march 2017

Every time Genevieve Caffrey hears the words President Trump, “I feel like I was physically punched in the stomach,” she says. “I feel like I’m in an alternative universe that was imagined and made fun of by late-night comedians before the election.”

On election night in her home in Chicago, she invited friends over and told them all to bring champagne. As state after state flipped to red, her friends left quietly, one by one. Caffrey yelled at her husband for being too confident Hillary Clinton would win. She blamed herself for not volunteering more. Then she cried herself to sleep, “thinking about all the people who would die and suffer and become fearful and hated and hateful unnecessarily under a Trump presidency.”

Updated on March 7, 2017 at 12:22 p.m. ET

House Republicans leaders on Monday embraced a legislative plan to replace the Affordable Care Act for the first time in the nearly seven years since Democrats enacted the transformative health insurance law.

Now, they have to sell it.

That challenge ran into an immediate threat from key conservatives who criticized the new proposal for failing to fulfill the party’s iron-clad promise to rip out the signature policy of former President Barack Obama. “It’s Obamacare in a different format,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said in a phone interview. Jordan cited three provisions that conservatives have complained about for weeks leading up to the formal release of the House GOP plan on Monday evening: its extension of Obamacare Medicaid expansion for another four years; its failure to immediately repeal all of the law’s tax increases; and its call to provide refundable tax credits to help people buy insurance, which Jordan labeled “a new entitlement.”

House Republicans unveiled Monday the American Health Care Act, their long-promised plan to replace Obamacare. The bill is similar to, and arguably more generous than, a draft that leaked a few weeks ago, and conservative members are already denouncing it as “Obamacare Lite.”

To wit, it:

• Keeps the extremely popular provisions barring insurance companies from discriminating against people because of their preexisting conditions and forces them to continue allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26
• Does away with the much-loathed individual mandate
• Keeps Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion until 2020
• Contains tax credits

It’s this last point that will determine whether people on the individual market are richer or poorer under Ryan/Trump/PriceCare than Obamacare. Unlike Obamacare, which determined subsidies for insurance by income, the new plan would weight the tax credits by age and then phase them out in increments by income.

Why, last Saturday, did President Trump accuse former President Obama of wiretapping him? In its story tracing the accusation from Mark Levin’s radio show to Breitbart’s front page to Trump’s Twitter Feed, The New York Times offered a theory: Trump wanted to distract the press from bad news.

“To his adversaries,” wrote Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Mr. Trump’s bomb-throwing seems like a calculated strategy to distract from another story he wants to avoid,” the story of “Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself last week from any federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia in response to reports that he had met with Russia’s ambassador during the presidential race.”

With the reveal of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) on Monday evening, Republican authors claim to have killed the “individual mandate”—the requirement that everyone who chooses not to purchase insurance pay a $695 annual penalty.

It’s true that the words “individual mandate” appear nowhere in the bill. So, since insurance works when many people—ideally all of them—buy in, how does the bill get young, healthy people to buy insurance instead of rolling the dice?

This is where the very important “continuous-coverage incentive” comes in, under Section 133. This is really a penalty for anyone who goes without insurance for 63 days. (Why the number is 63 is unclear to me.)

“The continuous coverage incentive is designed to limit adverse selection in health-care markets,” the House summary reads. Anyone who goes without health coverage for any reason has to pay “a flat 30-percent late-enrollment surcharge on top of their base premium” for the next year.

This post reveals “plot” points of episode 11 of The Bachelor season 21.

Last week, Middlebury College, a Vermont liberal arts school with about 2,500 students, became the latest campus to make national headlines due to protesters who so detested a speaker that they tried to prevent their classmates from hearing him speak. Some cast the clash as pitting conservatives against liberals. But that isn’t right.

The social scientist Charles Murray arrived on campus at the invitation of a student group to speak about his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Two students who extended the invitation, Alexander Khan and  Philip Hoxie, had been trying to understand the election of Donald Trump, although neither supported him. Intrigued by Coming Apart’s analysis of the growing cultural gulf between the white elite (from which Middlebury draws many of its students) and the white working class, they felt their campus would benefit from engaging with its author.

On Monday evening, the House Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees released the two long-awaited components of the House GOP’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Although intense secrecy from House aides and a hunt for the bill last week involving Senator Rand Paul and a gaggle of reporters had raised expectations of dramatic changes, the bills that will go into markup Wednesday in the committees look pretty similar to a draft version of the bill that leaked a few weeks ago.

The two components—called the “American Health Care Act” in tandem—are intended to be passed by the reconciliation budgetary process, and as such only contain provisions that pertain to budgetary items, like the amount of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate tax or the Medicaid funding granted to states. The whole bill has yet to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office, a critical step that will determine both the number of people projected to gain or lose coverage under the law, and the amount of spending or saving it would incur.

The spokesman for Vladimir Putin gave a funny answer on Monday when asked about Donald Trump’s claims that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump’s phones during the 2016 presidential campaign. The Russian government “should not be in any way linked to U.S. domestic issues” and “doesn’t have the slightest inclination or intention to be associated with these affairs,” he said.

The answer was funny because the backstory to Trump’s comments is the Russian government’s brazen interference in America’s domestic affairs—specifically the recent U.S. election—and efforts by American officials to investigate the precise nature of that interference. (The Kremlin denies involvement in the hacks and leaks of Democratic Party emails.)

J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.

J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.

His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.