Initial attempts to sign up for ObamaCare go about as well as expected

[boutons_deux]

Another Repug LIE destroyed

Insurers Say Most Who Signed Up Under Health Law Have Paid Up

Most of the people choosing health plans under the Affordable Care Act — about 80 percent — are paying their initial premiums as required for coverage to take effect, several large insurers said Tuesday on the eve of a House hearing about the law.

But the health insurance industry said the total of eight million people who signed up included “many duplicate enrollments” for consumers who tried to enroll more than once because of problems on the website.

“Insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment,” said Mark Pratt, a senior vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade
group.

“It may be a matter of months,” Mr. Pratt added, “before insurers know how many people activated their coverage by paying their share of premiums.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/07...?from=homepage

[boutons_deux]

Missouri Protesters Arrested After Demanding Their Lawmakers Pass Medicaid Expansion

More than 100 protesters and clergy members were removed from the Missouri Senate galleries on Tuesday, after they burst out into chants demanding the state accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Missouri is one of 24 states that has not yet accepted the more than $2 billion in federal funds available to the Show-Me state.

The Springfield News-Leader reported that the protesters shouted, “Medicaid Expansion! Do it now!” and “Missouri Senate expand Medicaid, bring dignity, do your jobs!” Capitol police reportedly removed more than 100 people and arrested 23 clergy, delaying the Senate’s session by nearly an hour.

Gov. Jay Nixon (D) supports the expansion, which would provide insurance for tens of thousands of additional Missourians. But despite estimates that refusal to accept the funds would cost state hospitals hundreds of millions of dollars, the Republican-controlled legislature has not passed expansion legislation.

After the protest, a Republican State Senator who has backed expansion tweeted that “it appears that unruly protesters have killed our chances,” as the protests have “emboldened” opponents.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...icaid-protest/

And Repugs/tea baggers STILL think running against ACA is a campaign winner

[boutons_deux]

...

[boutons_deux]

This Was The Week The GOP's Anti-Obamacare Circus Came Crashing Down


Just a couple months ago, the pair of hearings that congressional Republicans held this week on Obamacare would have gone very differently.

The GOP was at the top of its oversight game back then, leaving administration officials flustered. But this week, the party appeared powerless to conjure the bad Obamacare headlines it has been seeking.

First, House Republicans continued an increasingly desperate search for evidence that recent Obamacare news hasn't been as positive as the White House has said. At that hearing, the Republicans were stumped by their own witnesses, who had mostly positive things to say about recent developments or refused to speculate about possible future shortcomings.

Then a day later, Senate Republicans seemed to make the tactical decision that hitting hard on the law wasn't the right strategy while reviewing the person nominated to replace Health and Human
Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who served as the lightning rod for many of the law's controversies.

Both incidents marked seismic shifts from the days of HealthCare.gov's disastrous launch, when Republicans readily grilled Sebelius and other officials over the law, taking as many shots as they could while Obamacare's future was uncertain.

Things got so bad that, at one point, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) effectively chastised industry executives for not producing any information on the 2015 rates, which Republicans have warned could skyrocket.

"You have done no internal analysis on what the trend line is for these premiums? None?" Blackburn said, clearly exasperated. "It is baffling that we could have some of our nation's largest insurers, and you all don't have any internal analysis of what these rates are going to be."

It was that kind of week for the GOP.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-...+%28TPMNews%29



The remaining two FALSE SCANDALS AS THIS-IS-HOW-WE-CAMPAIGN-WITH-WITCHHUNTING are IRS and Benghazi! LOSERS!

[boutons_deux]

wow, that was fast! Obamacare rompin and stompin already

Hospitals In Arkansas See Drop In Uninsured ER Visits Following Obamacare Implementation


Preliminary survey results from Arkansas show a significant drop in the number of uninsured since the implementation of the state’s so-called private option, a compromise hammered out between Gov. Mike Beebe (D), Republican state lawmakers, and the Obama administration to provide health care coverage to low-income residents.
Data released on Thursday from 42 hospitals show that emergency room visits dropped by 2 percent, “while the number of uninsured patients in those emergency rooms dropped by 24 percent,” the Associated Press notes.

Erik Dorey, a spokesperson for Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR), said that the survey results indicated that the state’s implementation of health care reform is successfully providing insurance coverage to Arkansas families. “Because of Arkansas’ private option, 150,000 working families already know the security of quality coverage, and its successful implementation is a credit to Republicans and Democrats in Arkansas coming together to pass it into law,” Dorey said in a statement to ThinkProgress.

