More than 1 million PA voters may lack valid IDs

The Justice Department is investigating the PA Voter ID law

This just in: the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Pennsylvania Voter ID Act and an expert report submitted to the Commonwealth Court ahead of Wednesday's court hearing on the new law  may help it establish a good case of vote suppression.
The report estimates that 1,055,200 registered Pennsylvania voters (almost 13 percent) lack a valid photo ID and 1,364,433 or 14.4 percent, of eligible voters lack a valid ID to vote in November's presidential election.
If this report is correct, that's more than 1 million of the state's  already registered, already on the books, voters who do not qualify to vote under the state's new voter ID law.  That's out of the state's roughly 8.8 million total registered voters, or nearly one in nine. 
Worse, an estimated 1.2 million eligible Pennsylvania voters think they have a valid ID, but do not, according to the 97-page report based on surveys conducted by Matt A. Barreto, Ph.D., of the University of Washington and Gabriel R. Sanchez, Ph.D, of the University of New Mexico.   
Even worse, 37 percent of eligible voters, 34 percent of registered voters and 34 percent of those who voted in 2008 are totally unaware that a photo ID law exists, the report says.
That's one-third or more of the state's potential voters who don't even know they will need to produce a driver's license or other government-sanctioned photo ID with when they walk into their polling place in November.  Fortunately a majority of them will have a valid driver's license.  Let's hope they bring it with them.
In addition to the lawsuit, Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, No. 330 MD 2012, which will be heard starting at 10 a.m. Wednesday, it was disclosed today that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened a formal investigation of the state's voter ID law by sending a three-page letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele Monday asking her for a bunch of annoying records, including the entire state voter registration list AND the entire current state driver's license and personal identification card list AND all documents identifying registered voters who lack acceptable proof of identification AND the records supporting Aichele's recent estimate that only758,000 registered voters lack state-issued photo ID.
By the way, the DOJ wants those records in 30 days. 
The DOJ's probe marks the first time it has publicly acknowledged a formal investigation of a voter ID law passed in a state which is not covered by Section 5 of the 1964 Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states with a history of racial discrimination to have changes to their voting laws precleared.  The Pennsylvania investigation falls under Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits any state from enacting a “voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”
And, in Professor Barreto's expert report, the DOJ has a big helping hand in proving that minorities are being denied the right to vote.   He found that the biggest impact of the new law will be on Latino voters, 18 percent of whom lack a valid ID compared to non-Hispanic  whites (14 percent)who  lack a valid ID.  Also more women (17 percent) than men (11 percent) do.
The kind of good news is this: Barreto estimates that among eligible voters, 86% of whites and 86.8% of Blacks possess a valid photo ID, and for registered voters the figures are 87 percent and 86 percent.
But enough statistics.  Read the report if you're a statistics maven.
Sufficient to say, we're having some fun now, boys and girls.

