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

[boutons_deux]

What Happens When You Fact Check Fox News


Fox News reported that the Cleveland Clinic was ins uting "massive layoffs" due to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, but when asked about the reports, a Clinic spokesperson told Media Matters, "We're not."

On November 25, The Daily Caller published an article led, "Top U.S. hospital laying off staff due to Obamacare." On Fox Business' Markets Now, host Connell McShane reported on the "massive layoffs."America's Newsroom host Bill Hemmer claimed that the Cleveland Clinic was going to "shed workers." Later, during the America's News HQ, Fox reporter Chris Stirewalt claimed that the layoffs "rocked the community there in northeastern Ohio."

But there's one problem: the Cleveland Clinic is not laying off any employees. Eileen Sheil, Cleveland Clinic's Executive Director of Corporate Communications, said in an e-mail to Media Matters,

"There have been several mis-reports and they keep mentioning that we're laying off 3,000 employees. We're not." Sheil explained that Cleveland Clinic is offering voluntary retirement to 3,000 eligible employees and that the Clinic is also "working on many initiatives to lower costs, drive efficiencies, reduce duplication of services across our system and provide quality care to our patients." Sheil continued, "Many of these initiatives do not impact our employees."

Sheil told Media Matters that Fox had been notified of its error and that the Cleveland Clinic requested Fox's future reporting on the issue more accurately present the Clinic's plans. According to a Media Matterssearch, Fox had not corrected its mistake by the time of publication.

Despite Fox's reporting, Sheil reiterated the Clinic's support for the Affordable Care Act, stating:

We believe reform is necessary because the current state is unsustainable. The ACA is a step toward that change and we believe more changes will come/evolve as there are still many uncertainties. Hospitals must be responsible and do what we can to prepare and support the law.

Fox's continued focus on the Cleveland Clinic is due, presumably, to President Obama's frequent praise of the hospital. In September, host Greta Van Susteren acknowledged the network's flawed reporting on the Cleveland Clinic after it was cited by U.S. Sen. John Barasso (R-WY) on her program.

http://www.alternet.org/what-happens...tter929418&t=8

[Nbadan]

Source: Raw Story

A Seattle Times columnist took a closer look at a conservative headline-making health care reform case Friday and discovered that the Rush Limbaugh narrative doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

In Danny Westneat’s piece “Debunking Obamacare sob story,” the writer checked on the reversal of fortune claimed by Jessica Sanford, a Washington parent of an ADHD-diagnosed child, who had been touted by President Obama last month as an example of the success of the Affordable Care Act because she could obtain insurance for the first time in 15 years.

When Sanford said on a Facebook post that the state had miscalculated her eligibility for a subsidy based on her income and that she was “screwed,” the media pounced, particularly conservative outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

However, Westneat’s examination revealed that Sanford’s son qualified for Medicaid coverage at $30 a month, which would have not been available before the ACA. “He has ADHD and, according to Sanford, it costs them $250 a month for prescription drugs alone. Which will now all be covered,” Westneat wrote. While Sanford had originally been quoted for coverage at $169 a month, a bronze-level policy for a 48-year-old woman making $49,000 costs $237 a month, while a silver-level policy costs $313, Westneat added.

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/2...mes-columnist/

[boutons_deux]

Hilarious and expected that right-wingers here believe absolutely any LIES Fox and Repugs spew at them.

It's all nothing but ALL SMASH-MOUTH, BAD-FAITH POLITICS, ALL THE TIME, no matter who or what gets screwed, esp when screwing Repugs' own voters.

Next Repug disaster: the next round of very deep sequester cuts, flattening growth or pushing it negative in 2014.

[boutons_deux]

Part-Time Workers With Minimal Health Coverage Get New Options

In January, part-time workers who have so-called mini-med health insurance plans with very limited benefits and annual caps on payments will begin to lose that coverage.

Under the health care overhaul, they after the beginning of the year. For some, that may be just as well. Part-timers likely will have better options in January.

Mini-med plans, often favored by retailers and restaurants with lots of low-wage and part-time workers, generally provide an extremely limited range of benefits, and total coverage may be capped at just a few thousand dollars a year.

