The Senate health care bill would increase premiums dramatically: an average of 74 percent when you compare similar policies, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. EPI breaks that down by state:

Seven states would suffer triple-digit increases: Alabama, Alaska, California, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and West Virginia. All but one of these are states that voted strongly for Donald Trump.

Ten states would escape with increases of less than 50 percent: Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington DC, and Washington. All but two of them voted for Hillary Clinton.

No state would see an actual premium decrease.

In a way, I suppose you have to congratulate Republicans. They’s so dedicated to dismantling Obamacare that they’re willing to endorse a plan that hurts every single state, but hurts red states the most and blue states the least. All so the Wall Street crowd can get a tax break. I’m guessing that this is not really what Trump’s fans thought they were signing up for when they voted for him.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

Fresh from the adoring, bused-in crowds that greeted him on his arrival in Poland, our president had some things to say about North Korea today:

In Warsaw, Trump said the United States was considering “some pretty severe things” in response to what he called “very, very bad behavior” from the North, although he did not mention any specific plans. “Something will have to be done about it,” he said.

“Something.” Would you care to offer a comment above a sixth-grade level, Mr. President? No? Roger that.

There aren’t a whole lot of options when it comes to North Korea. We can tick them off in a few moments:

• Sanctions. Go whole hog on economic sanctions. This is the most likely possibility, but the problem is that about 85 percent of North Korea’s trade is with China. We could kill off the rest of the world’s trade and it wouldn’t make much difference. So China is it, and there’s a limit to the kind of sanctions we want to levy against China. They can fight back, after all.
• Nuclear attack. Destroy North Korea’s nuclear capability and its conventional retaliatory capability against Seoul. There’s no way to do this quickly except via nuclear weapons. So this amounts to dropping several nuclear bombs on North Korea.

Am I missing anything? A blockade accomplishes nothing since most trade is overland with China. A conventional attack would result in thousands or millions of South Korean—and maybe Japanese—casualties. A diplomatic solution is unlikely in the extreme. North Korea is convinced—not without reason—that its nuclear weapons are the only sure protection against an American attack. And Chinese cooperation seems pretty unlikely short of convincing them that a nuclear attack is imminent unless they cut off North Korea entirely.

This is how I view it, anyway. We either launch a nuclear attack against North Korea or else their bomb and missile program is going to continue. Tell me why I’m wrong.

From Gen. David Petraeus, asked if he believes Donald Trump is mentally fit to serve as president:

I think it’s immaterial.

We are doomed. Petraeus would remove a fireteam leader if he thought the guy was mentally unstable. But the commander-in-chief? Meh. He’s got good people around him. They’ll keep him on a leash. Probably.

Via AEI and the Washington Post, here’s the gender pay gap among White House staffers during the Obama and Trump administrations:

During the Obama years, the average disparity was 13 cents on the dollar. Under Trump, it’s 37 cents. But before you jump to any conclusions, I don’t think this is because Trump believes women should be paid less than men for the same work. He’s not a neanderthal. He just doesn’t like to hire women for senior roles in the first place. What’s wrong with that? There’s nothing nefarious about it, so all you humorless feminists need to back off.

But here’s what I really wonder: what would this number look like if you didn’t include the communications folks? 50 cents? 60 cents? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can say this: if you exclude women whose job is primarily communications, who will shortly be exiled to Singapore, or who are on Melania’s staff, the Trump White House employs a grand total of two (2) women out of 34 in the top two pay grades: Dina Powell and Marcia Kelly. That’s 94 percent men. In its own way, this is actually kind of an impressive accomplishment, what with this being 2017 and all.

I don’t know. No matter what we say, maybe we all like having a reality-TV president:

I don’t think CNN did anything wrong in tracking down and reporting on the Reddit guy. But the “we reserve” sentence was a colossal mistake.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 5, 2017

What’s this all about? Well, you remember the dumb video that Donald Trump posted on Sunday? The one where he’s body slamming a wrestler whose head has been replaced by the CNN logo? We all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 1.

Then we tracked down the origin of the video. It came from someone named HanAssholeSolo on the alt-right reddit sewer r/The_Donald. It turned out that Han had also posted some inane anti-semitic memes, so we all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 2.

Then CNN tracked down the actual person behind HanAssholeSolo. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be some dude who had been acting out and was terrified at the prospect of becoming national news just because our president was stupid enough to retweet his stuff. So CNN decided not to publish his name “because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.”

However, CNN also said it “reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” This sounded like a threat, so we all decided to get outraged over that. This was dumbness level 3.

Is there anything we won’t use as an excuse to get outraged? Trump’s tweet was puerile, but it was just a joke, not a call to violence. HanAssholeSolo is an idiot, but he’s just one of millions of individual idiots, not someone with any power or influence unless we give it to him. And under anything but the most hostile reading, CNN obviously wasn’t threatening anyone. They were just covering themselves: If it turned out that Han was playing them, they were under no obligation to maintain his anonymity.

Not that it matters. If CNN can track this guy down, so can someone else. He’ll be viral on Twitter before long no matter how abjectly he’s apologized.

