Linda Close was grateful to learn she qualified for a sizable subsidy to help pay for her health insurance under the new federal law. But in the process of signing up for a plan, Close said her HealthCare.gov account showed several different subsidy amounts, varying as much as $180 a month. Reported by Journal Gazette 17 hours ago.

The Court of Appeals for D.C. and Fourth Circuit issued conflicting decisions regarding whether the ACA permits federal tax credits for health insurance purchased through federal exchanges. Reported by Mondaq 14 hours ago.

Georgia employers and individuals will receive $11 million in rebates this summer due to a federal rule on health insurers’ spending, reports Georgia Health News. Some 304,000 Georgians will benefit from the refunds, with an average rebate of $53 per family, as a result of the “Medical Loss Ratio” (MLR) rule on 2013 insurance plans, according to federal figures released on Thursday. The rule was created by the Affordable Care Act. The rule generally requires health insurers to spend at least… Reported by bizjournals 12 hours ago.

The Department of Health & Human Services' Office of Inspector General released a transcript of testimony given to Congress on health insurance marketplaces. Reported by Mondaq 10 hours ago.

Over the past decade, an increasing percentage of Americans lost health insurance coverage because they couldn't afford it. As a family physician, I have seen the devastating effects of losing health insurance. Without it, patients die unnecessarily. Reported by CNN.com 8 hours ago.

Federal officials have capped the amount of money scofflaws will be forced to pay if they don't buy insurance this year at... Reported by Deseret News 9 hours ago.

This week on the topic of poverty, Congressman Ryan spoke. A day later he and his Republican colleagues voted.

What's clear is that action speaks louder than words. And at every turn over the last three years, the actions House Republicans have taken have prioritized cuts to programs for low-and middle-income families.

Funding for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program was slashed in the Ryan-Republican budget. Social Services Block Grants were eliminated. Food assistance, Pell higher education grants, job training and housing assistance were all dramatically scaled back. And of course, an extension of unemployment insurance and a raise in the minimum wage were both blocked by House Republicans.

The new Republican rhetoric on poverty is no match for the deeply troubling actions they have repeatedly taken, and continued to take this week with changes they passed to the Child Tax Credit. The bill completely ignores the need to extend the 2017 expiration of the expanded refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit, which if allowed to occur would push 12 million people, including six million children, into poverty or deeper into poverty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Republicans may say that such an extension could be done later. But that talk about future action is made incredulous when Republicans have passed in unpaid-for tax cuts to more than $700 billion.

Instead, the legislation expands and makes permanent the availability of the credit to many new, upper middle-income families whose incomes are too high to qualify under current law. A married couple making $160,000 with two children would get an additional $2,200 in their 2018 tax refund, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A single mother of two making $14,500 would see her refund cut by $1,750.

It gets worse. Republicans inserted a provision into the legislation requiring recipients of the Child Tax Credit to provide their Social Security number - a change that could lead to the loss of the Child Tax Credit for the families of five million children, four million of whom are U.S. citizens. What's more, 400,000 veteran and armed forces families will lose all or part of their credit.

There's a reason that United States Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes this requirement - because it is a deeply flawed proposal that would leave millions of families with children behind.

Ben Franklin once said, "Well done is better than well said." It is even truer that well said cannot obscure what is harmfully done. Reported by Huffington Post 8 hours ago.

A "smoking gun" has emerged in the legal and political debate over whether Congress intended health insurance subsidies to be available on the federal Obamacare exchange, even though the text of the Affordable Care Act says that subsidies are only available on exchanges "established by the State." Now a 2012 speech by one of the bill's drafters has surfaced in which he boasts that the bill was written to deny subsidies on federal exchanges.

In the speech, reported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a press release Friday, Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains that the bill was drafted to make it impossible for subsidies to be available on the federal exchanges so that states would feel political pressure from low-income residents to create their own insurance exchanges. Formally, states could still say no; politically, he argued, they would not: 



What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.



Gruber's remarks appear at 31:25 in this video of the speech:

This week, two federal appellate courts split on the question of whether the use of the word "State" excluded subsidies from federal exchanges, or whether, as the law's defenders argue, that was merely a "drafting error" outweighed by the overall intention of the law to provide subsidies throughout the country. Former legislative staffer Sean Davis wrote in The Federalist that the idea that the term "State" was a drafting error was ridiculous, and that in any case the error would have to be rectified by congressional legislation, not by executive fiat:



The deliberate creation of a separate section to authorize a separate federal entity is not a drafting error. The repeated and deliberate reference to one section but not another is not a drafting error. The refusal to grant equal authority to two programs authorized by two separate sections is not a drafting error. The decision to specifically reference section X but not section Y in a portion of a law that grants spending or tax authority is not a drafting error.

