Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty December 23, 2013 Merry Imminent Christmas! There will be no Jolts until December 27. Happy Obamacare Deadline Day! The News Is Still Bad Happy Obamacare Deadline Day! You've got to pick a plan by the end of today (and send in that payment!) to make sure you have health insurance for the coming year. Say, AP, how's that going? As a key enrollment deadline hits today, many people without health insurance have been sizing up policies on the new government health care marketplace and making what seems like a logical choice: They're picking the cheapest one. Increasingly, experts in health insurance are becoming concerned that many of these first-time buyers will be in for a shock when they get medical care next year and discover they're on the hook for most of the initial cost. The prospect of sticker shock after Jan. 1, when those who sign up for policies now can begin getting coverage, is seen as a looming problem for a new national system that has been plagued by trouble since the new marketplaces went online in the states in October… Hospitals are worried that those who rack up uncovered medical bills next year won't be able to pay them, perpetuating one of the problems the new health care system is supposed to solve. The Affordable Care Act doesn't actually make care affordable. To celebrate, Senator Joe Manchin's calling it a "meltdown": President Barack Obama's healthcare law could have a "meltdown" and make it difficult for his Democratic Party to keep control of the U.S. Senate next year if ongoing problems with the program are not resolved, a Democratic senator said on Sunday. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has urged delaying a penalty for people who do not enroll for health insurance in 2014 under the law, told CNN that a transitional year was needed for the complex healthcare program, commonly known as Obamacare, to work. "If it's so much more expensive than what we anticipated and if the coverage is not as good as what we had, you've got a complete meltdown at that time," Manchin told CNN's "State of the Union" program. "It falls of its own weight, if basically the cost becomes more than we can absorb, absolutely." And look at the poll result that Obama gets to unwrap this week! Support for the country's new health care law has dropped to a record low, according to a new national poll. And a CNN/ORC International survey released Monday also indicates that most Americans predict that the Affordable Care Act will actually result in higher prices for their own medical care. Only 35% of those questioned in the poll say they support the health care law, a 5-point drop in less than a month. Sixty-two percent say they oppose the law, up four points from November. The uninsured remain persistently difficult to reach -- almost as if they don't care nearly as much about obtaining insurance as they say to pollsters: Despite White House and state efforts to promote the Affordable Care Act, some people still don't have health insurance or any idea how to sign up for it. Take Corryn Young, a 32-year-old dental hygienist in Fort Collins, Colorado. She knows she needs to get health insurance but is a little vague on the details. "What my income would qualify me for, when I need to be signed up, what type of deductibles they have to offer - that kind of stuff overwhelms me," she says. There are people available to help Young with all those questions. The White House has set aside more than a quarter of a billion dollars nationally to pay navigators to give people face-to-face help buying coverage and applying for new subsidies to make it more affordable. But all the effort had netted about 23,000 customers for private insurance in the state's marketplace as of Dec. 14 -- only about 17 percent of the way to the state's goal of enrolling 136,000 people by the end of March.
In Maryland, they're having a blue-vs.-blue Christmas:
Maryland gubernatorial candidate Doug Gansler is incensed over the botched rollout of Affordable Care Act. He's aghast at chronic problems with Maryland's online enrollment platform and stunned that a state with "literally the smartest people in the country" would have hired a company from North Dakota, of all places, to help put its exchange in place. The whole spectacle, Gansler fumes, "is almost like a Saturday Night Live skit." The punch line: Gansler, Maryland's current attorney general, is a Democrat. Do Not Emulate the Characters in Love Actually. Thank You Next to "does Die Hard count as a Christmas movie?", the most highly-charged, furious debate in certain corners of the Internet this month has been whether the 2003 British romantic comedy Love Actually ranks among the all time best of holiday films and romantic comedies or whether it's actually an astonishingly bad one that demonstrates how audiences have become conditioned to feel romantic joy simply by hearing the right music and watching handsome and pretty faces. Christopher Orr threw down the gauntlet by declaring the movie was in fact the least romantic movie of all time. Emma Green punched back. Love Actually is one of those movies that's enjoyable as you're watching it but quickly falls apart if you think about it too much after wards. You walk out the theater feeling good, but when you catch it on cable a year or two or ten later, you realize some long stretches are awful. This movie is beloved because of the performances of about half of its British-acting-all-star-game cast -- it's as if George Steinbrenner became a London casting director -- covering up for the problems in the other half of its intertwined storylines. When people say they love this movie, they're probably thinking of the storylines of Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon, Liam Neeson and Thomas Brodie-Sangster, and Bill Nighy's lunatic aging rocker, Billy Mack. (When I saw it in the theater, the moment Rowan Atkinson's face appeared on screen, the audience started giggling. He's accumulated such a record from Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and other performances that we're conditioned to start laughing upon sight of him.) So what's wrong with this movie? For starters, for a story entitled Love Actually, character after character and scene after scene offer a creepy obsession with sex. This is not a prudish complaint. I'll put my capacity to enjoy bawdy sexual humor up against anyone else's. I'd rank the first three seasons of BBC's Coupling among the all-time funniest television comedies ever. But Love Actually blurs the line between love and sex a lot, resulting in a slew of scenes and dialogue that range from off-key to creepy: - In consoling her widower friend, Emma Thompson offers a presumably tongue-in-cheek pep talk that just comes across as creepy: "Get a grip. People hate sissies. No one's ever gonna shag you if you cry all the time." Even as a joke, that's a horrible, horrible thing to say to a widower who's just expressed his fears about how his son is coping.
