What G.O.P.-Style Reform Looks Like
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
February 1, 2014
Three Republican senators — Orrin Hatch of Utah, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Richard Burr of North Carolina — have issued an alternative to the health care reforms that they deride as Obamacare. Conservative analysts have hailed their proposals as “an important milestone in the health care debate” and a “reform that has enormous promise.” But the plan, which is hard to parse because it has not been put into precise legislative language, looks inferior in most respects to the existing law.
The plan would
repeal the Affordable Care Act and
subs ute an alternative that would
likely cover fewer uninsured people,
raise premiums for many older adults,
shrink Medicaid,
cut back on subsidies for middle class Americans,
scale back protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and
allow private insurers to escape many of the consumer-friendly requirements now imposed on them.
It is a blueprint for what the Republicans hope to do if they capture the White House in 2016. They say they are relying on market compe ion to keep costs down; empowering consumers to choose plans they want, not plans whose benefits are set by the federal government; emphasizing private insurance, not government programs; and giving states the primary role in managing the reform effort.
All of these ideas have been debated for decades, and the most important have been incorporated into the existing reforms, which also rely on market compe ion and give consumers tools to choose among private insurance plans. In fact, the Republican plan keeps some parts of Obamacare that the public has embraced — like guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions in some cir stances, allowing children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26, and barring insurers from imposing lifetime benefit caps. But simply grafting those popular elements onto a package that reduces coverage will not mask the defects in the Republican plan.
The plan claims to guarantee coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, but there is a big catch. It is only guaranteed if they maintain “continuous coverage.” If they lose a job and the insurance that went with it, they must enroll in another plan promptly or they could be locked out of insurance or charged unaffordable rates if they have pre-existing conditions.
Although the Republicans would retain the most popular provisions of the reform law, they would drop consumer protections like
a ban on annual benefit limits,
free preventive services,
equal premiums for men and women, and
comprehensive benefits designed to make sure all plans are adequate.
Federal tax credit subsidies would be limited to those earning up to three times the federal poverty level, not four times as under the existing law. How those subsidies would be paid for is not clear.
The expansion of Medicaid in 25 states and the District of Columbia, which was intended to enroll millions of uninsured Americans, would be repealed,
and the amount of federal money provided for Medicaid would be capped, endangering coverage for tens of millions of Americans enrolled in Medicaid.
The plan does away with the mandate that virtually all Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty.
The mandate is a critically important element of reform because it drives young and healthy people into the insurance pools, making it possible to reduce the cost of premiums for the old and the ill. The Republicans, in eliminating the mandate, are simply hoping that insurers will offer up a batch of low-cost policies that don’t provide comprehensive benefits and will attract young and healthy consumers who don’t expect to need much medical care.
The exchanges on which consumers currently shop for private insurance would be eliminated,
and no federal funds could be used to establish alternative websites;
people would have to rely on brokers and private-sector websites unless a state funded its own website.
One way the Republicans plan to reduce the number of uninsured people is by allowing states to enroll those who receive federal tax credits in a randomly chosen plan with a premium exactly equal to the tax credit. While this means there would be no cost to the individual in terms of premium payments, the insurance might not be worth much. Insurers could raise the deductibles and co-payments to very high levels, leaving consumers with bare-bones catastrophic coverage that might not prove adequate in a medical or financial crisis.
The Republican plan would be costly and disruptive — to millions of Americans who have already signed up for private plans or Medicaid or will do so in the next few years; to insurance companies; and to state insurance commissioners who have based plans on the existing law and spent substantial money carrying them out.
Instead of trying to replace the health reform law with an inferior version, the Republicans should work to make the current law better, perhaps by encouraging more states to expand their Medicaid programs and intensify their outreach to the uninsured.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/what-gop-style-reform-looks-like.html
aka, incurable, hopelss insanity from the Repug Klown Kar!
Arkansas Repugs WANT TO CANCEL COVERAGE that ARKIES now have
Wasn't losing your insurance because of ACA a BAD THING, according to Repugs?
"more than 85,000 Arkansans who have signed up for coverage through the Medicaid expansion would presumably have that coverage stopped in 2015."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/arka...publicans-2014
You Got Sick! AOL Slashes 401K Benefits And Blames Two Women Who Gave Birth To Sick Babies
AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong blamed the babies of two employees for increasing the company’s benefit costs on Thursday, explaining in a conference call that AOL had to pay millions out in medical bills and alter its entire benefits package. The remarks came just hours after the company announced changes to its 401(k) plans and complained that Obamacare has increased costs by $7.1 million .
“We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general,” Armstrong said on a conference call first reported by Capital New York . “And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.” Under the new program, AOL employees will not be able to collect any matching funds toward their retirement savings from the company for any given year if they leave before Dec. 31 of that year.
But health care experts ThinkProgress contacted questioned why a large self-insured company with more than 5,000 employees could not absorb the additional health care costs associated with the pregnancies. Large employers typically purchase reinsurance, which could cover a substantial share of big claims and ensure stability in cases of larger-than expected medical payouts.
“The Affordable Care Act is simply a convenient whipping boy for any decision an employer makes to cut benefits,” Tim Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee, said. “
Assuming AOL had reasonably generous coverage like most large employers, it should not have experienced any significant changes in its benefit structure for 2014. Perhaps it had to pick up a few more employees that had not been covered before or reduce premiums for a few employees, but it is hard to see $7.1 million here.”
