Dear Josh (Stein, NC State Senator),
I hope you and your loved ones are all well.
I came away from the first Hagan-Tillis debate with five thoughts.
1.) Any candidate whose positions are favored by "the facts" would wisely create (and promote) a "fact-checking" webpage as a post-debate resource. Such a repository would enable documentation of important details and crucial contextualization that the debate format does not permit. Even reporters would benefit from this resource.
2.) I have not followed NC budgetary process closely enough to know how Tillis' touted "7% teacher pay raise" is seen in context. If this year's "7% raise" were coupled with teacher pay "increases" from budgets passed by previous GOP-Assemblies, I assume the "increase" would be a paltry percentage when annualized. Viewed "over time," Tillis' purported "raise" may even represent a loss of purchasing power relative to cost-of-living increases.
"Low Teacher Pay Sets Back North Carolina Education"
3.) It would be useful to document the individual stories of teachers lured to other states by higher pay. Orange High School English teacher, Mitch Cox, is one such fellow, a thirty year veteran and a fellow revered by students and teachers alike. News of Mitch's emigration to Virginia was shocking.
4.) Sen. Hagan did a yeomanly job defending against Tillis' attack on Obamacare. However, she seems to have missed a rhetorical opportunity. I am not aware of any significant number of North Carolinians who feel deprived by Obamacare, and would therefore encourage her campaign to probe purported disaffection to see if it really exists in any substantial way. The GOP noise machine pisses and moans but when individual cases of "harm" have been investigated, they typically reveal erstaz grievances lodged by dimwits too benighted to learn what Obamacare actually offers. Again, I do not know what a well-conducted poll would reveal concerning the number of North Carolinians who were "not allowed to keep their doctor." But I suspect the number is small to begin and that most of "the deprived" are now satisfied with their new physicians. Every year, millions of Americans move out-of-state without any hue or cry over the loss of their home state physicians. It is true that "perception" is often "reality" and that many people loathe change more than they welcome improvement. Even so, the "hot button" of "losing one's doctor" quickly cools when ideological wrath is contextualized by verifiable numbers.
On April 8, 2014, Daily Kos published this revealing review of a Rand Corporation report on Obamacare.
"RAND’s Health Reform Opinion Study (HROS), a survey conducted using the RAND American Life Panel, allows us to estimate how many people have become enrolled in all sources of health care coverage since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The analysis presented here examines changes in health insurance enrollment between September 2013 and March 2014; overall, we estimate that 9.3 million more people had health care coverage in March 2014, lowering the uninsured rate from 20.5 percent to 15.8 percent. This increase in coverage is driven not only by enrollment in health insurance marketplace plans, but also by gains in employer-sponsored insurance and Medicaid. Enrollment in employer-sponsored insurance plans increased by 8.2 million and Medicaid enrollment increased by 5.9 million, although some individuals did lose insurance. We also found that 3.9 million people are now covered through the state and federal marketplace—the so-called insurance exchanges—and less than 1 million people who previously had individual-market insurance became uninsured during the period in question. While the survey cannot tell if the people in this latter group lost their insurance due to cancellation or because they simply felt the cost was too high, the overall number is very small, representing less than 1 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 64."
"The Real Story Behind the Phony Canceled Health Insurance Scandal," published by Mother Jones, does a good job dispelling the smoke screen. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/obamacare-canceled-health-insurance
5.) Finally, Sen. Hagan would be well-advised to reveal the murderous brutality of North Carolina's refusal to expand Medicaid. We have touched on this before but the following numbers may be useful.
"GOP's Anti-Medicaid Expansion Body Count, By State"
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Keep up the good work!
Pax-Shalom-Salaam
Alan
PS I recommend Ken Burns' new PBS documentary, "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History." All seven (two hour episodes) are streamable at the PBS website through September 26. http://video.pbs.org/program/roosevelts/
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Teddy Roosevelt: "Malefactors of great wealth are curses to the country."
Excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech: "Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it. But I think we may go still further. The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good."
The full text of "New Nationalism" - http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/public-welfare-subjects-property-to.html
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