ACA : Improving or Screwing It Up

Fixing or Hobbling the ACA
Outside the White House, a collapse of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act may make some Republicans more willing to consider improving the law. To that end, Congress could permanently fund cost-sharing reductions to insurers, boost reimbursements to insurers for high-cost patients, and fix other small glitches in the law. Congress could also create a public option to boost competition in the ACA market.

A strategy to make the ACA fail would include ending the subsidies to insurers to cover premium shortfalls for low-income persons; choose not to enforce the tax penalties for people who forego insurance; and to refuse to advertise enrollment periods.

Leaving Students Behind
In the Jefferson County [Oregon] 509J School District, more than a third of all American Indian students in sixth through twelfth grades were suspended at least once during the 2015-16 school year, making them more than twice as likely to be suspended from school as their white peers. Native Americans make up one-third of the district's student population but receive nearly two-thirds of the expulsions. Last year, less than two-thirds of the tribal members who were enrolled as seniors in the 509J School District graduated. [1]

In public schools across the country, American Indian and Alaska Native students are more likely to be suspended than any other racial group, with the exception of African Americans. The suicide rate among Native teens is one and a half times higher than the national average, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than one percent of educators nation-wide are American Indians or Alaska Natives.  [2]

Confederate Monument Building Periods
One thing that should have been learned during all the emphasis on Confederate statues and monuments is that they were not constructed and put in place as a direct result of the Civil War. There were periods in which other events and motivations drove an accelerated pace of building.

Most of the Confederate statues and monuments were built between 1890 and 1920 -- a time of lynchings, the "Lost Cause"myth, and a resurgent KKK. Another peak was achieved in the 1950-70 period -- a time of the Brown Supreme Court decision and Civil Rights activism. The peak in the building came in 1905-10 and that was primarily due to the growth of the KKK.

Defunding Planned Parenthood
In the state of Iowa, more than 4,000 patients, most of them women, will have to find new options for family planning care -- a change that will be especially hard for rural and low-income patients in the four locations where Planned Parenthood clinics closed. "The replacement plan is a fiscal double whammy: Iowa is giving up millions in federal money and plugging the hole with state taxpayer dollars -- even though it faced a major budget shortfall last year. And the costs will likely rise. in the decade it existed, the largely federally funded Iowa Planning Network helped save $265 million in Medicaid spending because of fewer births, even as the abortion rate dropped by 32 percent." [3]

Footnotes
[1] Rebecca Clarren, "Left Behind," The Nation, August 14/21, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Hannah Levintova, "If You Defend It, They Won't Come," Mother Jones, September/October 2017.