The clear text of the law repeatedly demonstrates that plans purchased via federal exchanges were never meant to be treated the same as plans purchased by state-based exchanges.



The reason the IRS interpreted "State" to mean federal exchanges also--and did so long after the law passed--was because the political pressure failed, Davis argued: most states declined to create exchanges anyway.

The newly-unearthed speech by Gruber--who was lent by the White House "to Capitol Hill to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation"--settles the argument firmly in Davis's favor, and proves the case of those challenging the IRS in Halbig v. Burwell (the D.C. Circuit case that found against the Obama administration) and King v. Burwell (the Fourth Circuit case that supported the administration). Reported by Breitbart 8 hours ago.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File

In this May 12, 2009, file photo Jonathan Gruber, professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, participates in a Capitol Hill hearing on the overhaul of the heath care system in Washington. A supporter of the Affordable Care Act, Gruber says, "It’s so crazy to think that a society that has Social Security and Medicare would not find this (law) constitutional.”

If you were perusing the conservative twitter-sphere this morning, you would have witnessed a kind of collective orgasm, as it was discovered that back in 2012, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber gave a talk to a small group in which he seemed to support the analysis of the two judges on the D.C. Circuit who ruled this week in Halbig v. Burwell that the subsidies for buying health insurance under the Affordable Care Act should go only to people who live in states that set up their own insurance exchanges. Since Gruber advised Mitt Romney on the creation of Massachusetts' health reform (which became the model for the ACA) and then advised the White House and Congress during the preparation of the ACA reform, conservatives are now convinced they have their smoking gun: The law, they contend, was always designed to deprive millions of Americans of subsidies, and was in fact never meant to achieve that "universal coverage" that everyone involved said was its goal.

Up to the point where the Supreme Court rules on Halbig, those conservatives will be citing Gruber's 2012 comments. A lot. But the idea that something Gruber said in response to a question in front of what looks to be around 20 people is more relevant than literally everything else that happened during the drafting and debate over this law's passage is, to put it plainly, insane.

Let me provide a partial list of people who spent over a year between the beginning of the debate over health-care reform and the passage of the law talking about the ACA, but never mentioned what was supposedly the intent of Congress that people in states using the federal exchange would be deprived of subsidies:

· Barack Obama
· Kathleen Sebelius
· Harry Reid
· Every other Democratic senator
· Nancy Pelosi
· Every other Democratic House member
· Every health-care analyst in America
· Every health-care reporter in America
· Every Republican in the Senate
· Every Republican in the House
· Every conservative opponent of the law

Ezra Klein, who wrote as much about health-care reform during this period as anyone, tweeted this morning that he interviewed Gruber dozens of times, and not only did Gruber never mention this issue, "[t]he same is true for literally everyone else I interviewed. I never heard a single person say subsidies don't work in federal exchanges."

As for Gruber himself, this morning he spoke to Jonathan Cohn, and here's what he told him:



I honestly don’t remember why I said that. I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it.

During this era, at this time, the federal government was trying to encourage as many states as possible to set up their exchanges. ...

At this time, there was also substantial uncertainty about whether the federal backstop would be ready on time for 2014. I might have been thinking that if the federal backstop wasn't ready by 2014, and states hadn't set up their own exchange, there was a risk that citizens couldn't get the tax credits right away. ...

But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo.

There are few people who worked as closely with Obama administration and Congress as I did, and at no point was it ever even implied that there’d be differential tax credits based on whether the states set up their own exchange. And that was the basis of all the modeling I did, and that was the basis of any sensible analysis of this law that’s been done by any expert, left and right.

I didn’t assume every state would set up its own exchanges but I assumed that subsidies would be available in every state. It was never contemplated by anybody who modeled or worked on this law that availability of subsidies would be conditional of who ran the exchanges.



Cohn, too, says he never spoke to anyone who mentioned this before the Halbig lawsuit. If this was actually what Congress thought the law would do, then liberals would have been freaking out about this provision for years, because it would mean that millions of people wouldn't be able to get coverage. And conservatives would have been crowing about it for years, for the same reason. But nobody on either side was, because it was never part of Congress's intent. It was a mistake, and one contradicted by multiple other provisions in the law.

I have no doubt that when the Halbig case is re-argued before the full D.C. Circuit, either the plaintiffs' attorneys or one of the conservative judges will bring up Gruber's 2012 comments. Let's just hope it gets shot down like the baloney it is.  Reported by The American Prospect 8 hours ago.

Hate going to the dentist? Probably not as much as Ashik Gavai.

