because local law enforcement claimed it was a “derogatory remark” about the Pennsylvania leader.

Across the country, an estimated five million low-income Americans will be unable to access affordable health coverage because of their governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid. The resistance to this particular Obamacare provision has a disproportionate impact on people of color. It also has the potential to put a financial strain on businesses and hospitals.

Uninsurance Rate For Unemployed Americans Dropped Significantly Over The Last Month

BY SY MUKHERJEE/Think Progress

A new Gallup poll released on Thursday finds that the U.S. uninsurance rate dropped to 16.1 percent — the lowest level in over a year — as Obamacare officially went into effect on January 1:

CREDIT: GALLUP

While the overall number is a modest decline from December’s 17.3 percent uninsurance rate, unemployed Americans have seen significant gains in health coverage since December. Since then, the uninsurance rate among this group has fallen by 6.7 percentage points. “The unemployed remain the subgroup with the highest uninsured rate at 34.1 percent, but the initial decline among this group suggests the healthcare law may be working as intended for unemployed adults,” wrote Gallup.

Non-white Americans also gained health care coverage between December and January, with their uninsurance rate falling by two percent.

To date, at least 2.2 million Americans have enrolled in private health plans through Obamacare’s state and federal insurance marketplaces. Another 6.3 million individuals weredeemed eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) between October and December.

It’s still unclear how many of the Medicaid enrollees are simply re-applying for coverage and how many are gaining it for the first time after becoming newly-eligible in states that expanded the program under Obamacare. But the drop in unemployed Americans’ uninsurance rate indicates that people who are struggling financially are likely taking advantage of Obamacare’s coverage options.

Assessing Obamacare’s total effect on the uninsured is impossible until the open enrollment season ends on March 31. Preliminary reports have indicated that most people who gained private coverage in the first three months had been previously insured — but that isn’t necessarily surprising considering that many junk insurance plans were outlawed by the health law beginning in 2014, encouraging people with those plans to enroll in new ones before the New Year in order to avoid a coverage gap.

Other surveys have suggested that uninsured Americans may be taking their time to assess coverage options under the health law. A Commonwealth Fund report from earlier this month found that just under six in ten potentially eligible uninsured adults who had either not visited an Obamacare marketplace or visited one without signing up for a policy said they plan to enroll by the end of March.

Mike Huckabee: Giving Women Birth Control Coverage Assumes They Can’t Control Their Sex Drives

BY AVIVA SHEN/Think Progress

Former Arkansas Governor and Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee (R) asserted Wednesday that Democrats are telling women “they cannot control their libido” by offering no-copay contraception through the Affordable Care Act. He made the comments during a luncheon at the Republican National Convention, which is actively trying to dispel the party’s anti-woman image.

During his speech, Huckabee also likened Obamacare’s expanded contraception coverage to a sugar daddy. Democrats want women to think “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government,” he said. Republicans, by contrast, want to “empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”

Watch it:

While these comments have sparked fresh outrage, the former governor has been blithely offending women for most of his career. In the past, he’s speculated that women have trouble multitasking during their periods and passionately supported former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) after the failed Senate candidate claimed victims of “legitimate rape” can’t get pregnant. He has also specifically endorsed the belief that “wives graciously submit to their husband’s sacrificial leadership.”

GOP strategists have worked hard since the 2012 election to keep Republicans from alienating female voters by holding training sessions and advising candidates to simply avoid talking about rape. But offensive comments by prominent Republicans keep thwarting these efforts. On Wednesday alone, one GOP congressman running for re-election argued that wives should “voluntarily submit” to their husbands, while another Congressional candidatedropped out in the midst of a firestorm over his justification of marital rape.

Fox News Doesn't Care About The "Bloody Senate Report"

OLIVIA KITTEL/Media Matters For America:

"I don't care about the bloody report!"

With that, Bill O'Reilly delivered the climax to a night of Senate report denialism on Fox News.   

