You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
According to @loujacobson of @PolitiFact, if a President promises NOT to do a thing, then TRIES to do a thing but fails because Congress shot it down, that means they "kept their promise." 2/
So if I promise NOT to commit murder, and once elected I *attempt* to commit murder but I'm stopped by the police before I can pull it off, I guess that means I get credit for "keeping my promise". 3/
By this logic, if Bernie Sanders was elected President and *tried* to pass #M4All but failed to do so because Congress shot it down, he would still have "kept his promise" because "he tried".

HEY EVERYONE! IT TURNS OUT OBAMA PASSED UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS AFTER ALL!
I'd like to point out that @PolitiFact often does good work--I've been used as a resource by them myself on a number of ACA/healthcare issues--but this is absurd.

They seriously need to add a new category: Image
Here's a fun story for you: Throughout 2017, Trump kept on vowing to "blow up" and destroy the #ACA exchanges by cutting off CSR reimbursement payments to insurance carriers.

He THOUGHT that doing this would cut subsidies off to millions of low-income ACA enrollees. 1/
What Trump DIDN'T understand (to be fair it's a bit counter-intuitive) is that ACA CSR subsidies work differently from ACA premium subsidies.

With *premium* subsidies, the federal gov't pays a portion of your premiums for you to the carriers. 2/
With CSR subsidies, however, the CARRIERS agree to pay a chunk of your deductible/co-pays to the healthcare *provider* (doc/hospital), and was then *reimbursed* by the federal government the following month. That's a critical difference, which Trump clearly didn't understand. 3/
So instead of screwing over millions of low-income enrollees as he intended, he actually screwed over the *insurance carriers* out of several billion dollars in *reimbursed expenses* they were contractually obligated to cover. 4/
Now, you may think "hooray! screw the insurance carriers!"...except that a) the feds broke a legal contract and b) the carriers made up for it by changing their policy pricing to something called #SilverLoading, which I've written about a few times... 5/
The carriers figured out how much they expected to have to shell out in CSR payments the following year & tacked that onto their *premium hikes* instead. As a result, in 2018, average ACA premiums jumped a whopping ~27% on average...over half of which was to cover CSR losses. 6/
However, most of the carriers ended up doing something very smart: Instead of spreading the CSR cost evenly across all of their policies, they loaded all their CSR chips onto *Silver* plans only (thus #SilverLoading). This resulted in some very interesting pricing. 7/
In some parts of the country, this meant that some Gold plans ended up costing around the same as some Silver plans...but more importantly, ACA *premium* subsidies are based on *the cost of Silver plans* (1 specific Silver plan, actually). 8/
Because of this, if that benchmark Silver plan premium increases *more than the Bronze or Gold plans*, it results in several million ACA enrollees seeing their premium subsidies increase dramatically, especially when applied to a Bronze or Gold plan instead of Silver. 9/
In the end, more people ended up benefitting from #SilverLoading in the form of reduced subsidies than those who lost out by having to pay higher (unsubsidized) prices.

Using this PolitiFact logic, Trump "deserves credit" for "lowering premiums for Obamacare enrollees"... 10/
...even though 1) he was trying to do the exact opposite; 2) he had nothing to do w/#SilverLoading whatsoever; 3) he's being successfully sued in court by the insurance carriers for cutting off those payments; and 4) his own HHS Dept. tried to stop #SilverLoading for awhile. 11/
By PolitiFact's logic, if Trump tried to shoot me while I'm standing in front of an ATM, but he hit the ATM instead and it started spitting out $20 bills, I'm apparently supposed to praise him for "giving me free money" instead of having him arrested for attempted murder. /END
CORRECTION: In #10 above, that should read "in the form of reduced PREMIUMS", not "reduced SUBSIDIES"! Sorry for the confusion.
Hitler, 1932: "If elected, I promise not to kill all the Jews!"

