Jeanne Shaheen, the senior senator from New Hampshire, won her seat by defeating a Republican incumbent in 2008. She was thought to have a safe seat this year, and most polls and observers still give her an edge, if a tenuous one, over likely GOP challenger Scott Brown. Enlarge Image Sen. Shaheen, the decider Associated Press
But she has a problem. Like every other Democrat who was in the Senate in 2009, she cast the deciding vote that caused the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to become law. The Granite State is nobody's idea of an ObamaCare success story. It is one of only two states (with West Virginia) in which only one insurance company sells medical policies on the ObamaCare exchange.
As The Wall Street Journal reported in February, premiums tend to be higher in jurisdictions--a total of 515 counties in 15 of the 36 states on the federal exchange--with a lone insurer. As we noted in January, the absence of alternatives in New Hampshire means that some policyholders in some parts of the state have to drive long distances to get to a hospital that is on the Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield coverage network.
Not surprisingly, Shaheen--whose first name is pronounced "gene," not "genie"--is facing hard questions from constituents suffering under the new health-care regime. Her approach to answering them seems an unpromising one. It is to suggest that they don't know what they're talking about.
Blogger Jason Pye seems to have been the first to pick up on a Shaheen appearance last Friday "Good Morning With Dan Mitchell," a radio talk show that airs on WKBR in Keene. His post includes audio of Shaheen's exchange with an unidentified caller, which Pye says he obtained from America Rising, a conservative opposition-research group:
The caller told Shaheen that "President Obama's health care is not affordable."
"It's cost me more, my deductible has more than tripled and my monthly premium has doubled, so it's not affordable," he said. "And so, I'd rather have my old healthcare, my old system back."
Shaheen dismissed his concerns out of hand, telling him to leave his name with the host so her office could call him back "because that doesn't sound right to me." She chalked the caller's complaints up to "misinformation."
"It sounds, and there's a lot of misinformation about what's happening with the health care law," Shaheen told the caller, "so we'll get back in touch with you, we'll find out what's going on with your plan, and we'll help you sort that out because you shouldn't be paying that much more."
Now perhaps this was a Republican prank call, or maybe the guy actually is misinformed. Offering to help sort the matter out is obviously the wise political response, noncommittal in substance while demonstrating (or at least asserting) a commitment to constituent service.
But it was awfully impolitic for the senator to preface her promise with the prejudicial statement "there's a lot of misinformation." The customer may not always be right, but a smart salesman doesn't begin a transaction by saying he's probably wrong.
This turns out to be more a tic than an isolated slip. Last month Dave Solomon of the New Hampshire Union Leader reported on a similar exchange during a "telephone town hall":
According to an audio tape of the conference call sent out by the NHGOP (and verified as accurate by the Shaheen camp), "Dave" told Shaheen that although he was grandfathered into his existing plan after the ACA took effect, "our rate just went up 40 percent and if we went onto the exchange it would go up another couple of hundreds [sic] dollars."
He said he and his wife earn too much money to get subsidies under the Obamacare exchange plan, but are not "in the 1 percent and can't afford to pay the premiums."
He also claimed (inaccurately, as it turned out) that he and his wife would lose access to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital under the ACA.
"There are a lot of things that are broken in this thing and I want to know how Congress is going to address those loopholes and issues," Dave said.
Shaheen responded, "Clearly, there's a lot of misinformation about the Affordable Care Act."
She noted that Dartmouth-Hitchcock is in fact in the New Hampshire network.
As with the WKBR caller, Shaheen went on to promise to look into it. "Shaheen's office said there was such a follow-up and 'Dave' had questions about providers in Anthem's network," Solomon reports.
If Dave was mistaken about Dartmouth-Hitchcock, that shows there's at least a little misinformation about ObamaCare. And if he needed to call his senator to get answers about the insurance company's network, that suggests further that there's an insufficiency of easily accessible accurate information. But that is itself a shortcoming of ObamaCare. Its designers (including Shaheen) and administrators don't seem to have taken much care to ensure that consumers--also known as constituents--know what it is they're being forced to buy.