President Trump says variously that Obamacare is dead, failed, broken, and in a “death spiral.” But as Jon Chait points out, “death spiral isn’t just a term people who hate Obamacare get to use to predict that the law is going to fail because they hate it.” It has a specific meaning, and Trump’s own administration agrees with the CBO that Obamacare isn’t in a death spiral.

But what is a death spiral, anyway? It’s pretty simple. Suppose you have a health care market with five people in it. Their average annual medical expenses are $1, $3, $5, $7, and $9:

The average medical expense is $5, and in our fantasy world insurance companies don’t need to make a profit. This means our five customers each pay $5 for their health insurance. But Ariel thinks this is too much, because she hardly ever sees a doctor for anything. So she drops out:

Now there’s four people left, and the average premium goes up to $6. But this is now too rich for Banquo, who was willing to take a bit of a hit in order to reduce his risk, but not that big a hit. So he drops out too:

Three people are left, and now Cassius is fed up. His premiums keep going up, and at this price he feels like he’s hugely overpaying for the care he gets. So he drops out too:

And here’s where we end up. Desdemona and Edward will probably keep getting insurance, but it’s hardly insurance at all anymore. They’re both paying very nearly what their care would cost them if they just handed a pile of Krugerrands directly to their doctors. In all, 60 percent of the market has dropped out and the other 40 percent is barely getting any benefit. And the insurance company is probably not doing so well either. By the time we get to this point, they might decide to abandon the market entirely, leaving Desdemona and Edward out of luck too.

That’s a death spiral. That’s what dead, failing, and broken mean. It’s not happening with Obamacare now, and it won’t happen in the future unless Trump and his fellow Republicans deliberately sabotage it.

Our local fireworks show wasn’t as good this year as it’s been in the past, but I made up for that with a more serious effort to get a good picture of it. This shot was captured at a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds, with the camera steadied by my trusty beanbag. I like it, a good ol’ red, white, and blue extravaganza in the sky above Irvine. Happy Birthday, America.

You’ve probably signed away your right to sue your cell phone carrier, your cable company, and maybe your doctor and dentist too. Instead, if you have a complaint, you’re required to take it to arbitration, whether you want to or not.

How do they get away with this? Mostly by giving you no choice. You probably have only one cable company to choose from. There are four big cell phone carriers, but they all mandate arbitration. And it’s so common among doctors that you’d have a hard time finding one who doesn’t require it. In practice, they require it because they have enough market power to make it stick.

It’s ironic, then, that nursing homes don’t like it when someone with even more market power than them turns the tables:

In October 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) decided to push back on mandatory arbitration. By rule, CMS adopted a novel “condition of participation” for Medicare and Medicaid. Nursing homes that participate in the programs—which is to say, all nursing homes—could no longer ask their residents to sign away their right to sue upon entering the nursing home.

….Predictably, the nursing home industry sued, arguing that the rule exceeded CMS’s authority….Then President Trump took office. In early June, with little fanfare or notice, the administration dismissed the appeal and proposed to undo the change altogether. “Upon reconsideration, we believe that arbitration agreements are, in fact, advantageous to both providers and beneficiaries because they allow for the expeditious resolution of claims without the costs and expense of litigation.”

That’s from Nicholas Bagley, who says, “With health reform dominating the news, this volte-face has been overlooked. That’s a shame: it’s a big deal.” He promises to dive into it in more depth over the next couple of weeks.

The Trump White House has been unusually quiet about its campaign to defeat ISIS. Kimberly Dozier might have an explanation:

U.S. special operations forces have removed roughly 50 top ISIS leaders off the battlefield since President Donald Trump took office, down from 80 killed in the last six months of the Obama administration, according to figures obtained by The Daily Beast. “The pace and the way they have gone about going after these HVT’s [High-value targets] hasn’t changed,” said coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon of the U.S. special operations’ campaign to take ISIS commanders off the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields.

….Trump’s changes to the campaign so far have been tactical—namely, giving the military more autonomy to strike, including special operators….That’s presented a dilemma for those working on the Trump anti-ISIS strategy and slowed its public unveiling, U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast. The White House has asked defense officials to come up with new ideas to help brand the Trump campaign as different from its predecessor, according to two U.S. officials and one senior administration official. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive debates.

The senior administration official described Trump’s plan as “relying even more” on special operations working together with local partner forces. “But that’s nuanced, like most of the suggested changes” and doesn’t easily translate to a talking point, he said. That could help explain why Trump has twice missed his own deadline for unveiling the new anti-ISIS strategy.

I can hardly wait for the new branding campaign. But I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Whatever else you can say about Trump, he’s a master marketer and slogan creator. He has an almost animal cunning for drilling in on weak points and inventing Twitter-friendly catchphrases to bring them to the masses (“low energy,” “lock her up”).

Maybe he’s off his game because he’s too busy stewing about CNN or something. But he should get with it. There’s a whole army of Trump defenders out there who are waiting to take whatever he makes up and parrot it far and wide on every media channel in the galaxy.

I know the White House probably has a handy explanation teed up just in case someone asks, but, um, what is Donald Trump doing here?