After the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, nearly all plans were required to eliminate lifetime and annual dollar limits on benefits. But some businesses that offered mini-med plans said that if they had to conform to the new rules, they would drop the plans. Their workers would lose what little protection they had.

Some employers received waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services that permitted them to continue offering the limited plans temporarily. Starting in January, they can't offer plans that have annual benefit caps, although some large employers .

When Roberta Grindle was diagnosed with colon cancer in October, she blew through the $5,000 coverage limit on her mini-med plan almost immediately. Grindle, 62, worked 16 hours a week at a big-box store near her home in Sebring, Fla., and paid $32 every two weeks for the store's plan, the only coverage available to part-time workers.

She woke up with severe pain in her lower abdomen one morning and drove herself to the emergency room. Doctors suspected a ruptured appendix, and while performing emergency surgery discovered a cancerous tumor in her colon.

Grindle needs a second surgery to remove the tumor but has had to delay it until she recovers from an infection.

She says she doesn't know how she'll pay for her medical care, but it's certainly not going to be with the coverage she had on the job. "I have no idea what exactly it covered, but clearly not much of anything," she says. "I would have been better off without it."

Most employers don't offer part-timers any coverage at all. Only a quarter of companies that offered employee health insurance made coverage available to part-time workers in 2013, according to the . (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

When they do offer health insurance, the coverage is often not equivalent to that available to full-time workers.

Existing plans are "not going to be super robust," says Tracy Watts, a senior partner at human resources consultant Mercer. "Part-timers might be offered access to full-time benefits but have to pay more for them, or might not be eligible at all and just get a mini-med plan."

The health law requires that employers offer health insurance to employees who work at least 30 hours a week or face penalties starting in January, but the Obama administration delayed that provision until 2015. With the delay, speculation over whether employers would reduce workers' hours in order to avoid penalties has subsided, at least for now.

Many part-time workers will have more options for better coverage starting in January. If their employer doesn't offer a health plan, they can shop for insurance on the online marketplaces, and subsidies will be available to those with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($45,960 for an individual in 2013).

If they do have access to coverage on the job, part-timers can still shop on the exchanges, but they'll only qualify for subsidies if the job-based insurance costs more than 9.5 percent of their family income or pays less than 60 percent of medical costs, on average.

In addition, part-timers may be eligible for Medicaid if they live in a state that's expanding coverage to adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($15,856 for an individual in 2013). The health law requirement was made optional following a Supreme Court challenge; half of the states have so far opted to expand eligibility.

As for Grindle, Medicaid isn't likely an option since . She and her husband, who's 67 and on Medicare, have a combined income of $2,270 each month, about 175 percent of the federal poverty level of $15,510 for a couple in 2013.

With a premium subsidy, Grindle can buy a silver plan on the exchange for about $118 a month, according to Laurel Lucia, a policy analyst with the Center for Labor Research and Education at University of California, Berkeley.

Though more expensive than the roughly $70 a month Grindle paid for her mini-med plan, "the coverage would definitely be better than the mini-med they had," says Lucia.

Grindle says she plans to apply for coverage on the marketplace soon. As for the bills she's racking up now, she's been talking with the hospital to see what can be done.

"I'm just not letting it get me down," she says. "I'm just going to put the bills in a file. What can you do? It's a shame, because we've had excellent credit all our lives."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013...s?sc=17&f=1001

So even the minuscule number of employees forced by their asshole employers into part time so the employer can avoid the 50-employee mandate are taken care of by ACA.

[boutons_deux]

This Is Why We Can’t Have An Adult Conversation About Health Care

In 2009, former Republican nominee for vice president Sarah Palin dominated the conversation about health care reform with one of the most potent and viral pieces of demagoguery in recent American history: death panels.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” she said.

Palin’s science fiction-like conjecture of what the still-developing health care law will yield wound up killing a crucial and harmless part of the law: taxpayer-provided end-of-life counseling that would have asked all Medicare recipients to voluntarily set up a living will, which could have saved taxpayers billions while easing suffering for those near death and their families, who are often forced to make unbearable decisions.

Still, the lie persists.

A recent study suggests that even the act of debunking the law did little to blunt the misinformation. ”Sometimes, providing accurate information will only propel false beliefs,” wrote The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff.

