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.

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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.

The IRS Is Aggressively Auditing "Global High-Wealth Individuals"—People Just Like Mitt Romney

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jul. 24, 2012 12:57 AM PDT

Mitt Romney

In 2009, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman announced that the IRS had created a new task force to audit people he called "global high-wealth individuals." These new IRS targets, Shulman explained, have tens of millions of dollars in income and assets and "make use of sophisticated financial, business, and investment arrangements with complicated legal structures and tax consequences." They often have an intricate web of related business entities like S-corporations and other pass-through entities they control, along with various off-shore accounts and business entities. In other words, they're people like Mitt Romney.

There aren't that many people in the "global high-wealth individual" group—only about 8,000 taxpayers a year who have more than $10 million in annual income—and Romney is "exactly the kind of taxpayer the program was designed to look at," says Rebecca Wilkins, a lawyer at the Citizens for Tax Justice who used to work with rich clients as a CPA. It's possible for someone with a lot of income, like a corporate CEO, to have a fairly simple tax return, Wilkins says. But Romney's return from 2010 (the only completed one he's released so far) weighs in at 203 pages; 55 pages are simply devoted to disclosing the existence of a host of foreign transactions in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. In his domestic portfolio, there's Romney’s IRA, to which he was legally able to contribute only around $30,000 a year but which is now mysteriously worth between $21 and $102 million. It's the sort of stuff that the new IRS unit is supposed to vet.

Romney's campaign has said he's never been audited. "I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more," Romney said during a January primary debate. But IRS audits on Romney's fellow elite global high-wealth individuals have turned up quite a bit of extra money for the government. Out of the 36 high-wealth individuals audited in fiscal 2011 and the first five months of fiscal 2012, the IRS discovered an extra $47 million in taxes that should have been paid by 24 people in that group. Those figures suggest that some mega-rich people using aggressive-but-legal tax avoidance schemes are still not paying all they owe. There's no telling whether Romney deserves an audit or would pass one. But as long as he doesn't release his tax returns, speculation will continue about what's on those returns and whether they need a good look.

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6 Things Mitt Romney Is Hiding

From missing emails to mysterious investments, his deep history of secrecy.

—By Adam Serwer, Andy Kroll, and Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Jul. 20, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Presidential candidates try as best they can to control their public image. But by modern standards, Mitt Romney has taken his quest for secrecy to extraordinary lengths. Here's all there is to know about what we don't know about Romney.

His Old Emails

Reporters looking for emails and other records from Romney's tenure as Massachusetts governor are out of luck.

In the final months of Romney's four-year stint as governor, as the Boston Globe reported, 11 of his top staffers purchased the hard drives in their government-issued computers, preventing state archivists from accessing any of their emails. In its final days, the Romney administration also replaced computers and scrubbed state government servers of all the administration's emails. As the top attorney for Romney's replacement, Deval Patrick, put it: "The governor's office has found no e-mails from 2002-2006 in our possession."

The Romney administration did turn over to state archivists hundreds of boxes of records, including memos, emails, and other communications among state agencies and cabinet members. However, the boxes containing those records were hand-picked and given over voluntarily by Romney's staff. It stands to reason that any embarrassing or revealing information—say, internal planning or deliberations about Romney's universal health care legislation—did not make it into the Romney administration's record dump.

Pam Wilmot, the director of Common Cause Massachusetts, the Bay State affiliate of the good-government lobbying group, says no previous administration went to the same lengths as Romney's to keep its communications secret from reporters and the public. "In retrospect, there does seem to be a substantial difference between [Romney's] administration and other administrations on transparency," Wilmot says.

[Read the full article]

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]

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]