Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @smencimer

Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Top Obamacare Critic's Op-Eds Drafted by PR Firm That Reps Drug, Health Care Clients

Meet the magic PR elves fueling Sally Pipes' prolific anti-health-care-reform punditry.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Jul. 19, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Last Tuesday, a week after the Supreme Court's ruling upholding Obamacare, Sally Pipes appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to enumerate the evils of the law. The president of the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based free-market think tank, Pipes warned members of Congress that if they didn't act quickly Americans would soon suffer the rationed care and long waits supposedly plaguing her native Canada. The country's health care system, she insisted, had killed her mother by refusing to test her for colon cancer, which she later died from.

Pipes' appearance on Capitol Hill, days before the House voted for the 33rd time to repeal Obamacare, capped a busy two weeks for the prominent critic of the president's health reform law. In just the 24 hours following the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision, Pipes churned out thousands of words of outraged copy, publishing columns in the National Review Online, the Orange County Register, the Daily Caller, Human Events, and elsewhere—all while running her small think tank and keeping up her typically frenetic schedule of media interviews. All of this cemented her status as a leading voice of Obamacare opposition. Along with a constant stream of op-eds and TV appearances in recent years, she has also authored three books since 2008 lambasting health care reform.

[Read the full article]

Advertise on MotherJones.com

GOP Health Care Plan Is Still a Dud

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Jul. 12, 2012 3:04 AM PDT

This week, the House GOP voted for the 33rd time to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Obama's signature health care reform law. But the only alternative they've offered up to the Democratic plan is essentially the same one they've been pitching for more than a decade: more restrictions on medical malpractice lawsuits, which they claim are out of control and a significant driver of health care costs. On Tuesday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) spent a considerable amount of his time at a hearing on the impact of the ACA on patients and doctors grilling a Democratic witness about his stance on "tort reform," or limits on jury awards in malpractice suits, making clear that this is the only thing the GOP has to offer by way of alternative health care policy.

Unfortunately for the GOP's would-be tort reformers, a new report out from the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen shows that malpractice lawsuit payouts are now at an all-time historic low, having fallen steadily for the past eight years without any impact whatsoever on escalating health care costs. Highlights from the report:

The number of malpractice payments on behalf of doctors (9,758 payments) was the lowest on record, having fallen for the eighth consecutive year;
The inflation-adjusted value of payments made on behalf of doctors ($3.2 billion) was the lowest on record. In actual dollars, payments have fallen for eight straight years and are at their lowest level since 1998;
The average size of medical malpractice payments (about $327,000) declined from previous years
Medical malpractice payments' share of the nation's health care cost was the lowest on record (just 0.12 percent of all national health care costs)

The report also challenges the notion pushed by Republicans that most malpractice lawsuits are frivolous. More than 40 percent of the lawsuit payments were in cases where people had been killed, turned into quadriplegics, or left brain damaged or in need of lifelong medical care thanks to negligence on the part of doctors or hospitals. Overall, 80 percent of the payments went to people who had major, significant and permanent injuries.

Public Citizen says there is simply no evidence that restricting malpractice lawsuits even further will have any impact on health care costs. The report points out that Texas, home state of Rep. Lamar Smith (R), who has sponsored the main tort reform legislation in Congress, severely restricted the rights of injured people to sue back in 2003. Malpractice lawsuit payouts in the state plummeted 65 percent by 2010. At the same time, though, per-patient Medicare costs and private insurance rates grew at rates faster than the national average.

The sharp decline in lawsuit payouts is going to make it even harder for the GOP to make the already weak case that preventing victims of medical negligence from suing will somehow fix the broken health care system. At some point, they really are going to have to come up with something else.

On Health Care Reform: US Chamber 2, Tea Party 0

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Jun. 28, 2012 1:06 PM PDT

Chief Justice John Roberts administers the oath of office to President Barack Obama.