Since there’s no evidence that what Palin described is in the law, Republicans have just decided that the real “death panel” is the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).

IPAB is a 15-member board that cannot cut benefits or increase co-pays. It exists to make recommendations on cuts in payments to doctors only if Medicare’s costs grow too fast. Because the costs of government’s single-payer health care program for seniors are growing at an all-time low, the board won’t even convene until 2015 — at the earliest.

You can see now why it’s so hard to debunk this lie. The falsehood is so much more compelling.

Time magazine’s Mark Halperin did his part to keep the fraud alive during an interview with WorldNetDaily on Monday, when he said death panels are “built into the plan.” In the video above it comes around the eight-minute mark. Halperin corrected himself the next day — but the damage had been done.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/watch-th...t-health-care/

Thanks, right wingers and the Repug tea baggers you elect, repeatedly.

[boutons_deux]

Millions Of Americans Had Their Insurance Canceled And Their Premiums Rise — Before Obamacare



“The health insurance industry is racing to defuse a growing furor over retroactive policy cancelations that have saddled some patients with big medical bills and sparked lawsuits,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Rhonda Rundle wrote in February of 2008.

Some people who like their plans may have lost them this year but before Obamacare became law, the private individual insurance market was a mess.

Health insurers praised employees who helped drop sick customers. Buyers kept their insurance for two years on average. Premiums exploded, doctors were removed from networks and plans were canceled, sometimes right when they were needed most.

Since Obamacare, health care costs have grown at the lowest rate ever recorded.

Millions of people did have their plans canceled this year — either because the plan didn’t meet minimum standards or the insurance industry didn’t want to offer it to people with pre-existing conditions. But unlike those who lost their insurance in the past, they will be able to get a plan, whether they’re sick or not.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/tell-you...r-then-duck/4/


More Than 99 Percent Will Pay The Same Or Less Under Obamacare

Fewer than 1 percent — .6 percent — of the population will pay more for their health insurance under Obamacare.

“Families USA’s finding of 0.6 percent was based on data showing that only 5.7 percent of the non-elderly population have individual—as opposed to group—health coverage and that just 29 percent of that group have family incomes that are higher than the limits for subsidies,” writes CNBC’s Dan Mangan. “And just one-third of that smaller group would be expected to remain in the individual market for longer than a year, given its historical turnover.”

The vast majority will pay the same or less for health insurance that’s as good as or better than what they had before.

As many as 26 million Americans will receive subsidies to help buy coverage and millions more will be completely covered under Obamacare.

This isn’t going to be a relief to those who have to pay more but they now have access to a system where sick children and adults cannot be discriminated against. And if they don’t like paying more, they can advocate for a public option that would save billions by offering lower rates.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/tell-you...r-then-duck/5/


Fox, Repugs, tea baggers just GUSHING CROCODILE TEARS over all those poor, poor victims of insurance companies cancelling their ty plans.

Many of those plans were sold AFTER the insurance companies knew they'd have to cancel them for being so ty and not providing ACA minimum coverage. iow, just another bad-faith, screw-all-y'all-suckers corporate rip-off.

[boutons_deux]

Rejecting Medicaid Expansion Raises Rates By As Much As 15 Percent



Republicans are furious that Obamacare is canceling people’s insurance and demanding they pay more for new policies. But that’s what Republican governors are doing when they turn down Medicaid expansion for more than five million Americans.

When the Supreme Court ruled states could reject Obamacare’s provision to cover people who earn up to 138 percent of the poverty level, 25 Republican-led states took the opportunity to do just that — even though the federal government is paying 100 percent of the cost for three years, which will taper down to 90 percent by the end of the decade.

As a result of Republican obstinance, residents of these states are paying 15 percent more in health care exchanges, according to MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, and putting rural hospitals in the states in danger of closing. Rejecting Medicaid expansion also encourages those in poverty to remain there or lose their health insurance.

Texas, where 1 in 4 residents lacks health insurance, is denying about one million people health insurance through Medicaid.The cruelty of denying Medicaid expansion can also be measured in lives.