Indeed, hospitals are already seeing impressive results. “With the private option, we have literally seen a 50 percent reduction in uninsured patients coming through our emergency room,” chief executive officer Ray Montgomery of The White County Medical Center said.

The program has removed “a financial barrier for individuals who have needed care and needed service use, so they are not waiting later to have more complicated, less effective, more costly outcomes,” Arkansas Surgeon General Joe Thompson added.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...tals-arkansas/

[xrayzebra]

uh-huh, I wonder how many of that 24 percent actually had insurance? But I guess you can think progress. Like hope and change. Or you can keep your doctor.

[boutons_deux]

uh-huh, I wonder how many of that 24 percent actually had insurance? But I guess you can think progress. Like hope and change. Or you can keep your doctor.

100% earlier had no insurance.

now 76% have no insurance, so 100% of the 24% HAD INSURANCE

[FuzzyLumpkins]

CRIPPLE FIGHT!!!

[xrayzebra]

Or butons, they lost their insurance and was forced on to Obamacare because of Obamacare. Point being some folks think they have insurance and don't and even the doctors and hospitals are unsure until they submit claims. I wont dispute your 24 percent but I will wait and see how it all shakes out.

Fuzzychumpkins: Children should be quite and listen when adults are talking. You can follow me all you want so long as you are quite. I know you want to pattern yourself after the chumpster, but try to better yourself.

[boutons_deux]

Or butons, they lost their insurance and was forced on to Obamacare because of Obamacare.

bull . the ER patients were UNinsured, they had no insurance to lose.

w/o Obamacare, insurance companies cancelled polices every year, forever and denied policies to sick people.

Now they can't and they MUST not refuse insurance to anybody. XZ slapped again.

[Nbadan]

Obamacare saved consumers billions, new report finds
By Morgan Whitaker at MSNBC

http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/...umers-billions

"SNIP........................


The report from The Commonwealth Fund released Tuesday finds the medical loss ratio provision, which caps profits for health insurance companies, benefited consumers by about $3 billion over the past two years through a combination of rebates from insurance companies and reduced overhead spending.

The law’s provision limits insurance companies to spending a minimum of 80-85% of premiums specifically on treatment and medical costs, rather than overhead and profits.

The rebate receipts sent to consumers hit $1 billion in 2011 and about $500 million in 2012, an indication that insurance providers successfully shifted business models to fit the new spending requirements. In addition to the rebates provided to consumers, insurers reduced profits and spending on general overhead by about $1.4 billion, the report finds.

“The medical loss ratio requirement of the Affordable Care Act creates a higher-value insurance product for consumers,” said The Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal said in the report. “It ensures that a substantial portion of their premium dollar pays for medical care, as opposed to administrative costs and profits. It also encourages insurers to improve the care their customers receive, by investing in initiatives that will help achieve better outcomes for patients.”

Yep....

[boutons_deux]

Forecast Predicts A Shift Away From Employer-Sponsored Insurance

Michael Thompson, of the financial research firm S&P Capital IQ, predicts more and more companies will decide to get out of the business of providing health insurance now that their workers have another way to get coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: ACA actually creates an opportunity to revisit and redefine that relationship.

HORSLEY: At first, Thompson expects only a few big companies will make the switch. But as firms discover they can save money by shifting workers onto the exchanges, the trend will accelerate until by 2020, Thompson predicts 9 out of 10 employees will be responsible for buying their own health insurance.

THOMPSON: This is where it gets kind of interesting. That's the moment that employees start bearing the future risk of future health care premium rises.

(what? health insurers have been raising rates for decades, and in the past few years, employers have been requiring employees to pay a higher percentage of the premium. Employees ALREADY "bear the risk" of health insurance. )

HORSLEY: Thompson likens the change to the move from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans. Employees will have more choices, but fewer guarantees.

The Obama administration takes issue with Thompson's forecast, noting that when Massachusetts adopted a similar health care overhaul, insurance coverage through employers actually went up.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/08/310794...m_campaign=app

[boutons_deux]

no change from the status quo, health insurers and greedy sick care providers will keep sucking $100Ks of Human-Americans, because they can.