The big lie and low-information voters

As Inquirer political columnist Dick Polman so ably points out in today's paper, the Republicans are pushing a lie of colossal, world-class proportions when they claim that the Affordable Care Act is the "biggest tax on the Middle Class in American history." 
In fact, the penalty for not buying health insurance, according to Polman and the Congressional Budget Ofiice, will fall on only 1.2 percent of the public -- those who do not have employment-based insurance,  Medicare, Medicaid or some other government insurance program, like military or veterans' programs, and who are not too poor to pay for private coverage but just won't do it.
By the way, it's not a tax just because the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional under Congress' taxing powers.  Literally tens of  thousands of fees, tax deductions, tax credits and other government-regulated financial arrangements are allowed under the taxing power that are not direct taxes.   These include the premiums that retired government employees pay for their government-run health insurance. 
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his spokesmen have already flip-flopped on the issue, saying first that he agreed with President Obama that the penalty for not buying insurance coverage is not a tax, then, buying into the party's propaganda, that it is.
Romney is a rather poor candidate to be attacking the ACA, as it is modeled on his own Massachusetts health care plan, which the vast majority of Massachusetts citizens are perfectly happy with.  Which explains why he never talks about his governorship. 
Romney's flip-flopping is not so concerning in the presidential race as three other factors:  (1) voter suppression, (2) the ocean of campaign financing money being raised much more successfully by Republicans than Democrats and (3) Republican TV commercials already saturating the national television markets proclaiming that the ACA is the "biggest tax on the Middle Class in American history."
Here in Pennsylvania, we learned last week that House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R. Allegheny)  boasted to a Republican group that Pennsylvania's new Voter ID law will guarantee Romney's win in Pennsylvania, then we learned that as many as 10 percent of the state's already legally registered voters could be disenfranchised, including upwards of 180,000 voters in Philadelphia.
It was nice of Turzai to finally be truthful about the purpose of the law -- to disenfranchise Democratic voters.  As many, many people have been pointing out for some time, voter fraud involving people trying to impersonate other people at the polls is, and has been, virtually non-existent, not only in this state but throughout the US.
Photo ID not so easy
Those that say, "Well, all people have to do is go down to the nearest PennDOT office and get a photo ID" are delusional.  It is way more complicated.
You have to have  or obtain a Social Security card.  I haven't seen mine in decades, probably since I obtained a new Pa. driver's license in 1991. Everybody knows their number, but many don't have their actual cards.
Step 2 is to have or obtain a birth certificate.  This is sometimes impossible for older people, people who were born at home and people who were born in places where records have been lost over time.  
Step 3 is to make sure your name harmonizes with all your records. If you have never used the name on your birth certificate or if you changed your name when you married, that creates more problems.
Step 4 is to get yourself and your papers to the DMV.  Then you have to request and fill out an affidavit swearing that you will be using the ID only for voting and that you can't afford to pay the $13 for it.  If you have had to pay for your birth certificate or the photo ID card, that's a poll tax plain and simple. 
Students have to have a college photo ID with an expiration date, which as of two months ago, 80 percent of Pennsylvania colleges did not issue.   Finally, if you are not already registered, you have to go do that. 
I can see a lot of students, poor and elderly saying,"Why bother.  I just won't vote."
If that was the goal of Gov. Tom Corbett, Rep. Turzai and Senate Majority Leader Dominick Pileggi,  congratulations, mission accomplished.  
Brainwashing the rest
So once you cull out the 800,000 or so mostly Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, you are still left with the job of making sure the remaining Democratic, independent and Republican voters are adequately subliminally conditioned to vote against their own economic interests and for those of the corporations.
That means running millions of dollars of "Big Lie" TV commercials at every opportunity.  We will not be able to mute or channel-surf away from these ads fast enough, and most people won't even try.  They'll just sit there and absorb the crap-- delivered in stentorian tones while bad photos of the opposing candidates are projected -- until viewers become convinced that whatever they are seeing was their opinion all along.
Many people will go out and vote who have been mesmerized by the ads and haven't bothered to research the facts or issues.   These are the so-called "low-information voters" who -- in enough numbers -- can decide the economic future of generations.
One Tea Party" acquaintance sends me gushing emails talking about how handsome Romney is and how much she loves him, with many multiple exclamation points, even while her own economic and health coverage circumstances are desperate.  But she tells me, she opposes ACA because it might end up covering illegal immigrants.  So much better to deny health care to millions than to let a single undeserving person get away with anything. 
Unfortunately, this woman has a PA driver's license so she will get to vote.  

Vagina, vagina, vagina

Thanks Daily Times for making me blogger of the week!
I'm going on vacation tomorrow and don't have a long post in mind, but let me just say this on behalf of women everywhere: vagina.
Two Democratic Michigan state legislators were banned from speaking against yet another Draconian bill to suppress women's rights last week, apparently for saying the word "vagina."  Which is the anatomically correct word for the part of a woman's body that seems to scare the living daylights out of some men.  But please check out the link above for details on the bill that the Michigan State Assembly voted to approve.  That's more important than some silly tactic to silence women, which you may have noticed, never works.

Center three, l-r: Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, Rep. Lisa Brown, and Eve Ensler

So the Michigan Legislature's silly tactic brought out Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, who is always willing to talk about her vagina, and several hundred other women to protest on Monday.  I won't make you watch the five-minute video, though you can find it on YouTube (Eve Ensler Michigan), but here is Ensler's address to the crowd.  She just says it all so well.  Thank you, so aptly named Eve.