An independent analysis by the Rand Corporation found that the result of just 14 of 25 states not expanding could be as many as 19,000 people dying for lack of insurance each year.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/tell-your-republican-relatives-these-5-obamacare-facts-at-thanksgiving-dinner-then-duck/3/

[boutons_deux]

Obamacare’s Secret Success

The law establishing Obamacare was officially led the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And the “affordable” bit wasn’t just about subsidizing premiums. It was also supposed to be about “bending the curve” — slowing the seemingly inexorable rise in health costs.

So, how’s it going?

The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic.

the facts are striking. Since 2010, when the act was passed, real health spending per capita — that is, total spending adjusted for overall inflation and population growth — has risen less than a third as rapidly as its long-term average. Real spending per Medicare recipient hasn’t risen at all; real spending per Medicaid beneficiary has actually fallen slightly.

it’s hard to see why a weak economy would have more effect in reducing the prices of health services than it has on overall inflation. Finally, Medicare spending shouldn’t be affected by the weak economy, yet it has slowed even more dramatically than private spending.

A better story focuses on what appears to be a decline in some kinds of medical innovation — in particular, an absence of expensive new blockbuster drugs, even as existing drugs go off-patent and can be replaced with cheaper generic brands. This is a real phenomenon; it is, in fact, the main reason the Medicare drug program has ended up costing less than originally projected

So what aspects of Obamacare might be causing health costs to slow? One clear answer is the act’s reduction in Medicare “overpayments” — mainly a reduction in the subsidies to private insurers offering Medicare Advantage Plans, but also cuts in some provider payments. A less certain but likely source of savings involves changes in the way Medicare pays for services. The program now penalizes hospitals if many of their patients end up being readmitted soon after being released — an indicator of poor care — and readmission rates have, in fact, fallen substantially. Medicare is also encouraging a shift from fee-for-service, in which doctors and hospitals get paid by the procedure, to “accountable care,” in which health organizations get rewarded for overall success in improving care while controlling costs.

Furthermore, there’s evidence that Medicare savings “spill over” to the rest of the health care system — that when Medicare manages to slow cost growth, private insurance gets cheaper, too.

And the biggest savings may be yet to come. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel with the power to impose cost-saving measures (subject to Congressional overrides) if Medicare spending grows above target, hasn’t yet been established, in part because of the near-certainty that any appointments to the board would be filibustered by Republicans yelling about “death panels.” Now that the filibuster has been reformed, the board can come into being.

But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/11/29...t-success.html

If you don't know or remember, Medicare Advantage is an UNFUNDED REPUG CORPORATE WELFARE program that costs taxpayers 10%+ more than regular Medicare.

[boutons_deux]

Health Exchanges Brace For A December Deluge

"There is an avalanche coming,"

Williams says the firm knows from years of experience with open enrollment for Medicare patients, that the Monday after Thanksgiving is always the single busiest day for business.

"People will have been thinking about this over the holidays and talking to family members, and they are going to feel an impetus to do something on that Monday; and there is going to be a huge crush,"

Why December? Well, it finally represents a deadline. Originally you had to sign up by Dec. 15 in order to have your insurance coverage begin Jan. 1. Last week the administration extended the deadline to Dec. 23.

there are still two big groups that will try to squeeze through the tight enrollment window.

One group includes those who have from their insurance companies and who need insurance that meets the health law's new requirements.

The other group includes people who have been shut out of coverage until now because of and who have been waiting for HealthCare.gov to get its act together.

The website should be able to handle 50,000 users at the same time by the end of this month, HealthCare.gov repair czar

"We're also beefing up additional paths for enrollment — through the call centers, in-person assistance, and ... direct enrollment with issuers," he said.

When Zients talked about direct enrollment, he meant allowing individual insurance companies, as well as large Web-based brokers, to sign up people so they don't even have to visit the federal website. Right now that can happen for people who aren't eligible for government subsidies to help them afford coverage. But subsidy calculations still have to run through HealthCare.gov.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013...e?sc=17&f=1128

Dems gonna slap the Repugs in 2014, 2016 with ACA success, esp in red states that force their poor into ERs instead of Medicaid. The Dems will have TONS of excellent ACA successes with which to destroy the Repugs.