Most state health insurers seek rate boost: Proposals compared



If approved, rate increases for 2015 individual health plans proposed by 12 insurance companies may affect most policyholders, whether they bought their plans through
WashingtonHealthplanfinder’s online marketplace or in the outside market.

Washington is one of the first states to see proposed rate changes for 2015 individual health-insurance plans.

The proposed rate changes range from a decrease of 6.8 percent — from Molina Healthcare of Washington — to an increase of 26 percent from Time Insurance, a national company with relatively few Washington policyholders.

Most rate-change requests, particularly from larger insurers, were in the middle ground, with most asking for increases from about 2 to about 11 percent.

To anyone who has had individual insurance, premium increases are not surprising:

Records show that, on average, insurers have proposed rate increases for individual plans from about 9 percent to more than 18 percent every year from 2007 to 2013.

After review by the Office of the Insurance Commissioner, the average rate increases imposed were lower — in most cases, only slightly lower. But in one year, rate-increase requests were cut by more than 3.5 percentage points.

http://seattletimes.com/html/localne...wratesxml.html

Naturally, without ANY doubt, the Repugs will LIE that any and all rate increases are exclusively because of ACA.

[boutons_deux]

[boutons_deux]

More Specious Attacks on Reform

Conservative critics of President Obama’s health care reforms are engaged in two long-shot lawsuits to overturn the Affordable Care Act or disable one of its central provisions. Both lawsuits should be recognized for what they really are — attempts to use the courts to scuttle a law that Congressional Republicans have repeatedly tried, but failed, to repeal through the political process.

One case, now before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, makes the specious argument that the entire law should be overturned because the bill did not “originate” in the House.

The plaintiff’s lawyers argue that this process violated the “origination clause” in Article 1 of the Cons ution, which says “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.” They contend the Senate did not merely “amend” the original House bill because the health care reform amendment was not germane to the original bill.

A federal district judge rightly rejected this argument on two grounds last year.

First, the reform law is not primarily a revenue-raising measure, though it may incidentally raise some revenue through a fee, called a “shared responsibility payment,” on people who refuse to take out health insurance.

Second, even if the bill could be construed as a revenue-raiser, it originated in the House. The judge ruled that past Supreme Court decisions allowed the Senate to subs ute the entire text and le of a bill and left it to Congress to determine in individual cases whether that was acceptable. In this case, no one in the House challenged the act as a violation of the origination clause.

In a separate line of attack, lawsuits in several states argue that the act allows federal subsidies only for people buying coverage on the 14 state health insurance exchanges, but not for people buying on the exchanges run by the federal government in the 36 states that refused to set up their own. That contention was slapped down in one case in January by a federal district judge, who concluded that the law was designed to provide quality, affordable health care for “virtually all” Americans, not just those buying insurance on state-run exchanges. In March, a federal appellate court panel heard arguments on this case.

The opponents of health care reform are making desperate arguments that defy common sense and the purpose of a law that was approved by the political process and is providing benefits to tens of millions of Americans. Should these cases somehow reach the Supreme Court, the justices should reject their arguments outright.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/19...l?from=opinion

[xrayzebra]

Millions Could Get Surprise Tax Bills Under ‘Obamacare’ If They Don’t Accurately Project Their Income

snip......

A draft of the application for insurance asks people to project their 2014 income if their current income is not steady or if they expect it to change. The application runs 15 pages for a three-person family, but nowhere does it warn people that they may have to repay part of the subsidy if their income increases.

“I think this will be the hardest thing for members of the public to understand because it is a novel aspect of this tax credit,” said Catherine Livingston, who recently served as health care counsel for the Internal Revenue Service. “I can’t think of what else they do in the tax system currently that works that way.” Livingston is now a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Jones Day.

There’s another wrinkle: The vast majority of taxpayers won’t actually receive the subsidies. Instead, the money will be paid directly to insurance companies and consumers will get the benefit in reduced premiums.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/...-their-income/

[boutons_deux]

Actors, musicians are big beneficiaries of Obamacare

More than most people, workers in the area's vast entertainment industry are poised to benefit from the federal health law. But as the new law takes hold, the massive overhaul has also stirred up considerable confusion and anxiety over how to navigate a host of new healthcare options.

For decades, artists have flocked to the state, and many have just scraped by while trying to get their big break. According to a study from the National Endowment for the Arts, California has the highest number of artists in the nation.

