The evidence shows that the Affordable Care Act is working and that uninsured Americans are signing up for health care.

The post Getting Covered appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Uninsured Rate Hits Lowest Level Since 2009

How is the Affordable Care Act doing? One way to judge is by looking at one of its primary goals: providing uninsured Americans access to affordable health coverage. And on this measure, it is succeeding.

We know that over 4 million people have enrolled in private coverage under the law. And according to a survey by Gallup released today, the rate of uninsured Americans has now reached its lowest level since 2009:

CREDIT: GALLUP

As the chart above shows, the uninsured rate was 17.1 percent at the end of 2013, down from a peak of 18 percent. Two months into 2014, it now sits at 15.9 percent–the lowest level since the first quarter of 2009. That decrease may not look like much, but it represents millions of people getting health insurance who previously weren’t covered. The decrease also represents a marked departure from the trend of rising levels of uninsured over the last several years.

This good news only gets better by taking a closer look at the numbers. “The uninsured rate for almost every major demographic group has dropped in 2014 so far,â€� wrote Gallup researchers. And the groups who have seen the sharpest decreases in uninsured rates so far this year have been among those most at risk from lacking insurance coverage — low-income and black Americans. In fact, in the first two months of 2014, the percentage of uninsured African Americans has reduced from 20.9 percent to 18.3 percent, a 2.6-point drop. And among those earning under $36,000 per year, the rate of uninsured went from 30.7 percent to 27.9 percent.

Some people have expressed concern that the new law is not reaching the uninsured quickly enough, but today’s survey and other research should ease those fears. Besides, it makes sense that the uninsured wouldn’t necessarily sign up for insurance coverage right away, according to Larry Levitt, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation:

“There’s every reason to believe that early enrollment skewed towards the already insured and that the uninsured will sign up later. People who were insured and had their old non-compliant policies cancelled were no doubt first in line in the new marketplaces, along with some people with pre-existing conditions who were locked out of the market before… The uninsured, particularly those who are young and healthy, are more likely to enroll as the final deadline approaches this month.”

BOTTOM LINE: The evidence shows that the Affordable Care Act is working and that uninsured Americans are signing up for health care. The uninsured rate is at the lowest it has been in years, and more and more of the uninsured have been getting covered. Outreach remains critical with just 22 days until open enrollment ends, but this is good news for those of us who think health care should be accessible for all Americans.

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Marty and Rust. Good guys and bad guys. Flat circles and spirals. Was it all just a veil?

The post Flat Circles, Pagan Spirals, And How ‘True Detective’s First Season Was A Critique Of Binary Thinking appeared first on ThinkProgress.

CREDIT: HBO

This review discusses plot points from the full run of True Detective in detail.

“The light is winning,� True Detective’s Rust concedes at the end of the HBO hit’s first season. Or it’s got the momentum, at least, even if the deficit displayed on the scoreboard remains monumental. After seven-plus hours of his paeans to darkness and the inexorable pointlessness and tragedy of human existence, Rust’s closing line throws everything that came before it into a very different, well, light.

A number of critics (including on this site) find fault with that last-second reversal, labeling it a betrayal or holding it as emblematic of the show’s ultimate punt on many of the big questions of power, corruption, violence, and institutions’ control of individuals that it had seemed to raise. But it’s worth setting the question of whether or not True Detective kept its thematic promises aside for at least a moment to appreciate the technical craftsmanship of the storytelling that brings Rust through the improbable arc.

True Detective is built around binary relationships – optimist and pessimist, cop and crook, faithful and bereft. The usefulness and failings of these binaries are a recurring background presence in the season, and in some ways the show has more to say about binaries than it does about any of its plot-level ideas. Rust’s concession (or perhaps it’s a revelation of some long-lit and tightly guarded spark of optimism in him, which could explain why a committed pessimist who’s bad at parties would bother not just to bear witness to the “raw deal� nature’s offered humankind, but to be police, to be one of the bad men who keep other bad men from the door) is a shift in one of these binaries, and it’s worth examining it specifically to think about the broader structure that drove the HBO hit’s first season.