Tea party activists are understandably apoplectic over Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding President Obama's signature health care reform law. But in many ways, angry conservatives shouldn't be surprised by their loss. After all, they lost the fight over the bill back in 2010 to begin with. But more importantly, tea party activists, and radical conservative ideologues only really prevail in political fights when their interests align with those of corporate America. That's true even at the Supreme Court. And in this case, corporate America was very much on the other side of the fight.

When Obama and congressional Democrats cobbled together the deal to pass the Affordable Care Act, they were largely successful in getting all of the deep-pocketed key players on board, offering various sweeteners to get the pharmaceutical, medical and health insurance industries to back the bill. That's probably the only reason that the law passed in the first place. Healthcare reform, in turned out, could be good for business (witness the soaring stock prices of health care stocks after the Supreme Court's decision even as other stocks were falling). Conservatives seem to have forgotten that part of the story when they took the law to the Supreme Court and challenged the insurance mandate—and that's likely why they lost, too.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Who's Paying for $6 Million of New Anti-Obamacare Ads?

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Jun. 27, 2012 7:00 AM PDT

Concerned Women for America, a conservative anti-feminist operation dedicated to "bring[ing] Biblical principals into all levels of public policy," announced late last week that it is spending $6 million to run ads that highlight "the consequences of President Obama's health care plan." But $6 million is an unusually large ad buy for the group, which hasn't explained (and doesn't have to disclose) where it got the money.

The ads claim that the bill is forcing doctors to drop many patients and that it will add billions of dollars to the deficit. Starting on June 20, the ads have been running in six key swing states: Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire, and CWA claims that the ad is the first presidential ad to run in the general election in Minnesota.

During a presidential election, it's not unusual for outside groups to run ads attacking either candidate, especially using money from donors whose names don't have to be disclosed, as is the case with the CWA ads. The media buy was sponsored by CWA's lobbying arm, the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, which is a nonprofit 501(c)4. Unlike CWA, the CWA Legislative Action Committee is allowed to get involved in politics.

The $6 million advertising blitz vastly exceeds the action committee's entire budget from the past several years. According to its most recent tax filings, filed in October last year, CWA's advocacy arm only brought in $2 million in 2010, and ended the year about $500,000 in the hole. The previous year, the group brought in less than a million dollars.

That makes a $6 million ad buy a pretty significant investment, and suggests that CWA has gotten a big donor to foot the bill during this year's campaign season. But CWA doesn't have to say who gave it all that money, and a spokeswoman from the group did not respond to emails requesting comment.

What's really curious about the CWA's ads, though, is the timing. They're airing just as the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling that could overturn the law at the heart of the commercials. CWA's move suggests that regardless of what the court does, health care is going to continue to be a major issue for the duration of the presidential campaign.

The GOP's Dead-End Marriage Program

The research is in on a high-priced Bush-era initiative to promote marriage to poor people. It’s time for a divorce.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Jun. 25, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

With congressional Republicans beating the drum about profligate and wasteful government spending, they may want to take a hard look at a federal program pushed by a host of top GOPers during the Bush-era and reauthorized in late 2010, as the Republican deficit craze took hold. Originally championed by Republican lawmakers including Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and current Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a federal initiative to promote marriage as a cure for poverty dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into programs that either had no impact or a negative effect on the relationships of the couples who took part, according to recent research by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Launched during the Bush administration at the behest of evangelical Christian activists and with the aid of congressional Republicans, the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative was designed to help low-income couples put a little sizzle in their marriages and urge poor unmarried parents to tie the knot, in the hopes that marriage would enhance their finances and get them off the federal dole. Starting in 2006, millions of dollars were hastily distributed to grantees to further this poverty reduction strategy. The money went to such enterprises as "Laugh Your Way America," a program run by a non-Spanish speaking Wisconsin minister who used federal dollars to offer "Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage" seminars to Latinos. It funded Rabbi Stephen Baars, a British rabbi who'd been giving his trademarked "Bliss" marriage seminars to upper-middle-class Jews in Montgomery County, Maryland, for years. With the help of the federal government, he brought his program to inner-city DC for the benefit of African American single moms.

[Read the full article]