On Monday, the 17-year-old spent seven hours in a dentist's chair in Mumbai, India, to deal with a rare, abnormal growth in his right jaw. At first, doctors weren't sure what they might find, but as the surgery progressed, they were astonished to learn the growth was comprised of 232 other teeth, reports the Times of India.

(Story continues below.)
"[The teeth] were of varying sizes, some as tiny as a grain of mustard and some almost the size of a marble." Dr Sunanda Dhivare-Palwankar, the head of the dental department at JJ Hospital, where Gavai was treated, told the paper. "The fact that it was coming from a single molar was very unique."

According to the BBC, Gavai first noticed the growth 18 months ago, but doctors in his local village couldn't pinpoint the source of the problem. Last month, he started experiencing severe pain, prompting a journey to Mumbai.

There, doctors diagnosed Gavai with a complex composite odontoma, a benign dental tumor, which, though it isn't life-threatening, can make eating difficult and cause facial disfigurations.

"I was worried that it [his condition] may turn out to be cancer so I brought him to Mumbai," the boy's father, Suresh Gavai, told the Mumbai Mirror. State government health insurance paid for the procedure, which otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive for the family.

Doctors expect the boy to make a full recovery. "Now, his face has changed and he will lead an absolutely normal healthy life," Dhivare-Palwankar told the Khaleej Times. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.

Health insurance carriers are being forced to reimburse Arizona policyholders more than $11 million because they are not meeting federal mandates that require them to provide value for consumers' premium dollar. The 80/20 rule of the Affordable Care Act offers consumer protection to 78 million people nationwide who have health insurance coverage through their employers or purchased their own health insurance in the individual market. The 80/20 rule also is known as the Medical Loss Ratio rule,… Reported by bizjournals 7 hours ago.

Vint Cerf and David Nordfors are the leaders of the i4j Innovation for Jobs Summit.

Some say all jobs may be automated. Perhaps next thing consumption will be automated, too, and then we are really in trouble. Seriously, something does not make sense with this way of thinking.

Instead, innovation may disrupt unemployment. With a new mindset that appreciates the value of people, innovation can drive unemployment "out of business." Everyone can have a good job.

It's not that we are innovating too much. The problem is that we are trying to run the new economy in the old way. The old way is about doing more of the same, more efficiently. It's about standardizing tasks, creating work manuals, and such things -- many of them very tedious and non-rewarding. Well, that's what machines are good at, so if this is only what the economy is about, yes -- we will be losing more jobs all the time. And now we are worried, because we can't imagine what people can do instead. So that's what we are lacking: imagination.

It's obvious: all people can create value for each other. There are no useless people. We "only" need an economy that lets people create value. People are more enabled than ever before. The smartphone is such an amazing tool that we are surprised every day by people doing new things we just didn't think of as something possible for people to do. Each unemployed person with a smartphone is in control of a super computer center packed with engineers, according to old norms. How can a sound economy of any sort avoid utilizing this amazing resource of empowered people? It's not like there are too few problems for people to solve or that people stopped wanting more out of life. How about fixing the climate, eradicating disease and stopping wars, to start with? There are an infinite number of new things to do.

If we become as innovative in creating good jobs as we are in creating innovative products and services, then the innovation economy is sustainable. Today there is a product or service being developed for every possible need and desire. Can the economy develop valuable jobs for every person, letting them do something that fits them like a tailored suit, creating the highest possible value and satisfaction for everyone involved? Then there will be an infinite number of job possibilities for a limited amount of people. People will be the scarce resource, not jobs. Imagine instead of getting a job because you can do something that other people (or machines) can do, you get a job because you are special in a way that creates real value for other people. An attractive aim for the innovation economy, we think.

What could this look like? Imagine starting a company that recruits you to their service, let's say it's called Jobly just to give it a name. With smart technology Jobly scans your skills, your talents, your passions, your experiences, your values, your social network, and so on. Joibly finds ways of testing the market for things you can do. Perhaps you say "I would like to paint pictures but I don't know how to earn money on it". Well, there is a fair chance among all the billions of people on the planet there are some people who are willing to pay you. Perhaps you try that for a few weeks, then you try something else, until you decide to settle for something that feels really meaningful that you do together with people you work well with. Finding the right job is a bit like finding the right partner, isn't it? Now, if Jobly takes a commission on what you earn, they have the incentive to make you as valuable as possible. Jobly will help you find the right courses so that you will earn better, increasing what they earn. Jobly may offer you health benefits, too, because if they have a few hundred million users, they can spread the risk, they will be your health insurance, too. You are the service they offer to their customers who buy work in order to create value. Jobly would be disrupting unemployment, tailoring jobs for the so called "unemployable". It's quite often that people carrying that label are among the best people we know, the ones that make us feel that something is seriously wrong with the labor market today. The ones that are amazing, only that they don't fit the slots, so sorry, too bad.

