Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Just two items in today’s roundup, but they’re big ones. In Montana, Rep. Steve Daines is caught red-handed trying to mislead with statistics on the Affordable Care Act. And in the state of Washington, a huge crack in the Wanapum Dam on the Columbia River could have a ripple effect that reaches upstream all the way to the Flathead.
This is a good example of how to mislead with statistics. In 2011, the Obama administration made a deal with the Republican devils in Congress:
The “Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011” required this report to Congress [PDF] on the impact of sections 2701 through 2703 of the Public Health Service (PHS) Act, as amended by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the premiums paid by individuals and families with employer-sponsored health insurance. Specifically, the Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is to provide an estimate of the number of individuals and families who will experience a premium increase and the number who will see a decrease as a result of these three provisions.
Released on 21 February 2014, the report — which does not estimate how much premiums will rise or fall — was released on 21 February 2014 concludes:
Specifically, we have estimated that the premium rates for roughly 11 million people will increase and about 6 million people are expected to experience a premium rate reduction due to sections 2701 through 2703 of the PHS Act.
So, the fair reading of the report is that premiums will change for 17 million. Eleven million may see an increase of one cent or more. And — and this is what Daines omitted from his email — Six million may see a decrease of one cent or more.
That’s called cherry picking the data. It’s also called lying by omission.
And it doesn’t provide any context for why some premiums will increase and some policies will be canceled.
That context is simple: the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, sets standards for health insurance that many old, el cheapo, policies with high deductibles can’t meet. People owning non-ACA compliant policies who became seriously ill discovered their health insurance was junk insurance that didn’t pay, or didn’t pay enough, when needed most by the policyholders. That was the reason it was cheaper.
It’s hard to believe an elected official so disdains the welfare of his constituents that he seeks a return to the days of junk health insurance. But seeking that return is exactly what Steve Daines is doing.
That’s the dam visible three miles downstream from the I-90 bridge across the Columbia River at Vantage, WA. After noticing an out of spec bowing in the dam and an out of alignment spillway gate, engineers found a 65-foot crack in one of the massive concrete piers to which the gate was attached.
A spokesman for the dam said the crack was a serious matter, and he wasn’t kidding. It’s possible the pier has sheared and moved slightly. And it’s also possible that the other piers could incur similar damage. The extent of the damage required notifying governments downstream that the dam was damaged, and damaged to the extent that a failure of the dam, while unlikely, was a possibility.
The water behind the dam is being lowered 20 feet to take pressure off the structure while further inspections are made and while repairs are being designed.
Unlike Hungry Horse Dam, Wanapum is not a storage dam. The pool behind Wanapum holds approximately one million acre-feet of water, but the pool serves mainly to provide a hydraulic head for the turbines. Wanapum is essentially a run-of-the-river dam, so once the pool upstream of the dam is lowered, the Priest Rapids Dam a few miles downstream should not be in danger of damage or failure.
But river and powerplant managers throughout the northwest will be scrambling to replace the 1,000 megawatt output from Wanapum. That could have a ripple effect reaching to the headwaters of the Columbia River system. Those headwaters include the Flathead River.