This week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the results of its investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi. The report dispelled many of Fox News' favorite conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks, including the myth that the Obama administration engaged in a cover-up by suggesting the attacks may have grown out of protests outside U.S. facilities in Benghazi over an anti-Islam video, an idea then-U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice suggested in a series of interviews on the broadcast Sunday shows three days after the attacks.

And yet, Fox hosts Bill O'Reilly and Bret Baier continued to push these myths, even when covering the Senate report that debunked them.

On the January 16 edition of Special Report, guest A.B. Stoddard pointed out that the report found no evidence of a cover-up, and Baier responded, "You said no cover-up, but there's clearly an open question about this story about the protests, and about where that all came from."

Bill O'Reilly went even further, peppering guest James Carville with questions about the origins of Rice's suggestion that the attacks may have originated from a protest over the film. Carville attempted to explain that the Senate report answered O'Reilly's question, but the Fox host repeatedly interrupted him, finally yelling, "I don't care about the bloody report":

The Senate report makes clear where reports of a protest were born -- from the intelligence community. The report noted that the intelligence community (IC) received and disseminated an account in the immediate aftermath of the assault that there had been protests against the anti-Islam video at the diplomatic facility prior to the attack, based largely on press accounts that made that claim. The report also revealed that it took days for eyewitness statements by U.S. personnel indicating that there had been no protests to make their way into CIA assessments -- this information was not reviewed or disseminated until after Rice's statements.

What's more, the Senate's findings specifically dismissed the notion of a cover-up, stating:

The Majority concludes that the interagency coordination process on the talking points followed normal, but rushed coordination procedures and that there were no efforts by the White House or any other Executive Branch entities to "cover-up" facts or make alterations for political purposes.

Fox News' heavy coverage of the Senate report has consistently ignored the facts in the report in order to smear the administration's response.

Bombshell political corruption allegations

Wendy Davis Drops an Atomic Truth Bomb on Desperate Sexist Republicans

By: Sarah Jones/politicususa

This is so embarrassing for Republicans, who’ve taken to attacking Democratic State Senator Wendy Davis (TX) on whether or not she was technically divorced at the age of 19 when living alone in a trailer with her daughter.

Apparently the Texas Republicans haven’t met Wendy Davis yet. Wendy Davis is a fighter for all people, and she isn’t about to let a few cheap shots at her family or her personal struggles take her down. State Senator Wendy Davis issued a statement today, saying in part, “The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce… I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”

Conservatives were claiming that Davis lied about her status at the age of 19 because she wasn’t technically divorced yet and thus couldn’t possibly be a single mother (don’t ask), but as Iexplained earlier, before the divorce one gets the separation and before the separation, one gets the unraveling of the relationship which often impacts the living situation. Then there is the time spent after filing for divorce. Welcome to reality.

But since Republicans don’t seem to live in reality, Senator Davis felt compelled to offer her biography to clear things up:

Wendy Davis Early Biography

- Wendy Davis’ parents separated for the final time when she was 11, and they were divorced by the time she was 13 years old. Even though the divorce settlement called for child support, Wendy’s father was not able to provide significant income for the family.

- Wendy and her siblings were raised primarily by her mother, who had attended school only into the ninth grade, and whose own father had only a sixth grade education.

- Wendy’s mother worked at a Braum’s ice cream store to support the family. Wendy started working at age 14 to join her siblings in the support of the family.

- Despite the financial struggles at home, Wendy was a good student and attempted to attend to college after graduating high school. She was unable, however, to make ends meet economically, and left believing that a college education was just not available to her.

- Wendy left home at 17, married when she was 18 and had her first daughter Amber when she was 19. She and her husband lived in a trailer, and Wendy continued to live there with Amber after they were separated. As a single mother at age 19, she often struggled to make ends meet. Wendy filed for divorce when she was 20 and she and Amber lived for a short time with her mother. The divorce became final when she was 21.

- After learning about flexible class options from a Tarrant County College brochure, Wendy discovered that she could get back into college. She moved into an apartment with Amber and began attending classes while working multiple jobs.

- Tarrant County College gave her a gateway to higher education. She excelled in classes as she worked hard. She did well enough to get into Texas Christian University, which she attended with the help of financial aid and scholarships.