A business model like this one is good for both the micro and the macro-economy. It is for-profit driven, maximizes the value of people and minimizes the cost of tasks. It distributes wealth, creating happier workers and wealthier customers. It seeks and creates diversification, enabling people in society to do as many different things as possible together, thereby strengthening the ability of society and economy to deal with all types of challenges. It is a model for nurturing a middle class society in the innovation economy.

The value proposition is attractive. Think about it, only a fraction of all human capacity is being used today. So many people hate their jobs, The market size for disrupting unemployment is the difference between the value created this way today and the value created by all living people, fitted with tailored jobs they are passionate about, giving one hundred percent of their capacity. This might be the greatest business opportunity ever.

So what about automation killing jobs, then? Innovation is actually a very good thing in the economy we have described, because it frees up people so that they can do other things. But it has to be combined with innovation in tools, making people able to do new things that they could NOT do before. Smartphones are great. So is software for creativity and productivity.

People with disabilities, or who have suffered severe social challenges or who have been ill, don't have an easy time on the job market. But with the right tools they can be just as attractive as anyone else. They often have special skills that people with less challenging lives lack which can make them even more valuable. You won't find these things in the job descriptions of listed jobs.

Or look at those who are unique in other, very special ways, for example those who say they can see auras around people. It's not a recognized skill. A lot of scientists and other presumably rational people will say they are fakes. They are often into healing or alternative medicine which isn't accepted by the healthcare systems. Insurance won't cover it.

You won't find a single job description saying "we are looking for people who can see auras". There isn't a big market for aura healers. In 2012 researchers found a possible explanation to seeing auras. It's a condition called "synesthesia", crossed wires between the senses. There are people who see colors when they hear music, often excellent musicians, such as Tori Amos or Leonard Cohen. Research suggests that people who see auras have 'emotional synesthesia', their eyes see an augmented reality, colored by their feelings. This is a very valuable gift In a world where so many people are out of touch with themselves. People with emotional synesthesia will often be better at seeing when people are troubled, or spot when someone is lying, because they are emotional seismographs. They can excel in anything that requires gut feeling, which is quite a lot. They can be excellent neuropsychologists, work with improving human-computer interaction, or work with making video conferencing technology more efficient.

Almost no one knows about the 2012 research paper. Why should they? There is no incentive. Synesthesia is a very unusual gift and it's not like aura healers are important for the economy today. You won't see any job descriptions talking about it. This is a type of value that a company like Jobly can cultivate. Their intelligent system will be following the research and relevant discussions. They will know if you are a healer, because it's obvious from your emails. They will notify you, saying something like "you can be very good at reading people, check out this 2012 paper and these other sources if you want to know more". Jobly might go on asking "are you interested in working with something like building a new educational system in Country X?" because it turns out that country X, a place you like going to, is working on an anti-corruption program and are restructuring their educational system. They need people who are empathetic and can spot honest people that can be put to work with coaching kids. You already know people in country X that are involved in the project, it's only you aren't aware of it. They aren't aware that you might solve their problem, and they definitely don't know the 2012 research paper. Even if they know you are a healer, they won't make the connection to their project. Jobly will not tell you all it knows, it needs to keep discretion, but links can be made in each case. Let's say you are thrilled by the idea of spending some time in country X doing good work, and you are pretty excited about the 2012 paper which explained a bit more you who you are at the same time as suggesting how you might create value with it. So Jobly now gets in touch with your friends in country X, the ones working with the education system, presents them with the idea that people with emotional synesthesia might be relevant for building a corruption-free system. If they say this is something they would like to look into, Jobly lets you know, and then its up to you to get in touch. Jobly will let you know that some of your contacts might be good entry points. If you decide to go for a project together, Jobly will give you all the administrative tools you need to fix visas, taxes and so on. And 20% of the money goes to Jobly, for reinvestment in continued refinement of job and talent mining.

How big is the potential market for job innovation startups? Well, to start with, there is $100 billion in cash spent each year on unemployment insurance. Perhaps a part of that money can be used as incentive for job seekers and companies like Jobly to get going putting people's most valuable talents into use.

But unemployment not only costs tax dollars. That's the small part of it. Human capacity is probably the world's most underutilized resource, the worlds largest potential market. Think about it: In an average western country, only about half of all people are in the work force. About a tenth of those are officially out of work. So there might be a doubling of GDP already there.

Next, consider this joke: A visitor is being shown around a large workplace. He asks "Who many people are working here?" His host answers "About fifty percent". We all know it's true. There is perhaps another doubling of GDP just there. The market for disrupting unemployment might, in principle, quadruple the GDP. Can we even imagine a larger market opportunity?