[boutons_deux]

Meanwhile Repugs plan to and continue to screw their states

Maine Hires Firm to Study Medicaid System, to Democrats’ Ire

The contract was given to the Alexander Group, whose president, Gary Alexander, is a former secretary of Public Welfare in Pennsylvania under Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican. During his tenure, from 2011 to 2013, Mr. Alexander proposed cuts to public assistance programs and was opposed to expanding Medicaid.

“The philosophy of the consultants, I believe, is merely an effort on the part of the administration to bolster their own philosophy about the human service budget in the State of Maine,”

the record of Mr. Alexander, who, while running Pennsylvania’s welfare department, established an asset test for food stamp eligibility and cut about 130,000 people from state welfare rolls in a five-month period, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Critics also objected to the cost of the contract, $925,000.

“It’s really just another gimmick to deny tens of thousands of Mainers health care,”

Mr. LePage twice vetoed bills passed by the Democrat-controlled Legislature in May and June that would have expanded Maine’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act. And he has sought to cut tens of thousands of people from the state’s existing Medicaid rolls.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/news/affor...democrats-ire/

This is just like Michigan Repugs sending a bankruptcy expert (as opposed to a general purpose manager) as emergency dictator of Detroit. No surprise when his recommendation was the Repug-desired-all-along .... municipal bankruptcy.

[boutons_deux]

Medicaid Growth Could Aggravate Doctor Shortage

as California’s Medicaid program is preparing for a major expansion under President Obama’s health care law, Dr. Mazer says he cannot accept additional patients under the government insurance program for a simple reason: It does not pay enough.

“It’s a bad situation that is likely to be made worse,”

His view is shared by many doctors around the country. Medicaid for years has struggled with a shortage of doctors willing to accept its low reimbursement rates and red tape, forcing many patients to wait for care, particularly from specialists like Dr. Mazer.

Community clinics, which typically provide primary but not specialty care, have expanded and hired more medical staff members to meet the anticipated wave of new patients. And managed-care companies are recruiting doctors, nurse prac ioners and other professionals into their networks, sometimes offering higher pay if they improve care while keeping costs down. But it is far from clear that the demand can be met,

In California, with the nation’s largest Medicaid population, many doctors say they are already overwhelmed and are unable to take on more low-income patients. Dr. Hector Flores, a primary care doctor in East Los Angeles whose practice has 26,000 patients, more than a third of whom are on Medicaid, said he could accommodate an additional 1,000 Medicaid patients at most.

The health care law seeks to diminish any access problem by allowing for a two-year increase in the Medicaid payment rate for primary care doctors, set to expire at the end of 2014. The average increase is 73 percent, bringing Medicaid rates to the level of Medicare rates for these doctors.


But states have been slow to put the pay increase into effect, experts say, and because of the delay and the fact that the increase is temporary, fewer doctors than hoped have joined the ranks of those accepting Medicaid patients.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/11/29...?from=homepage

[rascal]

What I don't understand is how can it work so well in other countries and in the US it is so difficult to get it to work out.

[boutons_deux]

Medicaid Expansion Faces Major Logistical Challenges Among the Homeless

Today, most state Medicaid programs cover only disabled adults or those with dependents, so Mr. Cannon and millions of other deeply impoverished Americans are left without access to the program. But starting Jan. 1, President Obama’s health care law will expand Medicaid coverage to adults with incomes under 138 percent of the federal poverty line, and enrollment is expected to increase by about nine million next year. Thousands of homeless people will be among the newly covered.

Housing advocates say they believe that the Medicaid expansion has the potential to reduce rates of homelessness significantly, both by preventing low-income Americans from becoming homeless as a result of illness or medical debt and by helping homeless people become eligible for and remain in housing.

signing up homeless people for Medicaid is a huge logistical challenge, as housing advocates acknowledge. Homeless individuals often do not have an email address, phone number or permanent address. Many are unaware of the health care law or are skeptical of public programs.

For homeless people, experts said, the Medicaid expansion will mean more consistent treatment for medical conditions, including alcoholism, drug addiction, chronic pain and depression. For states and cities, they said, it will mean a more effective safety net, and perhaps even a cheaper one.

“You cannot successfully treat someone for diabetes if they’re living under a bridge,”

“And serious mental illness and chronic health conditions are barriers to getting housing.”