- While working at her father’s dinner theater during college, Wendy met and later married Jeff Davis, a Fort Worth attorney. While married to Jeff Davis, Wendy had her second daughter Dru and continued to excel academically. She graduated first in her class from TCU. Wendy applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School. As Wendy has said before, Jeff helped her fulfill her dream of attending Harvard by cashing in a 401k and later they took out loans.

- While at Harvard, Wendy and Jeff arranged her schedule and that of her daughters, Amber and Dru, so that they could be together often. The girls lived in Boston during Wendy’s first year. In subsequent semesters, Wendy commuted weekly and Wendy’s mother played a daily caretaking role to assist the family.

- Following her graduation from Harvard, Wendy came home to Texas, completed a judicial clerkship, worked as a successful attorney at the law firm Haynes and Boone and later worked as an officer in their family’s title company.

- Ultimately, Wendy’s marriage to Jeff failed. The couple separated and shared custody of Dru who was still a minor. Dru lived in the family home with Jeff. After sometimes contentious proceedings, the divorce from Jeff became final and the two parents shared custody of their daughters Amber and Dru. Wendy was constantly present and sharing in the support and raising of her daughters as they grew up, attended college and have taken on jobs of their own.

- Wendy and her daughters remain very close. She and Jeff Davis have a healthy and respectful relationship based on their mutual love of their daughters.

In their efforts to avoid discussing policy, Republicans went for the jugular attacking Wendy Davis, her family, her history as a single mother, her time spent in a trailer, and the relationship between her and her now ex husband. They did this based on the idea that she could not be a single mother if she were technically still married, even if she were living alone with her daughter.

This is patently absurd and pathetic.

Republicans have done nothing but embarrass themselves, especially now that Wendy Davis has set the record straight with a truth bomb.

Olympic Gold Medalist Claims Chris Christie Bullied Him into Withrawing from Senate Race

by: Sky Palma/Americans Against the Tea Party

In yet another problematic development for the scandal-racked Chris Christie administration, Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis has come forward claiming that Christie personally pressured him to withdraw from a senate race against Christie ally, Kim Guadagno.
In 2011, Lewis challenged incumbent Republican Dawn Addiego for her state Senate seat, but Guadagno issued a ruling that declared Lewis did not meet the residency requirement to run, prompting outrage from Democrats. When the case went before a federal appeals panel, Lewis was ultimately denied the ability to run. But now, according to a report from the Huffington Post, Lewis is claiming that Christie personally told him that he was not wanted in the race. -

Lewis said Monday the governor called to dissuade him from running as a Democrat for state Senate in 2011 against Republican Sen. Dawn Addiego (ah-dee-AY’-goh). Lewis says he was told the fitness program they’d been developing wouldn’t materialize if he ran. Lewis says the governor felt the post “was a carrot he could pull away.”

Lewis actually went public with the allegation back in 2011, but at the time Christie’s office said it was a “misunderstanding on Lewis’ part,” adding that the athletic program was “all but dead” anyway.

Noam Chomsky: The Tea Party is the ‘petit bourgeois’ face of corporate oligarchs

By Travis Gettys/Raw

Story

The Tea Party is just the popular face of corporate power in the United States, says political philosopher Noam Chomsky.

“I wouldn’t call them revolutionary,” Chomsky said, dismissing a suggestion that the conservative political faction had anarchist characteristics.

He told Radio VR during an interview posted online last week that he agreed with the conservative political analyst Norman Ornstein’s characterization of the Tea Party.

“He just described them as a radical insurgency opposed to rationality, to political compromise, to participation to a parliamentary system — in fact, with no positive goals themselves,” Chomsky said.

He said traditional anarchists opposed the inherent inequality in the relationship between a government and its people or business owners and their workers, while Tea Party conservatives promote this imbalance.

“They’re in favor of having the population subordinated to concentrated private power, which should have no limits,” Chomsky said. “When they call themselves anti-government, that means they don’t want government to limit the capacity of concentrated private power to dominate the society. That’s very far from any anarchism.”

