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obamacare deadline being pushed back a year so Dem's wont be held accountable for it during midterm elections
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...eadline-1-year
It's a mess in TX, thanks to your Repug politicians and their bureaucratic sabotaging of ACA, navigators, and very probably your own blatant bias against anything Dem and all government.
And for-profit-health-insurance-executive-written ACA is a "mess" because it is forced to co-exist with the totally ed up mess of US health insurance, which you seem to be quite successful to suck your wealth from.
obamacare deadline being pushed back a year so Dem's wont be held accountable for it during midterm elections
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...eadline-1-year
poor voters in red states will hold Repugs accountable for denying them Medicaid expansion and insurance.obamacare deadline being pushed back a year so Dem's wont be held accountable for it during midterm elections
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...eadline-1-year
poor voters in general won't vote republican, so its moot
...the times are a changin....once TX turns blue, and it is when, not if, it's over for the GOP nationally....they can't win by the numbers..
good. the GOP sucks too. i just think the alternative isn't much better. the last few elections have basically come down to who is the shiniest of two turds
True dat.........some Democrats are just as bad as all Republicans...
ha. ha.
word it however you want to make yourself feel better about whichever party you feel inclined to semen shield for. party platforms have become too rigid, so any candidate that shows up from either side will be a virtual carbon copy of the last. anybody that tries to break the mold gets chastised by the party, rendering them weak.
There hasn't been a good GOP candidate from TX in a long time...in a way what is happening in TX today is a indicator of what is happening to the GOP nationally and what will happen to the GOP in TX in the future if they don't adapt.......GOP candidates in TX know that they can win on stupid red-neck rhetoric and not on successful leadership and policy...so you get some ty ass candidates like Rick Perry...who has to be the worst TX Governor in a long, long, time...
The GOP is ed. Got to give out free to minorities and stop relying on Bible thumpers.
In true politik..you don't win elections by catering to only your base...and as the GOP reaches further and further to the right, it isolates itself from the US soft-coshy middle base that wins elections...this GOP suicide is baffling.
oxymoron
(rural) TX is so backward, retrograde, that a "good Repug candidate" is one carrying a gun, a Bible, and wearing a cowboy hat.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/healt...-over-20140304Arkansas's version of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act is weakened, but safe ... for now.
After several weeks of uncertainty, the Arkansas House and Senate each approved funding for the state's "private option," which takes federal dollars for Medicaid expansion and uses them to buy private insurance plans for low-income individuals on the exchange.
The Senate approved the legislation first on a 27-8 vote Feb. 20. After four failed votes, the House passed the bill Tuesday on a 76-24 vote.
However, the action renews the program for only a year, and opponents remain committed to continuing the fight.
Obamacare Is Already Helping Boost Americans’ Personal Incomes
According to a new report from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the health reform law is having a positive effect on personal incomes and spending. According to the BEA, Obamacare accounted for about three quarters of the overall rise in Americans’ incomes in January.
Personal incomes rose by 0.3 percent during the first month of the year — and the BEA explains that’s partly because of the impact of the health law’s consumer benefits. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion increased public health insurance benefits by about $19.2 billion. And the new refundable tax credits under health reform, like the subsidies available to help American purchase new plans in Obamacare’s marketplaces, totaled about $14.7 billion.
“Personal income in January was boosted by several provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which affected government social benefit payments to persons,” the BEA concluded.
The financial impacts of health reform are most evident among the sectors of the population that are struggling to stay out of poverty. A recent study by the Brookings Ins ute found that Obamacare has the potential to boost the incomes of the poorest Americans by anywhere from five to seven percent.
In order to arrive at that figure, researchers took out-of-pocket medical expenses into account, which can be prohibitively expensive. The rising cost of health care has been squeezing Americans for years, and one in four U.S. families say they struggle to pay their medical bills.
Some researchers are optimistic that Obamacare will eventually be able to protect Americans at all income levels from “financial distress,” and lower the rate of people who end up going bankrupt after one catastrophic medical event. At least one study into the health reform law in Massachusetts, which served as the model for Obamacare in many ways, concluded that reform can reduce people’s debt and improve their credit scores.