The same study found that more than 30% of artists are self-employed compared with 10% in the general population, and rates of uninsured are typically higher among the self-employed than others.

In the industry, actors and other movie workers typically get insurance through their unions. But many say they don't get enough hours or steady work as actors to meet the income requirements to apply.

For instance, according to data from SAG-AFTRA, the country's largest union for actors, broadcasters and recording artists, only about 15% of members qualify for health insurance through the union.
"When people think Hollywood, they think George Clooney and Meryl Streep, but that's not the average person in this town," said Dan Kitowski, director of health services for the western region of the Actors Fund, a national nonprofit that does Affordable Care Act outreach.

The federal law that went into full effect this year made it easier for people to buy health insurance on their own because coverage is guaranteed regardless of preexisting health conditions, and subsidies are available to make premiums more affordable.

That creates a new range of options for people who are self-employed or who may have held on to a job they didn't like just for the benefits, said Laura Baker, a senior health and benefits consultant for consulting firm Mercer in Los Angeles. One Harvard study estimated that 11 million Americans were stuck in so-called "job lock" — not able to leave their jobs for fear of losing their health benefits.
"It's certainly a whole new world for some," Baker said.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-actors-insurance-20140523-story.html

[boutons_deux]

GOP Candidates Are Seeing Obamacare In A Different Light

a reminder of a pronounced shift among Republican politicians discussing Obamacare on the campaign trail. Few of them are delivering feisty denunciations and declarations of repeal, as they did just a few months ago. Even in deeply conservative states, Republicans are muting their rhetoric, acknowledging positive tenets of the ACA and engaging in equivocation — or, in some cases, fabrication — to cover their tracks.

That’s because the political terrain has shifted beneath their feet. In practice, as its proponents have long predicted, the ACA has helped millions of people to obtain health care they would not have been able to afford otherwise. Surely it’s no surprise that few voters want to give up benefits they have just begun to enjoy.

That has meant some less-than-artful dodging by such indefatigable partisan warriors as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In keeping with the GOP script, McConnell has been adamant about repealing the ACA.

But in his home state of Kentucky, Kynect, the state-run exchange that connects residents to Obamacare, is wildly popular, having signed up more than 400,000 people for health insurance. So McConnell takes advantage of voters’ confusion — many don’t understand that Kynect is Obamacare — to suggest he supports the exchange but not that foul law that made it possible. Indeed, he has gone so far as to declare that they are unconnected — a laughable lie, even in the warped reality of a political campaign.

Several other prominent Republicans have found themselves in a similar bind, as many facets of the law prove politically popular. Voters still don’t like “Obamacare,” but they like many of its provisions, including those that outlaw bans on patients who have pre-existing conditions.

Voters also support the provision that prevents lifetime caps on insurance payments — something that benefits those with serious, chronic illnesses — and the one that allows parents to keep their children insured until they are 26 years old. Indeed, the only provision that remains broadly unpopular is the mandate that requires every adult to buy health insurance (a necessary feature of the law, and one that many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, once believed in).

Perhaps the most dramatic shift among GOP pols has concerned Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. The Supreme Court’s ruling affirming the ACA made the Medicaid expansion optional for states, and most Republican governors resisted it. That was foolish and shortsighted, since the federal government pays the overwhelming portion of the additional cost. Those governors — and their GOP colleagues in Congress — were willing to trade better health for some of their poorest residents for the chance to poke Obama in the eye.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/gop-cand...fferent-light/

Grimes must absolutely, aggressively get out the CLARIFICATION that KYNECT __IS__ Obamacare.

Dems must absolutely, aggressively run in red states saying that it was the Repugs who DENIED Medicaid expansion, effectively, inarguably causing the deaths and more severe diseases of 1000s of red staters.

[boutons_deux]

GOP’s quiet Obamacare disaster: How this week’s biggest story got overlooked

Right around noon on Wednesday, the Senate voted to invoke cloture on Sylvia Mathews Burwell’s nomination to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. The all-out Obamacare brawl that Republicans had promised when Burwell’s nomination was announced never materialized. Instead, it ended with a quiet, respectful display of bipartisan comity.

Losing the opportunity to grandstand on the Burwell nomination, however, was the least of the Republicans’ troubles this week when it came to the Affordable Care Act. We’re only six days into June, and opponents of the ACA have already had a terrible month.