“They’re accustomed to a no,” Ms. Ward said of her homeless clients. “You really have to encourage them and let them know it’s their right to be covered.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/medicaid-expansion-faces-major-logistical-challenges-among-the-homeless.html

[SnakeBoy]

What I don't understand is how can it work so well in other countries and in the US it is so difficult to get it to work out.

Obamacare doesn't work in other countries either.

[boutons_deux]

What I don't understand is how can it work so well in other countries and in the US it is so difficult to get it to work out.

In other countries, it's non-profit, universal health care, deducted from everybody's income, everybody's in, nobody's out, you're born, you're covered.

No super complicated, multiple plans to decide on, no in/out-of-network cartel bull , no 50-state differences.

iow, universal health insurance in other countries is as simple and efficient as USA's Social Security.

And just as people buy supplementary retirement plans beyond SS, citizens in other countries can buy from supplementary insurance (top up) from for-profit insurance companies.

USA is a huge, wasteful, corrupt, rip-off, for-profit KLUDGEOCRACY.

That's why ACA, specifically healthcare.gov, trying work with the for-profit KLUDGEOCRACY is itself a super-complicated KLUDGEOCRACY, trying to deal with 10s of states's KLUDGEOCRACY of state regulations and plans (state's rights!! you Repug SCOTUS for the ACA opt-out job) because the red-state Repug states are sabotaging ACA by not participating.

btw, super wealthy, supposedly highly competent Oracle Corp has really botched the much simpler Oregon's ACA website as badly as private contractors botched the much more complicated healthcare.gov.

btw, another simplification, perhaps coming later, would have been for ACA to deliver a minimum, plain-English, no-fine-print universal policy with all the mandated minimum coverage, NO CHOICE, so the people would compare the various for-profit plans on price only, cut throat compe ion, rather than on the more complex KLUDGEOCRACY choices now.

[boutons_deux]

How we got Obamacare to work

Jay Inslee, a Democrat, is governor of Washington.

Steve Beshear, a Democrat, is governor of Kentucky.

Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, is governor of Connecticut.

In our states — Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut — the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is working. Tens of thousands of our residents have enrolled in affordable health-care coverage. Many of them could not get insurance before the law was enacted.

People keep asking us why our states have been successful. Here’s a hint: It’s not about our Web sites.

but each of our state Web sites has had its share of technical glitches. As we have demonstrated on a near-daily basis, Web sites can continually be improved to meet consumers’ needs.

The Affordable Care Act has been successful in our states because our political and community leaders grasped the importance of expanding health-care coverage and have avoided the temptation to use health-care reform as a political football.

In Washington, the legislature authorized Medicaid expansion with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the House and Senate this summer because legislators understood that it could help create more than 10,000 jobs, save more than $300 million for the state in the first 18 months, and, most important, provide several hundred thousand uninsured Washingtonians with health coverage.

In Kentucky, two independent studies showed that the Bluegrass State couldn’t afford NOT to expand Medicaid. Expansion offered huge savings in the state budget and is expected to create 17,000 jobs.

In Connecticut, more than 50 percent of enrollment in the state exchange, Access Health CT, is for private health insurance. The Connecticut exchange has a customer satisfaction level of 96.5 percent, according to a survey of users in October, with more than 82 percent of enrollees either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to recommend the exchange to a colleague or friend.

In our states, elected leaders have decided to put people, not politics, first.

Thanks to health-care reform and the robust exchanges in our states, people are getting better coverage at a better price.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...6d4_story.html

suck a big one, right-wingers. ACA works now and is going to work even better. The Repugs and VRWC know it, too, that's why they are desperate to sabotage it, to LIE to their red-state assholes that ACA is a trainwreck, and DENY their poor resident access to Medicaid.

[boutons_deux]

Republican critics of Obamacare rose up in anger today, claiming that, after two months of fixes, the healthcare.gov Web site is now “unacceptably fast.”

Leading the howls of protest was the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who accused President Obama of designing a Web site that operates at a “blistering, breakneck speed.”

“With pages loading in milliseconds, this Web site is insuring people before they know what hit them,” Rep. Issa charged. “Clearly, this is what the President and his team had in
mind.”