But, although Obamacare takes some steps forward in this area, it won’t solve these issues altogether. Researchers who study medical bankruptcies believe they’re ultimately a result of tying health insurance to market concerns, and point out that countries with universal health care systems are the ones that have made the most progress toward eliminating them.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...hold-incomes/#
Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-06-2014 at 07:31 AM.
"Arkansas Repugs fund ACA related Medicaid expansion"
How a CBS Video About a Cancer Victim Misled Millions About Obamacare
"Woman Battling Kidney Cancer Losing Company Health Plan Due To Obamacare."
That was the headline on a story that CBS' Washington Bureau sent to its affiliates last fall.
CBS correspondent Susan McGinnis narrates the piece: "During the 10 years that Debra Fishericks has worked at Atkinson Realty, the company has provided group health insurance with manageable premiums," McGinnis explains –"until owner Betsy Atkinson learned the policy would be terminated because it doesn't meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
"Debra has scoured the website looking for a new policy," McGinnis adds, referring to healthcare.gov, but "so far, she cannot afford the premiums."
"They just keep going up higher and higher when there is a pre-existing condition," says Fishericks.
McGinnis wraps up the story: "Debra hopes that eventually she will find a plan that fits her budget so that she can still makes trips to Indiana –to visit her grandson."
The camera then turns to Fishericks, sitting at her desk, looking at a photo of her grandson. "If I can't go to see him—that's the worst," she says. And she begins to cry.
I was astonished: I thought most people understood that, under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can no longer charge a customer more because she suffers from a pre-existing condition.
Later, when I interviewed Fishericks, I realized that she honestly believed she was going to have to pay more for coverage because she had been diagnosed with cancer. Like a great many Americans, she didn't understand how the ACA would protect her. Given how hard Obamacare's opponents have worked to obscure the law's benefits, I probably shouldn't have been surprised.
But what shocked me is that no one at CBS's Washington Bureau seemed to realize that what Fishericks had said just wasn't true: not the correspondent who narrated the story, not the reporter who went down to Virginia Beach and interviewed Fishericks, not the person who edited the video.
Fifty-eight CBS stations aired the piece. Newspapers and bloggers ran with it. Nationwide, millions of Americans were left with the impression that under Obamacare, cancer patients may not be able to afford insurance.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2...isled-millions
Coal Bear CRUSHES the VRWC/Repug Obamacare LIES with his own "Obamacare Horror Story"
MUST-SEE: Stephen Colbert debunks Obamacare horror stories with special guest
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...t?detail=email
Missouri lawmakers renew cynical efforts to derail Obamacare navigators
To discourage folks from signing up for coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, Republican lawmakers in several states have pushed through bills making it difficult for people to get free help from specially trained “navigators” authorized by the Affordable Care Act.
At the top of the list of special interest groups supporting such legislation: groups representing insurance agents and brokers, who, of course, charge for their services. They view the navigators as a threat to their income.
Nowhere have the agents and brokers found more friends than in the Missouri legislature, which last summer passed a bill making it unlawful for anyone other than a licensed agent or broker to give advice to any state resident about choosing a health plan.
In a big win for consumers in Missouri and elsewhere, a federal court in Kansas City late last month blocked the GOP-sponsored law, ruling that it was indeed a violation of federal law.
While the ruling was specific to Missouri, it is expected to have ramifications in states that passed similar laws. And don’t expect Missouri to challenge Judge Smith: both Missouri Governor Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster are Democrats. The only comment Missouri Insurance Commissioner John M. Huff , a Nixon appointee, has made is that his department is reviewing the ruling.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/02/17/14249/missouri-lawmakers-renew-cynical-efforts-derail-obamacare-navigators
Conservative Leaders Don’t Want You To Even Look At Healthcare.gov
Despite the fact that conservatives often fancy themselves the kind of people who define political self-interest as strictly a cold, financial matter, the reality is that they’re far better than liberals at exploiting things like social stigma, bigotry, taboo and other “irrational” emotions to point people in the direction they want them to go. You’re really beginning to see that with the rollout of the ACA. While the ostensible arguments against it being levied by conservatives are financial, the emotional underpinnings are pure stigmatization. I was all about Brian Beutler’s piece at Salon yesterday about “waiver mania”, and I particularly liked this insight:
You can see traces of the same Galtist tendencies among conservatives in states that are resisting the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. It’s not just that Republican governors are denying their poorest cons uents a paid-for Medicaid expansion, though that will certainly contribute to a tiering in American health care that will insulate the right from the left. It’s also that Affordable Care Act private health plan enrollment in conservative states is in general lagging far, far behind enrollment in liberal states.
