BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER

& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, December 6, 2018

—Michael Avenatti with the big questions

ENROLL LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

The deadline to buy health insurance for 2019 through the Affordable Care Act is December 15. But President Trump has worked diligently to make sure that as few people as possible are aware of the deadline, and as many people as possible are discouraged from signing up—and his plan is paying off.

Next year’s enrollment is on track to fall by 800,000.

Those GOP efforts hit a snag when Republicans failed to repeal the law outright last year, so Trump has resorted to plan B: using his executive powers to destabilize the markets by shrinking them.

To achieve this destructive goal, Trump and his administration have:

• Slashed the advertising and public relations budget for the marketplaces by 90 percent

• Signed a bloated corporate tax cut bill, which eliminated the penalty for not being insured

• Created an incentive for insurance companies to flood the market with junk plans that aren’t real insurance

• Managed to commit so many crimes that cable news channels and other major media outlets have been too swamped to cover important policy stories

Note: Media doesn’t get a pass here just because of Trump. A Media Matters analysis found that CBS devoted all of one minute to open enrollment, barely outpacing CNN and MSNBC, which mentioned open-enrollment for less than two minutes combined, and NBC and ABC, which have devoted zero minutes to the topic. Getting cable and broadcast news to cover important policy stories is like juicing a turnip even when the president isn’t a criminal!

Not everyone who isn’t buying insurance on healthcare.gov or through their state exchanges has fallen prey to sabotage efforts.

• Enrollment tends to fall in states like Virginia that belatedly expanded Medicaid, because lower-income people drop out of the marketplaces and sign up for Medicaid instead. That’s not bad news, and in those states, overall health care coverage levels have risen significantly.

• The economy continues to grow, which means more people are working, and some (though not all) of those workers are getting health insurance through their employers.

But these effects probably wouldn’t create a decline in individual market signups on their own. Enrollment numbers are actually up in New York and Massachusetts, which expanded Medicaid years ago, and aren’t exempt from the growing economy. The difference seems to be that they are among the dozen states that have their own outreach budgets.

From Brian: Because he’s a sadist, and obsessed with Barack Obama, Trump will derive great satisfaction from causing hundreds of thousands to go uninsured. But there is a well-documented mortality risk associated with being uninsured, which means some of the people Trump is keeping in the dark about enrollment will die. For the sake of your health, and to deny Trump the satisfaction, don’t be one of his victims.

Confronted with evidence of egregious fraud in North Carolina’s ninth congressional district election, the state’s Republican Party says it will support a new election if officials demonstrate that the documented absentee ballot tampering could have swung the outcome. The Democrat in the race, Dan McCready, withdrew his concession today, while House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said that the House “retains the right to decide who is seated.”

The Trump campaign appears to have coordinated with the NRA during the 2016 election, by using the same consultancy to buy TV ads on the same stations and at the same times, with the ad buys from both groups both authorized by the same person. According to a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission, “This is very strong evidence, if not proof, of illegal coordination.”

Lobbyists representing Saudi Arabia spent more than $270,000 on an estimated 500 nights at President Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel within a month of Trump’s election. The lobbyists used the rooms to house scores of U.S. war veterans, whom the lobbyists brought to DC to lobby against a U.S. law the Saudis oppose.

Florida’s new Republican secretary of state is slow-walking the process of restoring voting rights to more than 1.4 million people who’ve served felony sentences, after the state voted overwhelmingly to pass the amendment to restore their rights in November.

The EPA announced a proposal to rollback requirements on coal power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—right on the heels of yesterday’s report that global carbon emissions are at an all-time high.

Fox has endorsed the First Step Act—a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill supported by President Trump, the ACLU, and some Democrats, to limit mandatory minimum sentences, expand rehabilitation, and combat recidivism. Some Senate Republicans oppose the bill, and Mitch McConnell has been reluctant to bring it to a vote in order to avoid dividing the Republican caucus. The statement reportedly came at the request of the White House.

This year’s Golden Globe nominees are the most diverse in the awards show’s history. The most recognized films include Black Panther, BlackKklansman, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Crazy Rich Asians, all of which star and were directed by people of color. Now do it again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.

Two women in New York were able to purchase and erase $1.5 million in medical debts for nearly 1,300 people for $12,500 through the New York non-profit R.I.P. Medical Debt.

Post decided to create a Sour Patch Kids cereal, and apparently it is as disgusting as it sounds. From Priyanka: Stay tuned for some BTS footage of me bugging my coworkers to review it on Instagram stories one of these days.

Victorina Morales, an undocumented immigrant who has worked as a housekeeper at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ for five years, washing Trump’s clothes, making his bed, and cleaning his residence, is speaking out about her experiences both at the club and with Trump himself. She says she’s not the only undocumented immigrant who worked at the club, and claims at least two supervisors were aware of it, and helped her and others avoid detection. Trump continues to insist on rooting all undocumented immigrants out of the country, and building a border wall to keep them out, and his hostility inspired Morales to come forward

“We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” she said. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”

Read →

The Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday in a case that may determine whether President Trump can spare his criminal associates like Paul Manafort from state-crime charges by pardoning them.

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Denmark’s right wing has a new plan to move “unwanted” immigrants to a remote island that was previously used to study contagious animals. Disgusting. The plan, which has obviously raised many red flags, has yet to be passed by parliament.

Lena Dunham has written a completely unpersuasive apology to Aurora Perrineau, the actress who accused the executive producer of Dunham’s show Girls of raping her when she was 17 years old. Dunham responded to Perrineau’s accusation by falsely claiming to have “inside” information indicating the accusation was false. You’d think someone who has had to make so many apologies for so many public missteps would be slightly better at it by now, but no.

And we thought Spotify was the only company that could humiliate us with our years in review.

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