Koch brother says supporters of carbon tax are “on LSD”

He also expressed skepticism about renewable energy — and supports the Keystone XL Pipeline

Elias Isquith
SALON ®  

William Koch (Credit: AP/Louis Lanzano)

According to a report in the Palm Beach Daily News, Bill Koch, one of the lesser-known members of the Koch family, recently told a group of about 600 people at a Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce gathering that supporters of a carbon tax are “on LSD.” A better way to combat high carbon levels, Koch suggested, would be to plant more trees.
Koch also weighed in on the Keystone XL Pipeline, which he supports, and climate change, in which he does not believe. “I won’t bet on global warming,” Koch said before arguing that alternative energy sources — like solar or wind — were too expensive.  ”We can’t count on renewable energy to save us,” he said.

Koch encourages drilling for shale gas. He described the process involved in extracting shale gas deposits, which requires vertical and horizontal drilling and the process known as fracking to break through the rock surrounding the oil.

He dismissed concerns about pollution and environmental contamination raised with regard to fracking.
“Carbon is going to be around longer than we are,” Koch said. “Pollution problems can be solved.”
To get away from carbon dioxide, the human race will have to move to another planet, he said.

[h/t ThinkProgress]

Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

GOP’s latest, desperate Obamacare strategy: Try to confuse Americans!

Rather than field inquiries or provide constituents with information, Republicans want them mixed up by Obamacare

By Brian Beutler

 

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul

 (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com/Reuters

/Gary Cameron/Jonathan Ernst)

 

If you’ve received a letter from your health insurance company advising you that your plan has been canceled because of Obamacare (and perhaps offering to shift you into much more expensive coverage) you’re probably wondering what remedies are available to you.
In an ideal world you could call your member of Congress or one of your senators and ask his or her staff to help you sort through your options.
But if your representatives are Republicans, the very idea of providing you assistance runs at cross-purposes with their desire to turn you into a talking point.
Introducing… #YOURSTORY!
It’s a new campaign organized by the Senate Republican conference to turn your frustration, anger and/or confusion over the Affordable Care Act into an anecdote for a floor speech or a sound bite for a reporter whose job it is to find some Obamacare “losers.”
Now obviously most of the submissions Senate Republicans will field will come from constituents who are already unfavorably disposed toward the law. And their stories will be relayed to other constituents who are unfavorably disposed to the law. So the public relations value of #YOURSTORY is probably pretty marginal.
But consider for a moment what it implies about the GOP’s commitment to providing responsible constituent services.
Recall Dianne Barrette, who did an about-face on Obamacare once its benefits were explained to her clearly and responsibly. But it wasn’t a member of Congress who provided that assistance. It certainly wasn’t any of the Republicans who helped turn her into the embodiment of the Affordable Care Act’s failure and President Obama’s broken promises. It was a reporter.
Now I don’t know if Barrette reached out to any elected officials in the first place. For all I know her member of Congress is a Democrat. But it speaks volumes about the GOP’s commitments that they pounced on her story when it was so borderline to begin with, and moved on once she was no longer of any use.
In reality, Barrette’s story illustrates that a little bit of information about Obamacare can turn bewilderment into satisfaction. Many of the people receiving cancellation notices or experiencing rate shock will eventually find that they’re pretty happy with their new options. But when that happens, their human interest value collapses, as does their usefulness toward the end of undermining Obamacare. So what are the odds, do you suppose, that Republicans are providing this kind of information to their constituents themselves?