Additionally, Rep. Issa said, at such high speeds “it is questionable whether this Web site is even safe for consumers to use, particularly the elderly.”

The California Republican said he would call for hearings this week to investigate the dangerous new velocity of healthcare.gov, telling reporters, “If anyone can slow this thing down, it’s me.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...tml#entry-more

[Winehole23]

The slowdown in spending is due in part to the recession and the tepid recovery—but not as much as you’d think. A recent paper by the Harvard economists David Cutler and Nikhil Sahni estimated that the recession explained scarcely more than a third of the spending slowdown. Oddly enough, the public debate over Obamacare has also played a role. Bob Kocher, who was a special assistant for health care in the White House in 2009 and 2010, did a report for Lawrence Summers on the past sixty years of health-care legislation, and found that when Congress seriously considered enacting health-care reform the rate of health-care spending often slowed for a year or two. Just talking about medical costs, it seems, limits medical costs. Kocher, a physician turned venture capitalist (and currently a guest scholar at the Brookings Ins ution), dubs this “the health-care-policy placebo effect.” As he told me, “When you’ve got politicians going around the country making speeches about how out-of-control health-care spending is killing the economy, health-care providers come to feel that it might make sense to be less aggressive in setting prices.”


Both those effects are bound to be temporary. But there’s good reason to think that the moderation of health-care spending will persist, because, according to Jason Yeung, an investor at Morgan Stanley’s Growth Team, we’re beginning to see deeper structural changes in the health-care system. Historically, costs have been hard to contain because most of the players in the system have had no incentive to do so. Hospitals and doctors have typically been paid on a fee-for-service basis: the more things they do, the more money they get. Insured patients have paid only a small fraction of the cost of their care, and insurers have just passed costs along to their customers. Employers and the government, meanwhile, have been left to foot the bill.

“What we’re moving toward instead is a world in which everybody in the system is sharing financial risk,” Yeung told me. “And therefore everybody has an incentive to control costs.”

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financ...alk_surowiecki

[Winehole23]

For consumers, this means higher deductibles and co-pays, and having to think more about prices. A peculiar feature of the American health-care system is the enormous variation in prices that hospitals charge for a procedure, which often are not correlated with quality. So in 2011 California adopted a system of “reference-based pricing” for state workers and retirees. If you needed hip-replacement surgery, say, the state would cover you for the amount charged (minus a deductible) at forty-one “value” hospitals in the state. If you went for a costlier option, you had to make up the difference. Most people chose one of the value hospitals, and their outcomes were similar to those of people who chose the more expensive hospitals. The state saved money, and the threat of losing customers, in turn, led the more expensive hospitals to cut prices; one study found that the price of joint-replacement surgery fell by about a third.

[boutons_deux]

"he enormous variation in prices that hospitals charge for a procedure"

I think ACA forces hospitals and clinics to publish their prices. If not, there is something that is allowing studies to obtain the prices and show the enormous variations.

then of course, there's is the huge price difference with the same procedures between USA, vs Canada, UK, Germany, France.

[boutons_deux]

ACA wins in court, again, split decision

Supreme Court declines to hear case on Obamacare's 'employer mandate'

The Supreme Court will not reconsider the part of President Obama’s healthcare law that requires employers to provide basic health insurance for their workers or pay a tax penalty.

The justices on Monday dismissed an appeal brought by a conservative Christian college in Virginia that contended the “employer mandate” is uncons utional.
Last year, the court in a 5-4 decision upheld the “individual mandate,” deciding that people may be required to either obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty.

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/60.../p2p-78403338/

[boutons_deux]

you Repugs, libertarians, and tea baggers are ALL as much sons of es as the sons of es y'all elect.

California GOP creates fake health care website to discourage cons uents from obtaining insurance

California Republicans are desperate and shameless. In the past two weeks, GOP Assembly members have sent mailings out on what appears to be the state's dime to their cons uents about health insurance. Only, they don't direct those people to CoveredCA.com to sign up. Instead, they send them to their own astroturf version with the url CoveringHealthCareCA.com.

On their version, there are links to negative articles and twisted messages intended to sour people on signing up for health insurance before they ever land at the official health exchange site.