Thanks for coming out and standing up for vaginas!
I am over you being afraid of vaginas! I am over trans-vaginal wands and dudes who want to control my vagina but are afraid to know my vagina, respect my vagina. Who can't even SAY vagina!
I am over the over-regulation of women's health clinics and women's bodies and vaginas when those same over-regulators do nothing to protect those same women when they get pregnant, when they get raped, unemployed and sick and need more financial support.
I am over dudes who pretend to care about personhood and cut Planned Parenthood which makes the health of my personhood possible.
I am over forces who wanna call victims of rape "accusers" and not "victims".
I am over you having the chutzpah to redefine rape so that a drugged woman or a date-raped woman wouldn't even be considered a raped woman.
And, by the way, I'm over RAPE!
I'm over rape culture, rape mentality, and rape jokes.
I'm over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I'm REALLY over being told I don't have a sense of humor and women don't have a sense of humor when most women I know (and I know a LOT of women) are really fucking funny.
We just don't think an uninvited penis up our anus or up our vagina is a laugh riot.
I am over free women getting raped in the US military by their comrades.
I am over women still being silent about rape because they're made to believe it's their fault and they did something to make it happen.
I am over dudes voting against the Violence Against Women Act when one in every three women on this planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes.
The destruction and the muting of women is the destruction of life itself. No women: no future. Duh!
I am really over some powerful men pretending this deep love of fetuses and babies and life when we know it's all about your terror of our sexuality and power. If you, if you really cared about life, you  would never, ever consider letting a woman die rather than performing an abortion.
You would ask the life-givers, the women, what they need and want and you would listen to them. You would honor their vaginas, maybe even worship their vaginas. You would cherish the word "vagina" and know there is nothing dirty or disgusting about the place where all life comes from.
I am over the Michigan state legislature, and any legislature, censoring, rebuking and removing Lisa Brown because they find the word "vagina" contemptible or out of bounds or lacking decorum. My vagina's got to got decorum!
And I am over all those other legislators that went along with it and didn't stand up.
I want to say something to all the good men here: I'm a little over it. You are brave and wonderful. But where are you? You live with us. You make love with us. You father us. You befriend us. You brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us. So why aren't you standing with us? Why aren't you driven to the point of madness and action when you see us being raped and humiliated and censored? Why don't you care about this as much as you do about sports?
I am over brilliant remarks being called "tantrums" and outspoken being called "crazy" and lacking decorum when they are just smart.
I'm over it! We are over it! This the moment. This is the moment. This is where it all turns around. This is the moment when we talk back and speak back. This is where we rise up.This is where we say "yes" to Lisa Brown. "Yes" to Barbara Byrum. "Yes" to every brave woman who is standing with us today. Gretchen Whitmer. Barbara Byrum. Stacy Erwin-Oakes. Dian Slavens. Rashida Tlaib. Vicki Barnett. Joan Bauer. Ellen Cogen Lipton. Maureen Stapleton. And all the amazing actors and activists up on this stage.
This is where we say: "VAGINA!" Say it!
CROWD: VAGINA!
Say it!
CROWD: VAGINA!
Not 'cause we're provocative. Not 'cause we're dirty. Not 'cause we're trying to make you uncomfortable. Not 'cause we're immoral or inappropriate.
VAGINA!
CROWD: VAGINA!
'Cause they're beautiful and real and mystical and alive and powerful and SO ARE WE!
And I wanna say to all these Republicans: we are free, YOU are free!

Even Tinkerbell believes in government regulation

Clap your hands if you believe that eliminating virtually all government regulation of business --  banking, employment, health and safety, environmental, insurance, food safety -- will instantly, or even slowly, transform our economy into a dynamic machine in which corporations will hire millions of new workers, always do the right thing by its customers and workers and make us all healthy, happy citizens of an unimaginable utopia. 
No?  Me neither.  