To be honest, we must also not forget: not all of the work we depend on is paid work. It's a lot, spanning from being a good parent to community work, engaging in democracy, or developing Linux and Wikipedia. We DON'T even want this to be paid work. So disrupting unemployment means more than giving people paid jobs. It is about how we create wealth and wellbeing for everyone.

--

The i4j summit is a new leadership network bringing together business, policy, education and media leaders to share new ideas about innovation, learning and jobs.
http://iiij.org/i4j Reported by Huffington Post 6 hours ago.

POLITICO Influence: David Schwartz heads to the health insurance company as head of public policy. Reported by Politico 4 hours ago.

New Mexico decided Friday to stick with a federal online system for another year to enroll individuals in health insurance plans. Reported by Miami Herald 6 hours ago.

Summer is time to move for many of us — and with that come other changes as well.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  Reported by azcentral.com 5 hours ago.

In response to Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Once Again Ties Subsidies to State-Based Exchanges:

These are terrific finds, but Gruber wasn't the only one saying this stuff, and he's not the only reason ObamaCare critics have long maintained that the federal exchange is not empowered to dole out the New Dole - the health insurance subsidies every member of what we used to call "the middle class" is now dependent upon.  Senator Max Baucus said as much too, but it's even bigger than him.  

Quite a few members of the ObamaCare brain trust thought it was a good idea to offer subsidies as a reward for states that set up exchanges (or, to be less charitable, withhold them as punishment from states that refused.)  There was also a point when ObamaCare was supposed to require states to set up those exchanges, but the idea was dumped because it was feared state governments would rebel.  Imagine the level of resistance to this boondoggle in 2010 if the 36 states that declined to create exchanges had been marched into the system at gunpoint.  Instead, they were given a phantasmal option to decline, which was to be brutally yanked away from them once the system went live, and the people in refusenik states noticed that their comrades in compliant states were getting big tax subsidies to defray the high cost of ObamaCare insurance.  

This was supposed to be a trap that snapped shut in 2014.  My guess is that some of the boobs who crafted the Affordable Care Act forgot that other boobs had left the state exchange trap in place, after concluding it would not be necessary.  There was a lot of fractional wrangling and back-room dealing involved in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which was one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the United States.  (Remember such gems of pure corruption as the Cornhusker Kickback?)  

Also, as you can see from the Baucus video linked above, a good deal of ObamaCare's groundwork was laid parallel to state Medicaid programs.  The scam artists who wrote the Affordable Care Act wanted to turn the whole thing into a gigantic set of unfunded mandates, dumping fiscal responsibility onto state governments while keeping ultimate power in Washington.  When the whole thing ended up costing far more than promised in those ludicrous early projections, fingers of blame would be pointed at the states.  One of the big reasons HealthCareDotGov was such an unmitigated disaster is that some of ObamaCare's bureaucratic midwives didn't seriously think they would be expected to create a system that could handle 36 states.  (Those who paid careful attention to the wording of the Affordable Care Act would have noticed it made no provisions for a federal exchange system at all.)  

We should keep in mind that ObamaCare was designed to fail.  This whole thing was supposed to collapse in a few years and pave the way for single-payer socialized medicine.  That little bait-and-switch would be much easier to pull off if the imploding ObamaCare system looked like fifty separate state failures (or, more likely, a number of states failing catastrophically while others more-or-less made ObamaCare work.)  It's a tougher sell if the public sees a massive federal program falling to pieces... which is exactly what has been happening, years ahead of schedule.

So yes, there's every reason to think that many of the cooks stirring the sloppy ObamaCare pot intended the subsidy mechanism to work for states only, and never really intended a federal exchange at all.  Some of them were hoping to create a federal system that would run parallel to the corporatist pseudo-private ObamaCare network in the fifty state exchanges - the "public option" of yore.  Such a system would grind private insurance into dust over the coming decade, leaving only a public system that could be easily transitioned to single-payer socialized medicine.  It's not surprise to learn these factions were not on the same page, and the power-hungry politicians who signed their stupid bill into law had no idea what they were signing. Reported by Breitbart 5 hours ago.

Obamacare’s employer mandate may have been delayed, but it hasn’t been forgotten — at least by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has posted a draft version of the paperwork large employers will have to file about the health insurance coverage they provide to their workers. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers with 50 or more workers will be assessed penalties if they don’t provide ACA-compliant coverage. This employer mandate originally was scheduled to kick in this year, but the… Reported by bizjournals 5 hours ago.