The big news was the release of new data from the White House indicating that enrollment in Medicaid has surged in states that elected to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act. In April alone more than 1 million people signed up for coverage. Medicaid enrollment in states that rejected the expansion has also gone up as people who didn’t know they were eligible started signing up – the so-called Woodwork Effect. Add all those enrollees to the number of people who were on Medicaid or CHIP prior to the ACA’s implementation, and you come up with just over 65 million Americans enrolled in the program.

As Paul Waldman puts it at the Washington Post, this is game over for Republican critics of the law who insist on repealing and replacing the ACA to get government out of healthcare. To do so, they’d have to find a way to transition tens of millions of people off of their government-provided health coverage. “Even if Republicans took back the White House and both houses of Congress,” Waldman writes, “moving people off their government insurance would be next to impossible.” The fight over Obamacare was always going to be a war of attrition, and it was always stacked against the Republicans.

And it’s not just that people are signing up for Medicaid; they’re using it, and early indicators are that expanding access to healthcare is having the intended effect of reducing instances of uncompensated care. The Colorado Hospital Association released a study this week showing that “hospitals in states that chose to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act saw significantly more Medicaid patients and a related reduction in self-pay and charity care cases.” Hospitals are obligated to treat and stabilize emergency room patients regardless of their insurance status or their ability to pay. If they can’t pay, the hospital gets stuck with the bill. Expanding the Medicaid rolls means that more people can seek out care and hospitals will have to absorb less bad debt, which could lead to lower healthcare costs overall.

Gallup’s most recent survey found that the uninsured rate thus far in the second quarter of 2014 is 13.4 percent, which is “down from 17.1% in the fourth quarter of 2013 and from the 15.6% average in the first quarter of 2014.” Overall this means that the roughly 11 million people who gained insurance during the ACA’s implementation contributed to a 22 percent drop in the uninsured rate. The rate does seem to be leveling off, per Gallup’s analysis, but the “rate could drop if more states elect to expand Medicaid.”

And as it turns out, there are states that are working to do exactly that. While there are still 20 states holding firm in their refusal to expand Medicaid, four states are either trying to work out compromise packages (Utah, Pennsylvania and Indiana) or locked in an internal battle over whether to accept the expansion (Virginia).

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/06/gops...ot_overlooked/

[boutons_deux]

In Texarkana, Uninsured and on the Wrong Side of a State Line

TEXARKANA, Tex. — On a hazy, hot evening here, Janice Marks ate a dinner of turkey and stuffing at a homeless shelter filled with plastic cots before crossing a few blocks to the Arkansas side of town to start her night shift restocking the dairy cases at Walmart.

The next day, David Tramel and Janice McFall had a free meal of hot dogs and doughnut holes at a Salvation Army center in Arkansas before heading back to their tent, hidden in a field by the highway in Texas.

None of the three have health insurance. But had Ms. Marks, 26, chosen to sleep on the side of town where she works, or had Mr. Tramel and Ms. McFall, who are both in their early 20s, made their camp where they had eaten their dinner, their fortunes might be different.

Arkansas accepted the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. Texas did not.

That makes Texarkana perhaps the starkest example of how President Obama’shealth care law is altering the economic geography of the country. The poor living in the Arkansas half of town won access to a government benefit worth thousands of dollars annually, yet nothing changed for those on the Texas side of the state line.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/09...tate-line.html

[boutons_deux]

Shifts in Charity Health Care

Health care reform was supposed to relieve the financial strain on hospitals that have provided a lot of free charity care to poor and uninsured patients. The reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act, was expected to insure most of those patients either through expanded state Medicaid programs for the poor or through subsidized private insurance for middle-income patients, thereby funneling new revenues to hospitals that had previously absorbed the costs of uncompensated care.

In return for the new income streams, hospitals that treat large numbers of the poor and get special subsidies to defray the cost would have those subsidies reduced on the theory that they would no longer need as much help.

But after the Supreme Court ruled that the reform law could not force states to expand their Medicaid programs, 20 or more states declined to do so. That failure has hurt some big urban hospitals, because their charity care burden remains essentially the same even as their federal aid has been cut.

( thanks, SCOTUS5 and Repug assholes! )
Even in California, which has expanded its Medicaid program, public hospitals that serve the poorest patients could face a big funding shortfall in future years, according to a study just published by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles.