This isn’t just a Healthcare.gov vs non-Healthcare.gov state issue. It’s also true among states with federally facilitated exchanges. And there are political and cultural forces behind the trend. Enrollment isn’t just discouraged in conservative parts of the country, it’s stigmatized. Remember Bette, from the GOP’s official State of the Union response? Her problem stems from the fact that she “wouldn’t go on that Obama website at all” — and she’s from relatively liberal Washington state!
That’s what’s going on, I think, in the disconnect between the “horror stories” that conservatives are trotting about about insurance companies canceling plans and selling their customers more expensive plans and the inevitable fact-checking that comes later, when mainstream media points out that if the person in question just bought through the health care exchange, they would actually save money. The latest version is this woman in a Koch brothers-paid ad in Michigan that is wildly dishonest. Her claim:
I was diagnosed with leukemia. I found out I only have a 20 percent chance of surviving. I found this wonderful doctor and a great health care plan. I was doing fairly well fighting the cancer, fighting the leukemia, and then I received a letter. My insurance was canceled because of Obamacare. Now, the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable. If I do not receive my medication, I will die. I believed the president. I believed I could keep my health insurance plan. I feel lied to. It’s heartbreaking for me. Congressman Peters, your decision to vote Obamacare jeopardized my health.
That’s terrible! Except it’s bull . Obamacare actually lowers her health care costs, as the Washington Post reports. Not only was there a plan in the exchange that included her current doctor, it was a plan that limited her out-of-pocket costs:
The claim that the costs are now “unaffordable” appeared odd because, under Obamacare, there is an out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350 for covered expenses under an individual plan, after which the insurance plan pays 100 percent of covered benefits. The Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Michigan that appear to match Boonstra’s plan, as described in local news reports, all have that limit.
Meanwhile, Boonstra told the Detroit News that her monthly premiums were cut in half, from $1,100 a month to $571. That’s a savings of $529 a month. Over the course of a year, the premium savings amounts to $6,348—just two dollars shy of the out-of-pocket maximum.
We were unable to reach Boonstra, but on the fact of it, the premium savings appear to match whatever out-of-pocket costs she now faces.
So, either way, she actually made out okay. As Kevin Drum explains:
So here’s my question: if this is the best AFP can do, does that mean that no one is truly being harmed by Obamacare? , I’m a diehard defender of Obamacare, and even I concede that there ought to be at least hundreds of thousands of people who are truly worse off than they were with their old plans. But if that’s the case, why is it that every single hard luck story like this falls apart under the barest scrutiny? Why can’t AFP find someone whose premiums really have doubled and who really did lose her doctor and who really is having a hard time getting the care she used to get?
If this is happening to a lot of people, finding a dozen or so of them shouldn’t be hard. But apparently it is. So maybe it’s not actually happening to very many people at all?
But here’s the thing: It doesn’t really matter that no one is actually harmed by enrolling in an insurance plan at healthcare.gov. The point of these ads is not to make the argument that people lost money, since that argument will get fact-checked pretty quickly. The point is to send the message that, if you go onto the website, bears will eat your face and dragons will set fire to your ass and you will be a sad person who is never the same again. A sad person with a little more money in your pocket, but so what? THERE BE DRAGONS AT HEALTHCARE.GOV. It’ a purely emotional pitch, and the facts are just noise to fill up airtime to convey the actual message, which is this poor person went to that dangerous website and now look how sad they are.
Fact-checking, of course, is very important, but what we need to understand is that deluding people on the facts is the least of the anti-ACA forces’ concerns right now. After all, if people go to healthcare.gov, they basically fact-check themselves by finding much better plans than they thought they would.
So the key, for anti-ACA forces, is to keep people from ever going to the site in the first place.