Congress is taking so long to respond to the needs of veterans you’d think it was the VA. Rep. Curt Clawson won this year’s “Guam Capsize Award For Excellence in American Foreign Policy” when he sought to improve relations with the American government. And policy wonks spent the day debating whether a law called The Affordable Care Act is supposed to help people get health insurance. Did you know that "wonk" is K-N-O-W spelled backwards? This is HUFFPOST HILL for Friday, July 25th, 2014

*PEOPLE ARE FLIPPING OUT OVER JONATHAN GRUBER* - Y'all should chill, suggests Greg Sargent: "The big story of the day is that Obamacare foes have unearthed what they call a smoking gun: Video of Jonathan Gruber, a key architect for the Affordable Care Act, in January 2011 *seeming to endorse the argument that subsidies would not be available to those who get coverage on the federal exchange*. This seems to bolster the case made in Halbig — that the law never was intended to provide subsidies to the three dozen states without their own exchanges — which, if upheld by the Supreme Court, would gut the law….*I’ve tracked down several Gruber interviews and studies that show him discussing these subsidies as national in scope*, and undercut the idea that he thought at the time that subsidies wouldn’t go to states without their own exchanges." Obamacare is saved! [The Plum Line]

*DARRELL ISSA'S JUST SAYIN'* - Jen Bendery: "Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) conceded Friday that, despite his weeks-long effort to subpoena White House political adviser David Simas to testify before his committee, there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Simas' office. Issa said during a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which he chairs, that he's not demanding that Simas testify because he thinks the White House Office of Political Affairs has inappropriately engaged in political campaign activities. Rather, Issa said, it's the potential for that office to overstep the line in the future that he wants to examine. '*We are accusing neither the president nor this four-person office of any wrongdoing*,' Issa said, adding, 'I allege no wrongdoing.'" [HuffPost]

*CONGRESS TRYING TO SAVE VA REFORM* - "Come back home to the refinery/ Hiring man says "son if it was up to me" /Went down to see my V.A. man he said "Son, the bill's tied up in conferenceeeeee" Sam Stein: "With the likelihood of passing legislation to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs dwindling rapidly, top Republican and Democratic staffers are making a last-ditch effort to find a compromise before the August recess. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who chairs its counterpart in the House, spoke to each other on Thursday night, according to Miller. It was the first conversation the two have had since Monday, and Sanders aide Michael Briggs characterized it as 'productive.' Meanwhile, committee staffers have spent Friday working on an agreement, and according to Briggs, 'Bernie expects to be talking to Miller again this weekend.' Miller, likewise, seemed to go out of his way to keep the door open to finding a last-minute deal. In a gaggle with reporters on Friday he said that he and Sanders were working toward putting legislation together and that he would stay in Washington, D.C., through the weekend if necessary. 'I don’t intend on going home for the break without a deal,' Miller said. Sanders was in Philadelphia on Friday afternoon to speak at the National Association of Letter Carriers' convention and planned to head to Vermont afterward. But Briggs said Sanders was prepared to return to Washington if it would help. Neither side would go into great detail about what major sticking points remain, but Miller maintained that money was the primary issue. Sanders and VA officials have said that billions of dollars will be needed to cut down on wait times for veterans seeking medical care. Miller has resisted that request and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has called it the equivalent of a blank check, even though Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson has asked for an actual dollar amount ($17 billion)." [HuffPost]

*HuffPost Haircuts:* Christina Wilkie Sumner, and Arthur Delaney trimmed his sideburns.

*ETHICS PANEL INVESTIGATING BOBBY RUSH, ED WHITFIELD* - Politico: "The House Committee on Ethics announced plans on Friday to extend separate reviews of Illinois Democrat Rep. Bobby Rush and Kentucky Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield. The two notices from the committee do not detail the charges against the congressmen but said both cases were referred to the panel on June 10. 'The Committee notes that the mere fact of a referral or an extension, and the mandatory disclosure of such an extension and the name of the subject of the matter, does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the Committee,’ the notice states...The Office of Congressional Ethics was investigating Rush for potentially using campaign funds for the Beloved Community Christian Church in Chicago. POLITICO previously reported that Whitfield was helping shepherd controversial animal welfare legislation in the House. His wife, Connie Harriman-Whitfield, a lobbyist for the Humane Society Legislative Fund, is urging Congress to support that bill. " [Politico]

*GUY WHO REPLACED TREY RADEL IS SORT OF A GOOFBALL* - A poor man's King Ralph maybe? John Hudson: "In an intensely awkward congressional hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, freshman Rep. Curt Clawson misidentified two senior U.S. government officials as representatives of the Indian government. The two officials, Nisha Biswal and Arun Kumar, are Americans who hold senior positions at the State Department and Commerce Department, respectively. Although both Biswal and Kumar were introduced as U.S. officials by the chairman of the Asia and Pacific subcommittee, Clawson repeatedly asked them questions about 'your country' and 'your government,' in reference to the state of India. '*I'm familiar with your country; I love your country,' the Florida Republican said*. 'Anything I can do to make the relationship with India better, I'm willing and enthusiastic about doing so.'" [Foreign Policy]

You know what would have helped Clawson focus? Cocaine.