But George W. Bush did, which is why he appointed anti-regulation zealots to regulatory agencies (FDA, USDA), didn't fill empty positions in regulatory and investigative agencies, had his attorney general concentrate almost exclusively on child porn prosecutions while financial ripoffs were rampant, (Ashcroft), slowed EPA cleanups to a crawl and let his SEC investigators spend their days actually watching pornography -- all of which helped lead us to the biggest economic meltdown this side of the Great Depression.
 Mitt Romney also believes in the magic of cutting government regulation.  Here's what he says:

Federal agencies today have near plenary power to issue whatever regulations they see fit. Though most are nominally controlled by the president, in actual practice agencies are frequently able to act autonomously with little or no presidential oversight. The end result is an economy subject to the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats pursuing their own agendas.
A Romney administration will act swiftly to tear down the vast edifice of regulations the Obama administration has imposed on the economy.  It will also seek to make structural changes to the federal bureaucracy that ensure economic growth remains front and center when regulatory decisions are made.

That'll be the day. 
Certainly government regulation is not perfect.  It took 17 pounds of paperwork and 15 years  to convince the government to transfer ownership of a mothballed Vietnam War-era destroyer, the USS Edson, to a group wanting to make it a floating museum  in Michigan.
But the vast majority of government regulations are intended, and do, protect our health, safety and pocketbooks (food inspections, Occupational Safety and Health rules, Workers compensation, wage and hour regulations, consumer protection laws, environmental protection, unemployment insurance) and they retrieve billions in taxpayer money each year stolen by crooked bankers, insurers, health care providers and others.  A few examples from this year and last:
* The nation’s five largest mortgage servicers agreed in March to a landmark $25 billion settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general and federal agencies.  This is the largest joint state-federal settlement in history and it is the result of a massive civil law enforcement investigation and initiative by state attorneys general, state banking regulators, and nearly a dozen federal agencies. (Not big enough, but it's a start.)

Bartlett Grain Co. explosion

* Dr. Jacques Roy of Dallas, Texas, is accused of bilking Medicare of nearly $375 million by recruiting homeless and fake patients to sign for care that wasn't provided.  If convicted, this doctor is likely to go to prison for a very long time.
* The New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance  today (March 8, 2012) announced that in 2011 the Department recovered more than $31.8 million for consumers and medical providers from insurers and financial institutions. (Not all regulators are federal.)

* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that BP North America Inc. has agreed to pay an $8 million penalty and invest more than $400 million to install state-of-the-art pollution controls and cut emissions from BP’s petroleum refinery in Whiting, Ind.  Kind of a middling EPA score)

* Bartlett Grain Co. L.P. faces five willful and eight serious safety violations cited by the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration following an October 2011 grain elevator explosion in Atchison that killed six workers and left two others hospitalized.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) next week (June 4, 2012)  will begin instituting a zero-tolerance policy for six additional strains of E. coli that are responsible for human illness.
* The owners and managers of Nifty Fifty's have pleaded guilty to skimming $15 million in receipts from their five restaurants and evading $2.2 million in federal employment and personal taxes.   We pay our taxes in this country when the pols don't provide huge loopholes.
* There are 6.6 million unemployed 18-26-year-old college students and graduates, high school grads and those in between who cannot get a job but who can, for a short time, remain on their parents' health insurance.  That's a government  regulation too.  No one on the Bush Administration gave a crap for these young people who break bones, develop odd diseases, need their wisdom teeth removed and can't be persuaded to ride their motorcycles with a helmet.
* The Department of Justice will recover $21 million from SunTrust banks, that will go back to 20,000 black and Hispanic mortgage payers who were charged high rates than other bank customers.  To find these 20,000 victims, government investigators and their computers had comb through 850,000 mortgage applications.  Truly your tax dollars at work.
* The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation's consumer protection agency, is warning consumers to be on the alert for scam artists posing as debt collectors. It may be hard to tell the difference between a legitimate debt collector and a fake one. Sometimes a fake collector may even have some of your personal information, like a bank account number.
I could write and document thousands of pages of this sort of thing every week. This is what government does. It plays cop or umpire or detective between us and countless abusive corporate interests.  It regulates and tries to control the excesses of the capitalist system.
Government investigations, regulations, arrests, indictments and sentencings go on constantly, hundreds of times a day as various agencies go about their jobs.  You never hear about 99 percent of them.  They're small potatoes.  Many of them go to jail, many pay large fines and many do both.
Then occasionally the government catches up with the Bernie Madoffs. Does his experience make you want to start a Ponzi scheme?  That''s a benefit of government regulation as well.
If  you want to see this seamy underbelly of day-to-day government, just Google the various government agencies, go to their reports or press release tabs and just start reading:  DOJ, EPA, EEOC, HSS, IRS, FTC,  Labor Department, USDA, OSHA, SEC, state departments of banking, insurance, labor, industry, health, agriculture, FBI.  I guarantee you, you won't keep up with it.
If you have access to Westlaw, look up publications called Westlaw Journal  Government Contractor, Bank and Lending, Health Care Fraud, White Collar Crime and Insurance Coverage, just for starters.  These biweeklies and monthlies chronicle the big ripoffs year after year, decade after decade.  A few issues of any of them will make you sick to your stomach, but perhaps also a little proud of what our unsung watchdogs do on their best days to catch millions of bad guys out there ripping us off.
 Romney is right.  These agencies do act autonomously with little executive oversight as do countless other federal and state agencies.  They're supposed to. They do cost businesses money, money that  businesses have stolen the taxpayers, consumers or their own employees.  Are we supposed to just sit back and let them do that in the name of a robust economy?  Forget Ayn Rand, doing well for oneself has never led to doing well for society.
Are we supposed to go back to the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Love Canal, a burning Cuyahoga River, the Great Laeks filled with dead fish, acid rain, smog so bad everyone was urged to stay indoors, Bhopal, the Station nightclub fire, PCBs in cow's milk, diet drugs that kill you -- just so businesses can flourish in a unregulated climate?  Have you ever heard of Rocky Flats, Hanford or Agent Orange?  The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act,  the Superfund Act?  Building codes, the National  Highway Transportation Safety Administration?
Clap your hands if you're are in favor of eliminating all of the regulations and regulatory agencies that are protecting us from all these things.  Do you want to return to the 1920s?  I can't hear you.