Tea Party conservatives present themselves as strict constitutionalist proponents of a limited government, a claim that Chomsky rejected.

“They do oppose too much state power, but that’s a bit of a joke; they also support state power,” he said. “They support the powerful systems that sustain private power, concentration of power, as opposed to traditional anarchists.”

Chomsky agreed that the Tea Party was a genuine popular political movement who members were almost entirely white, “petit bourgeois” business owners who tend to be highly nationalistic and had racist elements.

The group’s power and significance comes not from its numbers, he said, but by the heavy funding it gets from corporate backers and the favorable coverage it receives from some media outlets.

The Tea Party’s popularity is essentially a symptom of the rigged political system, Chomsky argued.

“They have popular support and plenty of financial support, and a lot of their power comes from the radical gerrymandering, redesigning of electoral districts,” Chomsky said. “So for example, they’re powerful in the House of Representatives, where in fact, Republicans have the majority of the representatives but with a minority of the vote.”

He said that Democrats actually won significantly more of the popular vote in the last congressional election but were unable to gain a House majority.

“By virtue of rearranging of electoral districts and vast amounts of money, the right wing was able to take over the representation,” Chomsky said.

He cited a study by the political scientist Thomas Ferguson on campaign funding and its effect on electoral results.

“(He) showed there’s an almost linear relationship between the amount of money put into a campaign and electoral victory,” Chomsky said. “These are basically bought.”

Watch this video of the interview posted online by VOR America:

Obama suggests racism animates some critics, animated conservative critics freak out

By Travis Gettys/Raw Story

President Barack Obama predictably angered his critics by suggesting that some of them don’t like him because he’s black.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said in a 17,000-word profile by The New Yorker’s David Remnick in the magazine’s Jan. 27 issue.

“Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president,” he said.

The article notes that Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a greater margin than any previous presidential victor in U.S. history and argues that his opponents are generally older white people who feel threatened by demographic changes or overlooked by the government and corporations.

White, working class voters are increasingly turning away from the president, whose approval ratings fell to historic lows late last year.

Conservatives suggested that Obama blamed his drooping approval ratings on racism, but that’s not exactly what he said.

In fact, he goes on to add some historical context to what drives opponents of his policies – particularly his signature Affordable Care Act legislation.

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” Obama toldThe New Yorker. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government — that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable — and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments.”

“But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun,” the president continued. “There’s a pretty long history there.”

Obama called on his supporters to give greater consideration to arguments presented by his opponents, even if they are steeped in racially fraught language.

“I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans,” Obama said.

“The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy,” the president added.

Senate intelligence report takes GOP tirades about Benghazi head-on

By David Ignatius/Washington Post

The Senate intelligence committee made headlines this week by reporting that the 2012 attack in Benghazi was preventable. But frankly, we knew that. The deeper message of the bipartisan report was that Republicans in Congress wasted a year arguing about what turned out to be mostly phony issues.

The Republican Party’s Benghazi obsession was the weird backdrop for foreign-policy debate through much of last year. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) used it as a pretext for blocking administration nominations. Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) used the issue to impugn the integrity and independence of a review conducted by retired Adm. Mike Mullen and former ambassador Thomas Pickering.

Driving the Republican jihad was a claim,first reported in October 2012 by Fox News, that CIA personnel had wanted to respond more quickly to the Benghazi attack but were ordered to “stand down,” perhaps by political higher-ups. Although this claim was promptly rebutted by CIA officials, it was repeated by Fox News at least 85 times, according to a review by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. This barrage fueled Republican charges that the Democrats were engaging in a coverup.

The Senate intelligence report addressed this inflammatory charge head-on. “The committee explored claims that there was a ‘stand down’ order given to the security team at the annex. Although some members of the security team expressed frustration that they were unable to respond more quickly to the mission compound, the committee found no evidence of intentional delay or obstruction by the chief of [the CIA] base or any other party.”