*DAILY DELANEY DOWNER* - PASTED: The Email of the Low Wage Worker: "My unemployment benefits ran out in December of 2013. I am working part-time as a Customer Service rep for $11 an hour. I earn about $250 a week. I still put in three or four resumes every single day, but no one is calling. No one is e-mailing me. If it weren’t for a trickle of income from art commissions and the generous donations from a Facebook campaign started by one of my subscribers, I would already be on the street." [Hang in there!]

*Do you like things that are sad?* Sign up for Delaney's miserable weekly newsletter here.

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*HOUSE PASSES MUCH-NEEDED RICH KID STIMULUS* - Because if we as a country can't provide Mackenzie and Kyle with new iPads, then what the hell are we doing? Mike McAuliff: "The House of Representatives voted Friday *to change a tax credit in a way that would add $115 billion to the deficit and hurt poorer parents while aiding the well-to-do. By a vote of 237-173, mostly along party lines, the House decided to make permanent the child tax credit and expand it to families earning up to $205,000 a year*. The credit, which is worth up to $1,000 for each child in a family, would also be indexed to rise with inflation, as would the eligibility thresholds. But the new measure fails to extend the part of the credit that was passed in 2009 to help impoverished families and that currently allows parents with annual earnings as low as $3,000 to claim some of the break. That element expires in 2017. Without it, a family would have to earn at least $15,000 to qualify for the credit. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, that means a mom working full time at a minimum wage job would receive no help from the credit -- because she would be earning only $14,500. Indeed, that mom would lose $1,725 under the new bill, while a family of four earning $150,000 would gain $2,200, according to the center's analysis. About 12 million people, including 6 million children, would be pushed further into poverty if the measure became law. Democrats contrasted Friday's vote with the speech delivered Thursday by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, who vowed to make a new GOP push to reduce poverty." [HuffPost]

*The House did try to put checks on one particular rich kid, however*: "The House of Representatives sent a bipartisan message to President Barack Obama Friday, warning the commander-in-chief that lawmakers do not want him to escalate war in Iraq without first going to Congress for permission. Passed by a large 370 to 40 majority, the resolution declares: 'The President shall not deploy or maintain United States Armed Forces in a sustained combat role in Iraq without specific statutory authorization for such use enacted after the date of the adoption of this concurrent resolution.' It's unclear whether the Senate would pass such a resolution, or whether it would trump the two authorizations to use military force that Congress granted the White House after 2001, both of which remain in effect. Nevertheless, lawmakers intended Friday's vote as a strong signal to Obama that they want him to go to them first, before a crisis might force him to take aggressive military action in a situation that both parties acknowledged could deteriorate even further than it has already." [McAuliff]

*WHITE HOUSE BRACING FOR IMPEACHMENT ATTEMPT BY BOEHNER* - Sam Stein: "One of President Barack Obama's top advisers said on Friday that he expects House Republicans will ultimately file articles of impeachment against the president. Dan Pfeiffer, a senior aide who has been with the administration since Obama first took office, told reporters that he anticipated that a lawsuit filed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) over executive actions taken by the president on health care would ultimately not be enough to satisfy some of the more vocal conservatives in Congress. Pfeiffer added that coming executive actions surrounding immigration reform would only stoke the impeachment flames. 'I think a lot of people in this town laugh that off,' said Pfeiffer. '*I would not discount that possibility. I think that Speaker Boehner, by going down this path of this lawsuit, has opened the door to Republicans possibly considering impeachment at some point in the future.'* Speaking at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Pfeiffer based his prediction on several factors. The first was former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) calling for articles of impeachment to be drawn over the president's executive action allowing certain young undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. The second was a CNN poll released Friday morning showing that while just 33 percent of the country supported impeachment, a full 57 percent of Republicans were in favor of it... Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel emailed the following response to Pfeiffer, 'We have a humanitarian crisis at our border, and the White House is making matters worse with inattention and mixed signals. It is telling, and sad, that a senior White House official is focused on political games, rather than helping these kids and securing the border.'" [HuffPost]