Where are the pitchforks?

As the old saying goes, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
I think it's hard to pay attention today when there are so many things being done to us, and by "us", I mean the poor, the elderly, the chronically ill, the  mentally ill, children, unions, voters,college students,  immigrants,the Middle Class, workers and small business owners.
Being done to us 24/7.
Being done to us so fast that the news media cannot keep up with the latest assaults, and we cannot digest them or react to them before the next one comes along.
All we can do is try to focus.
So let us focus now on our Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, the creation and puppet of big money donors, of corporations, the wealthy, the privatize-everything industry and especially of the natural gas industry.
Here are the highlights of what Corbett and his Republican legislature have done to us in the last year or so:
*Kicked 89,000 children off of the state's medical care program for the poor.
*Cut 68,000 adults off of the state's general assistance program that provides a miniscule $205 a month to the homeless, the chronically ill, mentally ill and addicted adults who have virtually no other source of income to help them survive other than begging on the streets and taking sandwiches from soup kitchens.
*Cut state funding by 20 percent for all state medical, mental health, addiction and child welfare programs.
*Reduced eligibility for unemployment benefits by 13 weeks, affecting 30,000 Pennsylvanians or one-tenth of those receiving unemployment.
*Savagely cut state funding to poor public schools two years in a row leaving the Philadelphia, Chester, York, Coatsville and many other school districts on the brink of complete bankruptcy.
*Instituted means testing for food stamps that will deprive poor people who have a couple thousand dollars in savings from being able to use the program.  Food stamps is about the only real welfare system left in this country since the 1996 federal law "changed welfare as we know it" by limiting cash assistance to families with children to five years.
*Slashed funding to the state's public universities and colleges at a time when students are drowning in debt and facing a doubling of the interest payments on their student loans, thanks to the Republicans in Congress who were willing to keep student loan rates down only at the expense of women's health programs.
*Absolutely refuses to raise taxes on the wealthy or to tax the natural gas industry more than a token amount even though it made $3.5 billion last year and continues to happily rape our state of one of its most valuable natural resources. Members of the natural gas industry contributed $2.5 million to Corbett's election campaign and the industry spends more than $1 million a year in lobbying Corbett and the legislature.