The Senate panel also rejected the insinuation, made repeatedly by Republicans, that the Obama administration failed to scramble available military assets that could have defended the Benghazi annex and saved the lives of the four American victims. “There were no U.S. military resources in position to intervene in short order in Benghazi,” the report says flatly. “The committee has reviewed the allegations that U.S. personnel . . . prevented the mounting of any military relief effort during the attacks, but the Committee has not found any of these allegations to be substantiated.”

These are bipartisan findings, mind you, endorsed by the panel’s Republican members as well as Democrats. GOP members offered some zingers in their additional minority views, but the Democrats rightly credited their colleagues for standing up to the right-wing spin machine: “We worked together on a bipartisan basis to dispel the many factual inaccuracies and conspiracy theories related to the Benghazi attacks.”

The Obama administration’s supposed coverup on Benghazi became a crusade for leading Republicans. A low point came when Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Reformissued a report last September questioning “the independence and integrity of the review” by the Mullen-Pickering group. These were extraordinary charges to make against a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former ambassador to six countries — especially since Issa didn’t present any conclusive evidence to back up his allegations.

The Republican tirades about Benghazi were unfortunate not just because they were based on erroneous speculation but also because they distracted policymakers from the real challenge of framing coherent policy in the Middle East. Sometimes, it seemed as if Benghazi finger-pointing was the only issue that leading Republicans cared about.

In fact, the Senate intelligence report echoes many of the themes of the earlier report by the Accountability Review Board, which noted “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies.” Warnings about deteriorating conditions in Benghazi were ignored; proposals to add more security there were rejected; even as evidence mounted of al-Qaeda’s growing power in Benghazi, the State Department failed to respond adequately. The Senate report makes clear that some important security mistakes were made by Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the courageous but sometimes incautious diplomat who was among those who died in the attack.

Perhaps the silliest aspect of the Benghazi affair was the focus on the errant “talking points” prepared for Congress, which cited incorrect intelligence about “spontaneous demonstrations” in Benghazi that wasn’t corrected by the CIA until a week after the points were delivered on Sunday talk shows by Susan Rice, then U.N. ambassador. Rice is still under a cloud because she repeated the CIA’s “points” prepared at Congress’s insistence.

Next time, the Senate report notes, the intelligence community should just tell Congress what facts are unclassified — and let the legislators do the talking.

South Carolina Senate Candidate Suggests Teachers Should Be Able To Carry Machine Guns In School

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

South Carolina state Sen. Lee Bright (R), who is challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the GOP primary, said on Friday that school teachers should be able to carry machine guns to protect students from gun violence.

Appearing on Fox News Radio’s The Alan Colmes Show, Bright expanded on his proposed bill to create high school courses on how to use a fire arm by agreeing with Colmes that the government cannot legally restrict gun ownership on school grounds:

COLMES: So [teachers] shouldn’t have machine guns?

BRIGHT: I would think a teacher protecting a school grounds should be able to carry whatever she can carry legally.

COLMES: So should machine guns be legal to carry?

BRIGHT: The Second Amendment is pretty clear. It says the right to carry arms should not be infringed. [...]

COLMES: So you should be able to have any gun you want?

BRIGHT: Well, I don’t see how the government can regulate it.

In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can limit ownership of “dangerous and unusual” weapons that are not in “common use.” As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia concluded in the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller — which held that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to carry a firearm under certain circumstances — “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms…in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Congress significantly limited the sale of machine guns in the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which prevents the sale to civilians “of all machine guns made after the law took effect.”

Chemical-Related Hospital Admissions In West Virginia Have Doubled Since Water Deemed Safe

BY EMILY ATKIN/Think Progress

It took nearly five days after a major chemical spill in West Virginia for residents to receive the go-ahead to start using their water again.

Nearly 7,500 gallons of crude MCHM — a little-known chemical used to wash coal — had leaked into the Elk River on Jan. 9, perplexing state officials on how exactly to get the chemical out of the water and what exactly it would do to people if they used it. It was Jan. 13, a Monday, when the first bans were lifted. As of Saturday, everyone affected by the spill was given the all-clear — water everywhere, state officials said, was now fine to drink.