Throughout True Detective’s first season, creator Nic Pizzolato relies upon two combating shapes: the open spiral and the closed circle. “Time is a flat circle,â€� in Rust’s idle (and meme-friendly) philosophizing, and Pizzolatto’s camera finds visual examples of that closed loop notion in highway interchanges and the bottoms of Lone Star tallboys and the drum magazine on Reggie Ledoux’s AK-47. Spirals adorn Childress’ victims and one is scarred into his own flesh just below the nape of his neck – a location that means someone else had to have carved the shape into his body – to say nothing of the spiral-ish labyrinth that hosts his final showdown with our heroes. If the dominant geometry of human history and experience is Rust’s “flat circleâ€� — where everything repeats, where free will is an illusion, where humanity marches witlessly around some sort of existential grindstone — then fighting crime and catching bad guys and mourning our long-dead toddlers is all pointless playacting.

The spiral, on the other hand, makes for a more hopeful metaphor for existence. Whether they collapse inward or wind outward from their centers, spirals suggest progress from one state to another, implying an uncertain future that can be influenced by present action. The intoxicating nihilism of Rust’s “flat circle� speech and the abstract brutality of the largely-unseen cultists for whom the spiral is a unifying symbol suggest there’s only one assessment of which notion of human existence is right and which is evil.

By converting Rust from a despairing advocate of circular history to a reluctant adherent to the heartening, spiraling idea that light has been bringing the universe closer and closer to a tie ballgame, True Detective reverses its original stance on this symbolic stand-in for philosophical inquiry.

We know the symbolic reversal of that moral binary matters a great deal, since symbolism is so essential to how True Detective works. The show is rampant with the stuff, and its leads are walking symbols of diametrically opposed values systems. The DNA of each man’s worldview is on hardly-veiled display in their very names. “Rust Cohle,� the corrosive and elemental force of brute rationalism, rendering life’s mysteries into plain inevitabilities of time and force, in the same way the earth’s internal forces turn carbon into coal. “Marty Hart,� whose gut goes slack in retirement, the heart-driven man who turns into Fat Marty, Mardi Gras, the guiltless intuiter and womanizer who’s good with people and great at the version of grade-school show-and-tell that adults call happy hour. Here, too, Pizzolatto organizes his clearest symbolic language within a binary structure, while also choosing one that is marked by classic cultural ideas of manhood and its rightful place in society.

More broadly, binaries are easy for an audience, and here they created a very engaging playground. But binaries are also simplistic and deceptive. The masculine binary that animates True Detective crowded out a lot of the shadowy complexity that attends real-world institutional conspiracies around power, murder, and sex. It also seems to flatter some classic cultural notions about strong, tough, brooding men being both rightful arbiters of good and evil and sufficient protection from the latter.

In choosing to locate his story within the Rust-Marty dynamic, Pizzolatto foreclosed a great many possibilities including that of female characters who are fully human or who demonstrate agency outside of how their lives collide with the menfolk they orbit. The space Pizzolatto clears with his choices gets allocated to spooky atmospherics and layers of conspiracy that implicate the most powerful political and religious figures in True Detective’s Louisiana in a drug-fueled ritual-based murder and pedophilia cult cobbled together from scraps of mainline Christianity and transgressive literary traditions. Other shows that handle similar subject matter have made very different choices about how to approach incest and violence against women and provoked very different kinds of contemplation. Taken together, art like Top of the Lake and The Fall and August: Osage Countyand True Detective serve as patches in a quilt of ideas about those subjects.

Some of those patches approach this material with a sure and settled viewpoint and find the right characters to bring that viewpoint to fierce and even triumphant life. Others function more as mirrors than as declarations, and I’d argue True Detective is one of these. Those old, flawed ideas about hard men keeping us as safe as we are docile and loyal that Rust represents? The show’s resolution calls all of them into question, as they fail to net any of the powerful men and institutions that were participating in the Carcosa cult and settle for destroying only its most prolific member. Those binary notions of how we should be and how we should view our species and our place in space-time get dislodged by the show’s conclusion. It isn’t that the spirals vs. circles, Marty vs. Rust, good vs. evil dynamics get resolved in surprising ways, it’s that they prove irresolvable and false by the time it’s all over. Rather than endorsing one or another clear or doctrinaire worldview or conception of reality, True Detective suggests its best to lean on a pastiche of many different elements, in much the same way that Adam Gopnik recently argued that the rump plurality of non-atheist non-religious people have set out to do for themselves in defiance of the self-appointed authority of both Pope Francis and Richard Dawkins alike.