PolitiFact, 1945: "There were 15 million Jews worldwide and Hitler only killed 6 million of them before being stopped by Allied forces, so #PromiseKept!"
I know that's a cheap shot, but as @sfmnemonic noted:

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More from @charles_gaba

Feb 21
📣⚠️ NEW: As I've been expecting for over a month and as I hinted at last week, the Red/Blue COVID death rate divide, which had been significantly reduced during the #Omicron wave, has started moving back up again:
acasignups.net/22/02/21/weekl…
There was one point in late September when the daily COVID death rate in the reddest decile of the U.S. was running nearly NINE TIMES HIGHER than in the bluest decile.

The gap between the extremes shrank down to almost nothing by late January...but is moving back up again now.
No idea how long this upswing will last & I doubt it will ever reach the extremes of the Delta wave...but the reason is pretty clear: Omicron, like prior variants, hit the most densely populated urban (blue) areas hard first, but is now spreading out into the rural (red) areas.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 21
📣 WEEKLY UPDATE: County-level COVID vaccination rates by 2020 partisan lean:
acasignups.net/22/02/21/weekl…
⚠️ AMERICA IN ONE IMAGE, updated thru today: Image
--There's now 13 U.S. counties w/694K residents where over 90% of their total populations have received their 2nd shot.

--There's 50 counties w/16.5M residents where over 80% have gotten a 2nd shot.

--There's 204 counties w/79.5M residents where over 70% have gotten a 2nd shot.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 20
Well, for starters, this is comparing the entire state of Florida (including the vast rural counties) against the CITY of New York (one of the most densely-populated areas of the country).
At a MINIMUM you’d have to compare the STATE of NY (roughly 20M) vs the STATE of Florida. Also, I don’t think he wants me to compare the states from last September, for instance.
Here's NYC *plus* the rest of NY STATE (they're listed separately).

Jan 2021: 6,293 deaths
Jan 2022: 5,506 deaths
= 12.5% *fewer* deaths statewide in NY in Jan 2022 vs. Jan 2021.

A smaller drop than FL's 33.5% drop, sure...but a hell of a lot different from a 32% *increase*.
Read 8 tweets
Feb 19
Been feeling kind of crappy the past few days so I decided to go ahead and use one of the 4 at-home COVID tests we received via USPS. My wife, kid & I are all vaxxed/boosted but you never know these days...

Will have the results in another 8 minutes or so.
Re. the test itself, for those who haven't used an at-home one yet: It's not too bad/complicated, but the nasal swab part is much worse than a PCR test--instead of 1 nostril for 5 seconds, you have to swab *both* nostrils for *15* seconds each.

Much sneezing resulted.
Annnnd…it’s negative.
Which means either a) I don’t have COVID, b) I did something wrong, or c) it’s a false negative. Image
Read 5 tweets
Feb 8
📣 (warning: long thread w/50+ graphics)

It's been another 3 months, so I figured it's a good time to again break out COVID county-level, 2-dose, total population vaccination rates for all 50 states.

Again, I use CDC data for most states, w/state health dept. data for a few. 1/
ALABAMA: Fairly weak partisan correlation, mainly because the vaccination rate sucks pretty much EVERYWHERE. It does form an odd snake shape, though.

The graph on the right (w/out background graphics/etc) includes children 5-11 only.
ALASKA: AK has always been all over the place on COVID vaccination rates. Bristol Bay has supposedly vaxxed *over* 100% of its population which is impossible; this is caused by a variety of factors including error margin etc. I've set a max cap of 98% for any county's vaxx rate.
Read 51 tweets
Feb 7
@RachelBitecofer Well, I haven't looked at 5-11 specifically, but it's pretty clear here. Notice how *both* the R^2 (correlation) *and* slope stopped climbing/leveled off around September, stayed flat for 2 months, and then started climbing again right after Thanksgiving?
@RachelBitecofer Guess what happened right around Thanksgiving?

Hypothesis: For the most part, mostly-Dem vaxxed parents vaxxed their kids; mostly-GOP unvaxxed parents refused to vaxx their kids.
Read 5 tweets

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