If you click on the "Don't have health insurance" tab on the front page, you're taken to a page that puts all the focus on the penalty and none on the benefits.

In fact, they have a "penalty calculator" on that page, rather than a premium calculator.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...e?detail=email

[cantthinkofanything]

you Repugs, libertarians, and tea baggers are ALL as much sons of es as the sons of es y'all elect.

California GOP creates fake health care website to discourage cons uents from obtaining insurance

California Republicans are desperate and shameless. In the past two weeks, GOP Assembly members have sent mailings out on what appears to be the state's dime to their cons uents about health insurance. Only, they don't direct those people to CoveredCA.com to sign up. Instead, they send them to their own astroturf version with the url CoveringHealthCareCA.com.

On their version, there are links to negative articles and twisted messages intended to sour people on signing up for health insurance before they ever land at the official health exchange site.

If you click on the "Don't have health insurance" tab on the front page, you're taken to a page that puts all the focus on the penalty and none on the benefits.

In fact, they have a "penalty calculator" on that page, rather than a premium calculator.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...e?detail=email

your black Jesus has ed up beyond imaginable and probably irreparable.

[boutons_deux]

Cost of Health Care Law Is Seen as Decreasing

The rollout of President Obama’s health care law may have deeply disappointed its supporters, but on at least one front, the Affordable Care Act is beating expectations: its cost.

Over the next few years, the government is expected to spend billions of dollars less than originally projected on the law, analysts said, with both the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for private insurance plans ending up less expensive than anticipated.

Economists broadly agree that the sluggish economy remains the main reason that health spending has grown so slowly for the last half-decade. From 2007 to 2010, per-capita health care spending rose just 1.8 percent annually. Since then, the annual increase has slowed even further, to 1.3 percent. A decade ago, spending was growing at roughly 5 percent a year.

But even though the Affordable Care Act might be more a beneficiary of changes in health care spending than the primary driver of them, the law’s provisions to control costs could prove increasingly important as the economy improves, demand for health care increases and spending picks back up.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/03...?from=homepage

[boutons_deux]

the REpugs and their VRWC paymasters keep on fighting a losing war

A New Wave of Challenges to Health Law

More than a year after the Supreme Court upheld the central provision of President Obama’s health care overhaul, a fresh wave of legal challenges to the law is playing out in courtrooms as conservative critics — joined by their Republican allies on Capitol Hill — make the case that Mr. Obama has overstepped his authority in applying it.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of several cases brought by states including Indiana and Oklahoma, along with business owners and individual consumers, who say that the law does not grant the Internal Revenue Service authority to provide tax credits or subsidies to people who buy insurance through the federal exchange.

At the same time, the House Judiciary Committee will convene a hearing to examine whether Mr. Obama is “rewriting his own law” by using his executive powers to alter it or delay certain provisions. The panel also will examine the legal theory behind the subsidy cases: that the I.R.S., and by extension, Mr. Obama, ignored the will of Congress, which explicitly allowed tax credits and subsidies only for those buying coverage through state exchanges.

“We have agencies under this administration having an at ude that they can fix a statute, that they can improve upon a statute, that they can look at a statute’s clear language and disregard it,” Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, who is bringing one of the cases, said in an interview Monday. “The president himself has said on more than one occasion, ‘I can’t wait on Congress.’ In our system of government, he has to.”

The subsidy lawsuits grow out of three years of work by conservative and libertarian theorists at Washington-based research organizations like the Cato Ins ute, the American Enterprise Ins ute and the Compe ive Enterprise Ins ute. The cases are part of a continuing, multifaceted legal assault on the Affordable Care Act that began with the Supreme Court challenge to the law and shows no signs of abating.

“After the A.C.A. was enacted and after the president signed it, a lot of people — me included — decided that we weren’t going to take this lying down, and we were going to try to block it and ultimately either get the Supreme Court to overturn it or Congress to repeal it,” said Michael F. Cannon, a health policy scholar at the libertarian-leaning Cato Ins ute, who helped develop the legal theory for the subsidy cases and will testify in the House on Tuesday.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/03...?from=homepage

irredeemable, sociopathic assholes everyone of them, the VRWC stink tanks included.