In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story. But according to statistics released by the state health department on Saturday, it turns out that since the bans on water began being lifted, hospital admissions and calls to the poison control center have doubled. Emergency room visits have nearly tripled.

On Jan. 12, the day before do-not-use orders began being lifted, health department officialscited 10 hospital admissions, 169 people treated and released from the emergency room, and a little more than 1,000 calls to the poison control center.

By Saturday — the same day the final 2 percent of people affected by the spill got their water back — those numbers had increased significantly. According to a report in the Charleston Gazette, health officials said 20 people had been admitted to the hospitals, 411 had been treated and released from the emergency room, and 2,302 had called the poison control center. Of those, 1,862 were human-related, 98 were animal-related and the rest were requests for information only.

Saturday’s numbers were also much greater than Thursday’s numbers, when health officials said only 317 had been treated and 14 had been hospitalized.

Part of the increased hospitalizations and calls may be due to confusion on the part of West Virginia residents, who in the last week have been repeatedly given conflicting information about the spill and whether they should use the water. The “do-not-drink” order finally lifted on Saturday, for example, was in a town that had actually had their ban lifted on Tuesday. On Thursday, however, West Virginia American Water rescinded their statements that the water was safe to drink, after water from a fire hydrant registered chemical levels above the 1-part-per-million (ppm) limit.

It’s not the only instance of conflicting information. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said pregnant women should not drink water with any amount of the chemical in it, despite West Virginia American Water saying two days earlier that water in some areas was safe to drink.

Chemical levels in the water must be below 1 ppm for human ingestion. But health experts have questioned that logic. Specifically, some are saying that the study being widely used to determine whether the water is safe does not include several chemical components that leached into the water.

“A key corporate study used by federal health officials to set a screening level for ‘crude MCHM’ in the West Virginia American Water system actually tested a pure form of the material’s main ingredient and might not account for potential toxicity of other components,” the Charleston Gazette reported on Friday.

The chemical that is thought to have spilled, crude MCHM, is actually a mixture of chemicals that is used to wash coal of its impurities, explained Evan Hansen, president of Morgantown-based Downstream Strategies, in an interview with Climate Progress’ Kiley Kroh on Saturday. Of those multiple ingredients, only one of them has any information about exposure limits, he said.

“If crude MCHM is truly what leaked, it’s possible that we don’t even know which of this ‘cocktail’ is most harmful,” said Hansen. “We could have set a threshold based on the wrong one. We may be testing the wrong one.”

So far, however, no official diagnoses have been reported linking patients’ symptoms to water exposure.

“As far as the data and recommendations we have from West Virginia American Water, the water is safe to use,” Rahul Gupta, health officer for the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, said. “We’re not saying it’s safe. West Virginia American Water is saying it’s safe. We are taking their word for it.”

Random Friday video:"Bridgeghazi" by Old Fart Rants

Fox: Where The Chris Christie Scandal Is Really Just About Benghazi

EMILY ARROWOOD/Media Matters For America:

Fox News can't seem to talk about the Chris Christie bridge closure scandal without invoking Benghazi.

Fox & Friends devoted five segments during its January 10 broadcast to the growing scandal surrounding Republican Gov. Chris Christie and his administration's involvement in deliberate traffic gridlock across the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ.

But in every segment purporting to discuss Christie, the hosts and guests used the story to attack President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by bringing up the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.  

Right-wing media figures have attempted to deflect from the Christie saga by attacking Obama and Clinton with tired myths, a tactic Fox's coverage took to new heights today. But the network's dogged determination to tie Benghazi to the Christie story is contextualized by new revelations about Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and his focus on influencing national politics.

Ailes has long expressed a love for Christie and reportedly lobbied hard for him to throw his hat in the ring for the 2012 presidential race. As a New York Times article on the upcoming biography of Ailes explained, he aimed in 2012 to use Fox News to "elect the next president."

Media critics have already begun speculating that Fox's scant coverage of the Christie scandal the day it broke is evidence of a motivation to protect Christie's political brand before the 2016 election. The network's attempt to hide Christie behind Benghazi only strengthens that view.