It's hard to choose which one of these assaults on the poor and helpless is the most egregious, I have to think it's the cuts to public schools because those cuts affect so many children whose futures are literally being snatched away from them, sending them into the same cycle of poverty, joblessness, crime and addiction that is already overwhelming us.
Last night I went out to dinner and my waitress was a special education teacher in the Chester Upland School District.
It was bad enough that she has to work two jobs to make ends meet, but she told me she had to buy her own printer, toner and paper in order to print out the Individual Education Plan for each of her students students that the state mandates be completed each a year.
"There is no paper," she said. "We have no paper."
And yet Corbett says, the school haven't raised property taxes enough.  They haven't used their "reserves."  what reserves?  Does he think we are fools?  
A lot of Pennsylvanians are suffering in silence and out of sight, and they will continue to suffer this year and next year and the next, while the rest of us seethe in an outrage we cannot find a way to express.
How long are we going to allow ourselves to be enslaved by those beholden to Grover Norquist and his insane idea that government can never raise taxes, ever, for any reason?
As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Taxes are good, they buy us civilization."  Our civilization is slipping away, one state, one child, one future at a time.
Where are the pitchforks?

Death of 'death panel' greatly exaggerated

Congressman Pat Meehan has found the "death panel" Sarah Palin claimed was in the Affordable Care Act back and he has struck a blow for freedom by voting to kill it dead, dead, dead!

I know this because Congressman Meehan called me personally to tell me about it a couple of weeks ago. Well, he didn't just call me, he held one of those telephone town halls. You know one of those things where you're sitting in your house minding your own business when out of the blue, you get a call and it's Meehan saying "I'm having a town hall right now, so listen up!"

So anyway, the really, really big thing he wanted to share was that he had voted to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel created as part of the Affordable Care Act that will begin in 2015 to develop and submit proposals to slow the growth of Medicare and private healthcare spending.

The IPAB -- once it comes into existence --will be made up of 15 members, doctors, insurers and consumers, who will be confirmed by Congress and served for staggered six-year terms. Its job will be to step in and recommend savings needed to meet the Affordable Care Act's limits on the growth of Medicare spending if other cost-saving measures fail to work to keep Medicare growth down to a limit of 7 percent or less, the average rate of growth for the last decade. 

The IPAB may not make recommendations to ration health care, cut benefits, increase premiums or restrict eligibility for the Medicare program. It can draw on studies and pilot projects to develop cost-effective ways of slowing the cost of Medicare and other health spending instead of imposing across-the-board cuts in payments to providers or increases in beneficiaries' premiums.
It is, as its name suggests, an "advisory" panel that may not even be needed for some time as the increase in health care spending has been running at about 3 percent for the last couple of years.   Congress can override its recommendations, but it is not subject to the intense special interest lobbying that Congress falls prey to.

So after the congressman was done bragging about having voted to kill the IPAB, he then went on to talk a lot about he was how he was all about cutting government spending, saving us money, preserving our freedom, blah blah blah.

What he didn't tell us is that the provision to repeal the IPAB was ensconced in a bill called Protecting Access to Healthcare Act, whose main objective is to put a $250,000 cap on noneconomic, or pain-and-suffering, damages in medical malpractice cases nationwide.