*Push polling update*: "In the wake of a lawsuit in the works against President Barack Obama, some Republicans like Sarah Palin have been calling for the House of Representatives to go a step further and impeach the president. Two new polls out this week, from CNN and Fox News, both asked the public to weigh in...Despite Fox's one-sided framing of the question, the results of the two polls were strikingly similar. In this case, people turned out to be against impeaching Obama regardless of how the question was phrased. Just 33 percent of Americans in the CNN survey, and 36 percent of voters in the Fox one, supported impeachment -- about the same percentage who favored impeaching the last two presidents." [HuffPost's Ariel Edwards-Levy]

*GOP STILL HAMMERING OUT BORDER PLAN* - "Alright, so we're nixing tax credits for people who self-deport, any new ideas?" Elise Foley: "With only a week to go before the August recess, House Republicans have yet to coalesce around the specifics of a bill to address the border crisis, but likely will approve less than a third of the funding the president requested. *Members said after meeting on Friday that they hope to take up legislation next week that would provide less than $1 billion -- down from the $1.5 billion discussed earlier this week -- to deal with the more than 57,000 unaccompanied minors who have been apprehended crossing the U.S. border illegally since October. The $1.5 billion in funding previously discussed is already far below Obama's $3.7 billion request and the Senate's proposal for $2.7 billion*. That issue of funding, and the likelihood that any House package will be attached to measures Democrats oppose, could make it impossible that anything will get done before Congress leaves town for a month. While members mostly agreed they should do something, they still haven't finalized a bill.'There's a lot of nervousness among a lot of the members about a lot of things,' Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) told reporters after the Republican meeting. 'Some are nervous that we won't do anything, some are nervous that we'll do too much. ... These conversations are always fascinating because you'll start with a range of opinions about this far apart, and eventually you begin to see what the consensus is. We are not at that point yet.'" [HuffPost]

*BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR* - Here's a cat in a hat.

*BUT IS IT GOOD FOR THE CRUZ?, PT 4,327,691* - BuzzFeed: "Sen. Ted Cruz will still hold all State Department nominations despite the fact that it could further delay the U.S. posting an ambassador to Russia, his office said on Friday. 'Yes he still has a hold on noms and wants answers to his basic questions,' Cruz spokesperson Catherine Frazier said. Cruz said earlier this week that he would hold all State Department nominations that are set to come before the Senate until he has answers about the Federal Aviation Administration’s ban on U.S. carriers flying to Tel Aviv in the midst of the Gaza war, which has since been lifted. Cruz accused the Obama administration of using the flight ban as a way to punish Israel: 'The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign policy demands,' he said on Wednesday. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf called the accusation 'ridiculous and offensive.' *One of the nominations that could be affected by Cruz’s hold is that of John Tefft, President Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Russia. He is scheduled to have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations committee on Tuesday.* The U.S. has not had a permanent ambassador in Russia since February, when former ambassador Michael McFaul resigned. Meanwhile, tensions with Russia have begun to boil over as the crisis in Ukraine continues." [BuzzFeed]

*COMFORT FOOD*

- A supercut of computer hacking in 1980s movies. [http://bit.ly/1qEbfyd]

- "Game of Thrones" emojis are coming. [http://uproxx.it/1unnwIR]

- How to disarm a live mine, you know, just in case. [http://bit.ly/1pgVedI]

- Why R.E.M.'s "Out of Time" might be the most politically important album of all time. [http://bit.ly/1onDWwe]

- Infographic showing the best and worst days in stock market history . [http://bit.ly/1rEc87O]

- Kristen Bell stars in a Mary Poppins spoof arguing for a higher minimum wage. [http://huff.to/1rEbB66]

- A cubist interpretation of Tupac. [http://bzfd.it/1rEdXSc]

*TWITTERAMA*

@daveweigel: Go easy on Rep. Curt Clawson. Why, I hear he turned in a 14-page thesis about foreign policy.

@jpodhoretz: I've said it before: If Hamas had been put in charge of the 2nd Avenue Subway it would have been done by now.

@seungminkim: My fave response of the day: Granger, when asked how children will be returned home (presumed changes to '08 law), she says: "Well, planes."

*Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com) or Arthur Delaney (arthur@huffingtonpost.com). Follow us on Twitter @HuffPostHill (twitter.com/HuffPostHill). Sign up here: http://huff.to/an2k2e* Reported by Huffington Post 3 hours ago.

A state health insurance exchange official says a recent federal court ruling shouldn't prevent New Mexicans from qualifying for premium subsidies. Reported by Miami Herald 4 hours ago.

Gilead has become the whipping boy du jour for the forthcoming Obamacare-driven cost explosion in health spending. Politicians and the health-insurance industry have embarked on a high-profile campaign to shame Gilead for the price of its new wonder-drug, Sovaldi. If successful, this campaign will have terrible long-term consequences for medical innovation. Reported by Forbes.com 55 minutes ago.