It is true that there's been a lot of deliberate misinformation about ObamaCare. Example: "If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor." That was Barack Obama in July 2009.
Here's another example:
My understanding . . . is that--and I know this is true of the bill that has come out of the committee in the Senate--if you have health coverage that you like you can keep it. As I said, you may have missed my remarks at the beginning of the call, but one of the things I that I [sic] said as a requirement that I have for supporting a bill is that if you have health coverage that you like you should be able to keep that. . . . Under ever [sic] scenario that I've seen, if you have health coverage that you like, you get to keep it.
A lot of misinformation indeed. That was Jeanne Shaheen in August 2009, responding to a constituent named Emil in another telephone town hall. The Washington Examiner's Byron York noted it (along with similar comments from 26 other then or future Senate Democrats) in November, and via a Google search we found it on Shaheen's official Senate website.
So Shaheen was an active participant, if perhaps an unwitting one, in a massive consumer fraud at the expense of many of her own constituents. No wonder she's so defensive.
Justice Sotomayor Hits the Treadmill Blogress Ann Althouse notes a linguistically interesting dictum in Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent from yesterday's decision in Scheuette v. BAMN. Here--in full except citations, and with a paragraph break added for readability--is Sotomayor's footnote 2:
Although the term "affirmative action" is commonly used to describe colleges' and universities' use of race in crafting admissions policies, I instead use the term "race-sensitive admissions policies." Some comprehend the term "affirmative action" as connoting intentional preferential treatment based on race alone--for example, the use of a quota system, whereby a certain proportion of seats in an institution's incoming class must be set aside for racial minorities; the use of a "points" system, whereby an institution accords a fixed numerical advantage to an applicant because of her race; or the admission of otherwise unqualified students to an institution solely on account of their race.
None of this is an accurate description of the practices that public universities are permitted to adopt after this Court's decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. There, we instructed that institutions of higher education could consider race in admissions in only a very limited way in an effort to create a diverse student body. To comport with Grutter, colleges and universities must use race flexibly, and must not maintain a quota. And even this limited sensitivity to race must be limited in time, and must be employed only after "serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives." Grutter-compliant admissions plans, like the ones in place at Michigan's institutions, are thus a far cry from affirmative action plans that confer preferential treatment intentionally and solely on the basis of race.
As Althouse observes:
Here is this term--"affirmative action"--composed of 2 very positive words--"affirmative" and "action"--a term that has been used and defended for decades, and Sotomayor decides it's time for a euphemism? . . .
What if a Supreme Court Justice, writing an opinion upholding the right to abortion, suddenly announced--in a footnote--that she wasn't going to use the world "abortion" anymore, because "some comprehend" it to mean things she thought were incorrect and distracting? Henceforth, she's only going to call it "reproductive freedom." . . .
Imagine a 19th-century judge writing an opinion upholding the right to own slaves and dropping a footnote to say he wasn't going to use the term "slavery" anymore, because it set opponents' minds reeling into thoughts he needed to control. He's only going to refer to it as "our peculiar institution."
Althouse's examples are not quite apt. "Abortion" and "slavery" are both straightforward nouns with clear meanings. "Affirmative action," by contrast, is itself a euphemism, designed to obscure the reality that it refers to a form of racial discrimination.
Thus Sotomayor is not merely euphemizing; she has climbed upon what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill. A new euphemism is needed because the old one has lost its power to obscure: Its real meaning is too obvious, even though it is unrelated to the literal meanings of either "affirmative" or "action."
Ironically, Sotomayor's new euphemism comes considerably closer than "affirmative action" to being a literal description of the underlying reality. "Admissions policies" is far clearer than "action," and "race-sensitive," unlike "affirmative," at least acknowledges that what's going on has something to do with race.
The word "sensitive" does all the euphemizing work. But it cuts both ways. Defenders of segregation were, in their own way, "sensitive" when it came to race.