The ugly subtext to stories like these — which proliferate so rapidly, but then turn out upon closer inspection to be less black-and-white than originally depicted — is that Republicans are fostering and nurturing constituent confusion.
#YOURSTORY is a manifestation of that strategy. A site like #YOURSTORY could be just as easily used to field inquiries and respond to troubled constituents with useful information. Instead it’ll be used as a crowdsourcing tool for anti-Obamacare opportunists.
The existence of a campaign like this suggests that the universe of individual Republicans who are refusing to help constituents navigate the Affordable Care Act is larger than we know. And we know it exists.
“Given that we come from Kansas, it’s much easier to say, ‘Call your former governor,’” Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., told the Hill, referring to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “You say, ‘She’s the one. She’s responsible. She was your governor, elected twice, and now you reelected the president, but he picked her.’”
“We know how to forward a phone call,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. “I have two dedicated staff who deal with nothing but Obamacare and immigration problems. I’m sure there will be an uptick in that, but all we can do is pass them back to the Obama administration. The ball’s in their court. They’re responsible for it.”
The strategic logic here is perverse, but there is a logic to it.
Millions of people are getting cancellation notices from their insurers. Most of those people will be pretty happy with the new system — if they’re made aware of and guided through it by conscientious public servants. The conundrum for conservatives is that once enough people are enrolled in Obamacare, its constituency will be too large for them to support repealing it without offering some alternative that also expands coverage to millions and millions of people. Which is to say, Republicans would be working against their own public policy ambitions if they did right by people receiving these letters. So they’re using them as pawns instead.

Brian Beutler is Salon's political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler. More Brian Beutler.

Obamacare “victim” now says loss of previous health plan may be “a blessing in disguise”

Dianne Barrette was the media's go-to example of an Obamacare victim -- until she found out all of her options

By Elias Isquith

President Barack Obama (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) (Credit: AP)

Because her $54 per month plan was cancelled due to Obamacare’s new higher requirements — and because her insurance company’s recommended replacement would cost her nearly 10 times as much — Dianne Barrette became the face of Obamacare’s so-called victims.
But in a new report from the New Republic, Barrette, after factoring in her tax credits and going through her options with reporter Jonathan Cohn, is now singing Obamacare’s praises, even going so far as to say her previous plan’s cancellation was “maybe” a “blessing in disguise.”
When Cohn  detailed for Barrette how much she’d be paying for far more comprehensive health insurance, Barrette told him she’d “jump at” the chance to secure the plan. “With my age, things can happen,” she said. “I don’t want to have bills that could make me bankrupt. I don’t want to lose my house.”

OK, but what can she get from Obamacare? Using plan data provided to me by the Kaiser Family Foundation, residents of Polk County, Florida have dozens of insurance options from which to choose. The cheapest option for somebody of Barrette’s age has premiums of $440 a month, the most expensive goes for $914 a month. But Barrette wouldn’t pay those prices. Obamacare offers tax credits to people with incomes of up to four times the poverty line, or about $45,000 for an individual. Given Barrette’s income, she’ll be getting a tax credit worth nearly $331 a month, according to the Kaiser Foundation’s subsidy calculator. And that tax credit works like a discount, upfront. To figure out what she’d pay, you subtract the value of the tax credit from the price of the plan.
Accounting for that discount, it looks like the cheapest plan available her would cost about $100 a month—in other words, about $50 a month more than Barrette pays now. Obamacare divides plans into categories based on generosity—with platinum the most generous, bronze the least generous. This is a bronze plan and you can tell by reading the benefit summary. It covers periodic wellness visits for free, like all plans must under the new law. But it doesn’t pay for virtually anything else until the beneficiary has paid $6,250 of his or her own money, the maximum out-of-pocket allowed under Obamacare. The plan might protect Barrette from bankruptcy, something her current plan doesn’t do, but it would do almost nothing to insulate her from less extreme medical expenses.
[...]
For an additional $50 or so, Barrette could apparently get the second-cheapest silver plan. It’s from FloridaBlue, the same company that provides Barrette with what she has now. Included in that policy: the usual free checkup, free vision care (one exam plus one pair of corrective lenses), free clinical lab work, and a drug plan with prices ranging from free for some generic, mail-order drugs to $250 for some high-end specialty drugs. It would cover primary care physician visits, though with a $75 co-pay per visit. Other coverage—for hospitalizations, specialist office visits, and so on—would kick in after her out-of-pocket expenses reached an annual deductible of $5,750. Her total out of pocket expenses could be no more than $6,250, in accordance with the law’s maximum.

Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.