“This world is a veil,� the revival-tent preacher with the Elvis haircut says in one early-season episode. As it turns out, that idea is a better representation of what True Detective has to say about human nature than anything. The spirals and circles, crowns and Yellow Kings, philosophizers and affable broskis are all feints at an orderliness that the real world never actually exhibits on its own. We think we’re making sense of the world around us, but we’ve made it into a veil that is legible to high-functioning animal neurology built to identify important patterns or to create them where none exist. The questions we think are worth asking and the binaries that seem worth organizing your life around prove useless.

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Every state in the country is suffering from climate change in its own way. On Monday night Senators will be giving voice to these concerns in an all night session aimed to raise awareness and bring attention to the matter.

The post 28 Reasons Why 28 Senators Are Talking About Climate Change All Night appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Percent of normal precipitation in January 2014 compared to the 1981-2010 average, based on preliminary PRISM data. Most of California, southern Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas received 25% or less of their normal precipitation.

CREDIT: http://www.climate.gov

In January, a group of 18 Senators launched the Climate Action Task Force to bring more attention to the issue of climate change. Starting Monday, 28 Senators are leading an all-night session of speeches on climate change in one of the task force’s first major endeavors.

The Climate Action Task Force is made up of all Democrats and the Senators speaking throughout Monday night and into Tuesday morning include Democrats and two Independents, but this isn’t due to lack of reaching across the aisle. “How about we get five Republicans from coastal states whose states are already suffering from sea level rise, droughts, floods and all the rest of it?” Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said at the launch of the task force.

Here’s a list of how climate change is impacting all the states represented by Senators in Monday’s all-night session. For every state represented, there is another state not represented — like Texas, or Mississippi, or McConnell’s home state of Kentucky — that’s suffering just as badly, if not worse.

1. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) California is in the midst of one of the state’s worst droughts in recorded history. ClimateProgress’s Joe Romm has written several times about how climate change is exacerbating the drought.
2. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) The drought is impacting everyone from beer brewers to public health workers to farmers growing things of all shapes and sizes in California.
3. Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) Last fall Colorado experienced unprecedented rainfall and flooding, and an analysis from the Center for American Progress found that the federal government spent $621 million in taxpayer dollars helping Colorado recover from nine extreme weather events in 2011-2012. Studies show that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
4. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) Climate change will adversely impact agriculture, infrastructure and natural resources in Connecticut through changing climactic conditions, increasing frequency of flooding and other extreme weather events.
5. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) Coastal erosion and sea-level rise will also put fragile ecological wetlands and coastal populations at risk in Connecticut.
6. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) Florida is a low-lying coastal state, making it especially vulnerable to increased extreme weather events such as hurricanes and the impacts of sea level rise. It is also one of the states most susceptible to heat-related deaths. Florida’s economy is highly reliant on tourism, and when businesses are forced to close due to weather it really hurts the state’s bottom line.
7. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) Sea level rise is the most immediate threat posed by climate change on Hawaii, with experts expecting up to three feet of increase by 2100. This will impact Hawaii’s food and water security as well as the state’s ability to maintain its infrastructure. Climate change is just one of many challenges facing the state’s fragile and unique ecosystem.
8. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) Climate change will make summers in Illinois more like those in Texas — scorching hot and relentless. It will also increase the frequency of droughts. Heat- and water-stress will harm the state’s important agricultural sector.
9. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) Residents of Maine are becoming more at risk of diseases transmitted by insects as the climate warms and increases their range. Lyme-disease carrying ticks are now endemic to all sixteen counties in the state as opposed to just the southernmost regions as was the case in the past.
10. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Massachusetts is actively preparing for climate change’s impact on the state. In January, Gov. Deval Patrick announced that the state will allocate more than $50 million on measures to protect against sea level rise and destructive storms like Hurricane Sandy.
11. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) Change in precipitation in Massachusetts will have significant effects on the amount of snow cover and spring snow melt — which will in turn impact water supply and quality.
12. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) Maryland has over 3,000 miles of tidal shoreline, and water is rising much faster than the national average in the state. As acres of land get swallowed up each day, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is trying hard to get the state to take serious mitigation and adaptation measures.
13. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) Residents of Minnesota are used to enduring frigid winters, not blazing summers — and the infrastructure reflects this. As the state confronts increasing heatwaves, the way homes are built and cooled will have to be re-envisioned.
14. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) Known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, Minnesota has also experienced three “1,000-year floods” in the last eight years.
15. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) Hurricane Sandy tore through New York, causing, among other devastating impacts, over one million people to lose power. There will be more storms like this in the future, and New York recently started requiring all state-run utilities to begin preparing for sea level rise and extreme weather events associated with climate change.
16. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Climate change will also exacerbate the “heat island” effect in large urban areas like New York City. This will have public health impacts as well as economic costs as more energy will be needed to stay cool in the summer.
17. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) Snowpack is suffering in Oregon’s majestic mountains, with average reductions already estimated at up to 20 percent across the state’s Cascade range. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions will continue to deplete seasonal snowpacks, impacting everything from ecosystems to hydropower systems.
18. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) Oregon will also experience more wildfires in the future as climate change reduces snowpack runoff and increases the likelihood of drought in some part of the state.
19. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) Last week, Majority Leader Ried said “Climate change is the worst problem facing the world today.” Nevada is a very hot and dry part of the world, and the state will feel the impacts of heat and drought on an already water-stressed population as climate change continues.
20. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) New Jersey was also hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, however the state has been less proactive in addressing climate change as a potential threat and more reactive in simply rebuilding after the storm, leaving residents vulnerable to future climate-related threats.
21. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) Fall foliage could be threatened by climate change as the season could get truncated and invasive species move into new northern areas. Drought can also thwart fall colors by making leaves smaller with muted colors. Officials in New Hampshire estimate that leaf-loving tourists add about $1 billion to the economy each year.
22. Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) New Mexico is enduring what amounts to a chronic drought. Surface water sources, such as the Rio Grande, are precariously low while already being over-allocated.
23. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) Groundwater reserves, which provide much of the New Mexico’s drinking and agricultural water supply, are also in danger as the region gets hotter and drier.
24. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has taken to the Senate floor dozens of times in just the past year to push for congressional action on climate change. He is one of the founders of the Climate Action Task Force and recently announced the launch of a website devoted to documenting climate change’s impacts on Rhode Island.
25. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) In Vermont climate change is harming the state’s prized maple syrup industry as well as the treasured winter sports industry. The winter sports industry is suffering from warmer and shorter snow seasons both across the U.S. and around the world.
26. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) Coastal communities are especially at risk of climate-impacts in Virginia, but residents across the state are likely to suffer increasing respiratory health problems due to smog, asthma and allergies that are exacerbated by climate change. Mayors across the state recently urged state lawmakers to take action in combating climate change.
27. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) Washington State will suffer from hotter summers and more unpredictable rainfall due to climate change, this could jeopardize important hydroelectric energy sources.
28. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) Washington’s families, businesses and communities are likely to incur billions of dollars of annual economic costs due to climate change. This will include increased energy costs, wildfire costs, storm damage and public health costs.

No Republicans signed up to and judging by minority leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) recent statements that’s unlikely to change soon.

“For everybody who think it’s warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn’t,” McConnell told the Cincinnati Enquirer over the weekend, saying he opposed U.S. action on climate change. “Even if you conceded the point, which I don’t concede, but if you conceded the point, it isn’t going to be addressed by one country. So the idea is, we tie our own hands behind our back and others don’t. I think it’s beyond foolish and real people are being hurt by this.”

In case these 28 reasons aren’t enough of an argument for climate action, take a look at a breakdown of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report for some more thought-provoking statistics.

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