A recent report in The Times by Abby Goodnough found that some hospital systems have started tightening the requirements for charity care in efforts to push uninsured people into signing up for subsidized health plans on the insurance exchanges created by the reform law. In St. Louis, for example, Barnes-Jewish Hospital has started charging co-payments to uninsured patients no matter how poor they are. Those at or below the poverty level ($11,670 for an individual) are charged $100 for emergency care and $50 for an office visit.

But some medical centers have seen their charity care costs decline. A report late last month in Kaiser Health News and USA Today said that Seattle’s largest “safety net” hospital, run by the University of Washington, saw its proportion of uninsured patients drop from 12 percent last year to a surprisingly low 2 percent this spring, putting the hospital on track to increase its revenue by $20 million this year from annual revenues of about $800 million.

How all of this will shake out is still uncertain. Some vulnerable groups may find it even harder to get the care they need. Through a quirk in the reform law,

residents below the poverty line in states that have failed to expand Medicaid are not eligible for either Medicaid or for subsidized coverage on the insurance exchanges.

( thanks, Repug and SCOTUS5 assholes! )

Undo ented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid or the subsidized coverage. And some low-income people who have enrolled in subsidized health plans may have trouble paying their cost-sharing.

There are some ways to address these gaps.

All states ought to expand their Medicaid programs since the federal government is offering very generous matching funds.

Hospitals should move aggressively to help people enroll in Medicaid or in subsidized plans on the exchanges.

And federal health officials need to review regularly whether health plan co-payments are actually affordable to those living on very modest incomes.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/09...alth-care.html

And many people who qualify for Medicaid, even rural rednecks, bubbas, poor white trash Repug voters, refuse to signup for Obamacare or Medicaid because Fox/Repugs told them to hate it and all things guvmint.

[boutons_deux]

Medicare cost growth still very, very low

While healthcare costs overall have increased—as expected with all the new patients thanks to Obamacare—in the last few quarters, Medicare spending growth is really, really slow. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that Medicare growth in the first eight months of this fiscal year has been just 0.3 percent. Some of that can be accounted for by federal policies, "the Medicare sequester [which wasn't in effect for part of FY 2013], payment reductions in the Affordable Care Act for home health agencies and Medicare Advantage plans, ramped-up hospital readmission penalties, and frozen means-tested Medicare premium income thresholds." Even without those factors, though, costs are being held down.

Adjusted for timing shifts, Medicare growth is even lower through eight months at just 0.3 percent. And even after removing the effects of temporary policies, year-to-date Medicare growth remains extremely low at 2.5 percent, even lower than through April. This is more than a full percentage point below economic and beneficiary growth, meaning that even excluding one-time effects, Medicare spending is on pace to both fall as a percent of GDP and on a per-capita basis. [emphasis in original, which tells you how big a deal this is to these analysts!]

The Incidental Economist notes that economic growth is 3.9 percent. Obamacare's supposed "death panel," the Independent Payment Advisory Board would kick in when spending reached GDP + 1 percent. We're nowhere near that now. So yes, this is pretty good news for Medicare, and should mean the end to any talk about raising the eligibility age for the program, or doing more means testing.

, maybe now would be time to start talking about expanding the program. Medicare at 55, anyone?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...28Daily+Kos%29

[boutons_deux]

Listened to Atul in my drive time, excellent report from a superstar health care insider (not a Euro-American, a "macaca", so you right-wing xenopobes can get pissed off) who explains how OBAMACARE is so much more transformative than the like healthcare.gov that the Repugs politicize. THE REPUGS

45 minutes long, so I don't expect right-wingers will make any effort to permit any light into their deep, dark ignorance

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/06/13/a...-on-point-live

[Winehole23]

The percentage of uninsured Minnesotans has dropped to the lowest level in state history, and the second-lowest level in the nation, following the end of enrollments under the Affordable Care Act.


About 180,500 Minnesotans gained health insurance from last September to this May, with the vast majority getting coverage through one of the state’s public health programs, a report from the University of Minnesota found.
That left just 4.9 percent of all Minnesotans lacking health coverage on May 1, about a month after the federal health law’s first major sign-up deadline. That’s down from 8.9 percent last Sept. 30.


“A change in the uninsurance rate like this is pretty much unprecedented in Minnesota,” said Julie Sonier of the university’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center and a co-author of the report.

http://www.startribune.com/business/262726381.html

[Winehole23]

insurers bail out in year two: http://www.advisory.com/daily-briefi...ping-in-year-2