- Alan Rickman instructs his cleavage-y, eager-to-seduce assistant, "Find a venue, over-order on the drinks, bulk buy the guacamole and advise the girls to avoid Kevin if they want their breasts unfondled." Oh, that Kevin and his groping! He's incorrigible!
- The office Christmas party is held at an art gallery where the art is giant nude images with small santa hats, etc. covering the bare minimum.
- Colin Firth's real moment of attraction to his Portuguese maid is when she strips down to her underwear. Keep in mind, until the closing scenes, they don't speak the same language and can barely communicate -- but upon seeing her naked, he realizes she's the love of his life.
- Billy strips on national television.
- In a scene so horrible it appears to have wandered in from some other movie, an awkward, lanky Brit goes to Milwaukee and finds all of his sex fantasies come to life. It feels like a dream sequence, until the closing scene reaffirms that yes, one Hollywood sex-symbol actress after another indeed fall in love with the Brit.
One subplot finds two stand-ins on a porn film, nakedly mimicking every position under the sun, having actual conversations as the camera guys and lighting guys work around them. These are genuinely funny scenes, but it also guarantees that we get naked people thrusting every fifteen minutes or so. Probably the most problematic storyline, one that is nearly impossible to like if you spend more than a moment thinking about it, is Andrew Lincoln's stalker-like expression of love to his best friend's wife, Keira Knightly. His closing message to her, written on cue cards at her doorstep, is: "But for now, let me say, without hope for agenda, just because it's Christmas (and at Christmas you tell the truth) to me you are perfect. My wasted heart will love you until you look like this [showing a mummy)." What set me off is that opening, "For now." For now? For now? What, a year from now, when your marriage to my friend is on the rocks, then I'll woo you? Everyone else writing about this movie seems to interpret her good-bye kiss to him as a platonic farewell, but I'd note it's on the lips and she grabs lapels in frustration and gives him a look that says precisely the opposite. She wishes she could be with him and she's sorely tempted. After she goes back inside, he says at the end of the scene, by himself, "enough now," which some interpret as a sign that he's telling himself to let go; I always heard it and interpreted it as "that's enough for now" -- he's gotten a kiss from her on the lips, and he knows she wants him back; that's enough to make him happy . . . for now. He'll probably make another grand romantic gesture behind his best friend's back by Valentine's Day. (Lapsing into geek for a moment: Yes, I know someday Andrew Wilson will grow up to be the sheriff on Walking Dead, so he's a little tougher than he looks, but Keira Knightly's husband is Chiwetel Ejiofor, and he's an operative of the Parliament from Serenity. He's going to make his friend fall on his sword!)
Chris Orr suggests that this scene, which makes most audience-members go "awww" is in fact the behavior of two lunatics: No normal, halfway decent person would behave as Lincoln does, and no normal, halfway decent person would receive such a gesture with giggles and then reward the gesturer with a kiss—even a chaste one—while her new husband waited upstairs, oblivious. Indeed, it's interesting to contrast this subplot (wife lies to husband, kisses his explicitly amorous best friend), which the film presents as completely adorable, with the [Alan] Rickman-[Emma] Thompson one (man lies to wife, buys necklace for his explicitly amorous assistant), which the film presents as a life-altering and possibly unforgivable betrayal. Love Actually aims to show us all the joys and pain of love, which is why we have seven or eight intertwined stories and about sixteen major characters. But this ambitious range means we get awkward Brit guy's American sex fantasy AND Thompson's heartbreaking reaction to her conclusion that her husband is having an affair within a few scenes of each other, which is like having Naked Gun scenes spliced into Masterpiece Theater. ADDENDUM: From CBS News: Lesley Stahl: Officials in the intelligence community have actually been untruthful both to the American public in hearings in Congress and to the FISA Court.
Susan Rice: There have been cases where they have inadvertently made false representations. Somebody's going on Santa's naughty list!
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