These ads are supposed to stigmatize—don’t go to healthcare.gov or you’ll be like this lady, and you don’t want to be this lady!—more than argue a point.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/2...ealthcare-gov/
Repug anti-Obamacare strategy is faith-based (believe us! Obamacare is horrible), totally FACT-FREE. Repugs are LYING to their base, as always, counting on their base to believe rather than to know, just like the ignorant Bible-thumpers. Belief trumps facts and reasoning.
Louisiana Threatens To Sue MoveOn Over Billboard
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...d?detail=email
you rednecks LOVE your own Cons utional right to free (political) speech, but not for others
Obamacare Rate Shock Probably Affects Less Than 1 Percent of the Country
The best estimate we have is that about 14 million people had individual policies last year, which means that 2.6 million people faced cancellation:
Many whose non-group policy was cancelled appear to be eligible for Marketplace subsidies or Medicaid....While our sample size of those with non-group health insurance who report that their plan was cancelled due to ACA compliance is small (N=123), we estimate that over half of this population is likely to be eligible for coverage assistance, mostly through Marketplace subsidies. Consistent with these findings, other work by Urban Ins ute researchers estimated that slightly more than half of adults with pre-reform nongroup coverage would be eligible for Marketplace subsidies or Medicaid.
So that means about 1.3 million people had their policies canceled and had to pay full freight for a new policy. Since the error bars on this estimate are fairly large, that comes out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2 million people. In other words, less than 1 percent of the country, mostly made up of people with incomes that are higher than average.
You can decide for yourself if this is a lot or a little. My own take is that it's pretty modest given that Obamacare probably benefits about 20-30 million people.
Any big new piece of policy is going to have winners and losers, and a ratio of 20:1 or so is about as good as it gets in the real world.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...ercent-country
Affordable Care Act Isn't Perfect, But It's A 'Pretty Good Structure'
For the Affordable Care Act to be considered a success years down the road, Ezekiel Emanuel believes that all Americans must have access to health coverage, and it must be better quality and lower cost. "And I think it's well within our grasp," he says.
A special adviser to the Obama White House in medical reform, Emanuel was instrumental in advising the health care overhaul. He's just published a new book called Reinventing American Healthcare: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve Our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System.
"Is the Affordable Care Act perfect? No, but it's a pretty good structure to go forward," he tells NPR's Scott Simon. "Let's fix the problems that it has and move onto other improvements we can now recognize."
Interview Highlights
On the impact of the Affordable Care Act so far
It is complex, but the health care system is complex. And I do think it actually has improved the system. ... It's gotten a lot of people insurance that didn't have it — people under 26 on their parents' plan. It's gotten 4 million — probably in the end it'll be 6 million people this year — on insurance, and it's created a structure for getting insurance to everyone. It's reduced a lot of infections already, it's reduced hospital errors, reduced re-admission, so it's had an improvement in quality. And actually, for the last few years, costs have been under control. Not all of that is the Affordable Care Act, but certainly some of it is.
On how the insurance industry will change
Health systems are going to begin offering coverage, and so you'll buy your coverage from the same organization that delivers the care, kind of like more Kaisers in this world. Similarly, health insurance plans are going to begin employing doctors, hospitals, and organizing them to deliver the best kind of care.
So I think insurance companies are going to get into providing health care as well as insuring, and hospitals are going to begin providing insurance as well as providing the care. You're going to see these, what I call "integrated delivery systems" that's going to be the dominant mode. So you're going to buy your insurance from maybe Cleveland Clinic, maybe Mayo, maybe Johns Hopkins, instead of from an insurance company.
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/287242...e?sc=17&f=1128
Opponents Float Another 'Replacement,' but Most Americans Want to Keep, Fix ACA
The latest polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that 56 percent of Americans want to keep the ACA and/or work to improve it (up from 47 percent in October, when insurance exchanges opened for business). Only 4 percent of Democrats, 11 percent of independents and 29 percent of Republicans want to repeal the law and replace it with a "Republican-sponsored alternative."
... and blah about PCA.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-se...b_4922117.html
If Repugs don't block it, ACA will be fixed, improved, tweaked as any forcibly complex plan that has to co-exist the USA's for-profit ripoff health care disaster.
doesn't fit in your script, does it, boutons?
They supported it, then didn't, then struggled to find a constipating, obstructive 75% of legislature vote to support it. Blind squirrel finds nut. Arkansas is red now, but Slick Willy was their governor.
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