The bill passed the house 223 to 181, pretty much along partisan lines.  It will now go to the U.S. Senate where it will die a quiet death, as it has for the last 15 years or so.  And if it doesn't, President Obama will veto it.
So the vote was pretty much symbolic, or even less than symbolic since it wasted a lot of the House's time that it could have been spending on meaningful legislating, but it gave Congressman Meehan something to brag about when he came home last week to meet with constituents, that is, raise money for his re-election.
He and his colleagues will tell you that he has voted to save Medicare.  He hasn't. 
Measures to cap noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases are really a bad idea, especially at the level of $250,000, which is already proven to be completely inadequate in California and Texas. It means that  if you are the victim of medical malpractice, chances are good you will not be able to find a lawyer to take your case.
Economic damages -- lost wages, medical expenses, home health care -- are what pay for your actual expenses if you are ever unfortunate enough to be a victim of medical malpractice.  Noneconomic damages are where lawyers get paid after they have put up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront costs to find and hire expert witnesses, take days of depositions, develop trial materials, file motions and in extreme cases (about 2 percent of all lawsuits) go to trial on your behalf.  Of course it would be nice if medical malpractice victims did not have to sue their doctors or hospitals, but they do and their lawyers have to get paid for those suits.
Conservatives think limiting non-economic damages keeps medical costs down by limiting your access to the courthouse door and this bill, should it ever get to be federal law, would do just that.  Actually, your access is already pretty limited as the courts are clogged with suits by businesses suing each other or consumers of every stripe suing businesses.  
What keeps health care costs down?  First of all, making insurance companies cover everyone and making everyone pay for coverage (the individual mandate), as well as practical measures to prevent health care providers from giving you the wrong medication or the wrong dosage, to prevent hospital-acquired infections, to prevent operating room accidents and to prevent health care providers from submitting false claims. 
The Independent Payment Advisory Board could be a big part of that if the Affordable Care Act survives the US Supreme Court and if the IPAB provision is needed.  If it is, it is projected to save taxpayers about $3 billion over the next 10 years with no reduction in Medicare services or coverage.
If the ACA does not survive, we will get vouchers that will lose value each year, instead of the guaranteed coverage that Medicare recipients now receive.  This will cost us each a lot more each year as we get older without any corresponding increase in the level of services.
So if Congressman Meehan really champions cuts to government spending and saving taxpayers money, why isn't he busy voting on legislation that is desperately needed to keep student loan costs low, to fund transportation projects to rebuild our roads and bridges, to cut the massive defense budget and to raise much needed revenues by making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes? 
Why did he vote to repeal the IPAB?  And why is he so proud of it? 

The Delco Repubs take a cannon to a rabbit hunt

Did Democrats who made the effort to come out in the Democratic primary in the 162nd House Assembly District on Tuesday cast write-in votes for Republican Nick Micarelli because:

A)     They think he’s such a wonderful public servant he transcends party?

B)      Certain Democratic leaders disliked the Democratic write-in candidate, Ken Harper, so much they secretly ran a behind-the-scenes campaign for the Republican candidate?

C)      Voters didn’t realize that Miccarelli is a Republican and just accepted the first rubber stamp that the nice poll worker thrust into their hands?

Nick Miccarelli

D)     All of the above?

I think it’s “all of the above” and I think that’s horrible for our supposedly democratic (in the small “d” sense) form of government.

It was, after all, a primary election, which means each party chooses its nominee for each seat to run in the November general election, most decidedly not the other party's nominee.
Yet 709 supposed Democrats voted for Miccarelli as opposed to 337 Democrats for Harper, better than two to one.
 I could maybe understand it if it had even been close, but, no, not even then. So my question is why?
 Why did the Republicans go to so much effort to get Miccarelli nominated on both ballots when he didn’t stand a chance of losing in November as a Republican?   Is it just for the sake of a press release or TV ad (“nominated by both parties!”)?  Just to rub the Democrats’ noses in  their ineptitude?

Why did the Democratic Party turn against Harper when it couldn’t find a candidate to run in the 162nd District in the first place and when Harper spent his own money to run as  a write-in in a primary where he surely knew that even if he was nominated, he would be a sacrificial lamb?
I sort of get the Republicans: they saw their opportunity and they took it.
I do not get those 709 registered Democrats who happily took the Miccarelli stamp and went into the voting booth to vote for a Republican, even one they know and admire, in the Democratic primary.
If there are that many Republicans in Democratic clothing in just one House district, that many people who changed their registrations to screw over the Democrats when they had the only exciting races going on in their own primary election, that's truly amazing.
But if that many Democrats did make the effort to come out to the polls in what was a pretty unexciting primary on our side but truly did not know, or ask, if they were voting for a Republican, that's pretty dismaying.

I have been a resident of Delaware County for more than 30 years, every one of them a Democrat, and perhaps that is why I will never understand Delaware County politics.

Actually I’ve never understood Pennsylvania state politics either, as in, cross-over nominations and a 30-day deadline prior to the primary to change your party affiliation.  You do know they don’t have these restrictions and confusions in other states, don’t you?

Somebody in the know, click on the comment box below and tell me why the enormous effort for Miccarelli in a district where he is the sure winner one way or the other.  There must be a reason.  Somebody educate me.