Meanwhile, the company is also hurting from poor business decisions. As the Washington Post reports, its quarterly earnings “were hurt by $13.2 million in costs associated with layoffs, including at Patch, the struggling local news venture recently sold to investment firm Hale Global. The Patch unit, championed by Armstrong, has lost an estimated $200 million.”
AOL’s total revenue beat expectations and increased $679 million in the fourth quarter. In 2012, Armstrong earned 12.1 million .
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-ac...ter955955&t=11
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-07-2014 at 03:49 PM.
ObamaCare Part Of 'Unprecedented' Bounty For Insurers, So Far
“The revenue growth opportunities in front of us may be unprecedented in the history of managed care and we believe our diversified portfolio positions us to capture our fair share and grow operating revenues at double-digit rates,” Mark Bertolini, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Aetna said earlier this week as the company reported fourth-quarter profits nearly double the year earlier period.
-- more -->
"ObamaCare Part Of 'Unprecedented' Bounty For Insurers, So Far"
That was inevitable since without the for-profit insurers getting paid off, they would have Harry-and-Louise'd ACA.
It's one of the strongest arguments for a no-profit govt health insurance and no-profit govt health care (govt hospitals, clinics, docs, nurses, etc as govt employees).
Anybody could still PAY FOR for-profit insurance and for-profit care FREEDOM!, but they'd get screwed like they do now, but more importantly a govt health insurance/care system would thoroughly screw the for-profit health care system BACK for screwing Americans for decades. No tears, no sympathy, the for-profit health ins/care assholes deserve payback.
What a joke. WH delays health insurance mandate, again.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...5fb_story.html
Last edited by TSA; 02-10-2014 at 05:49 PM.
why is it funny?
Just being friendly to corporations. Why would you right-wingers object?
How are laws changed, or is the ACA not a law?
ah, the "lawless President" schtick!
a law is not the same thing as rules implementing a law.
it's just like CFPB "law", almost totally gutted by financial lobbyists at the rule making stage, and they are still at it.
you realize this is the definition of political corruption right? Criminalize everything, use discretion to let your friends off the hook, then hide behind the "law"
You have a ed up concept of political corruption, and you were of course silent as the financial lobbyists gutted CFPB rules and House Repugs defunded it, the SEC, and the IRS to let their wealthy friends, benefactors, finance sector off the hook.
GOP senator to Fox News: Providing access to health care just makes people lazy
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama’s health care law would make some people so lazy that they didn’t want to work at all.
providing health care “can’t be a good idea” if it allowed people who were only working for health insurance benefits to leave the workforce.
“I think any law you pass that discourages people from working can’t be a good idea,” the Missouri Republican asserted.
“Why would we wanna do that? Why would we think that’s a good thing? How does that allow people to prepare for the time when they don’t work?”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/0...e+Raw+Story%29
From a red-state asshole Senator who works in the Senate less the 100 days/year, while Real Americans in the Real Economy works 200 or more.
Why do you think people have to bribe officials in third world countries dumbass?
You know Chinese officials believe they have freedom of religion in their country. It's in their cons ution. Freedom for all. ****It's just governed by "appropriate rules and regulations"******
Last edited by angrydude; 02-11-2014 at 12:25 AM.
BTW I'm glad Obama now agrees with Ted Cruz as far as postponing the employer mandate. I'm sure the apology will be coming any second now.
lol defenders of this dumbass president
Hopefully it's enough for the GOP to win back Congress and turn him into a lame duck... but you just can't take this stuff for granted anymore...
So the the 10Ks of companies that benefit from this delay are FOB, Friends of Barry? They bribed him?
Bribers in USA, and there are Ms of them, bribe for exactly the same reasons bribers bribe anywhere.
Y'all got NOTHING but typical right-wing assholes' FALSE outrage over a fabricated issue. Fox will run with this one, and all their other OBAMAMCARE DISASTER! through Nov 2016.
Since the Repugs don't have a single Pres candidate with ANY CHANCE, they run with OBAMAMCARE DISASTER.
Krazy Kruz wants ACA totally repealed, not delayed.
"I'm shocked, shocked by my own FALSE OUTRAGE!"
How the Confederacy rolls
96,000 People Are About To Lose Their Health Care Because Arkansas Has A Terrible Cons ution
Giving money to people who took up arms in a treasonous war to preserve slavery requires a simple majority vote in the Arkansas state legislature. But preventing tens of thousands of Arkansas from losing health coverage they already have requires a massive supermajority.
This matters because yesterday, 70 of the Arkansas House’s 100 members voted to appropriate the money required to continue Arkansas’ compromise plan to expand Medicaid. Currently, approximately 96,000 people are covered through this expansion, and close to a quarter million are eligible. If this appropriation does not pass, the nearly 100,000 men and women current insured through this program will lose their coverage on July 1.
But when 7 out of 10 lawmakers support a bill, that’s means it’s probably going to become law, right? Well, not in Arkansas:
Excepting monies raised or collected for educational purposes, highway purposes, to pay Confederate pensions and the just debts of the State, the General Assembly is hereby prohibited from appropriating or expending more than the sum of Two and One-Half Million Dollars for all purposes, for any biennial period; provided the limit herein fixed may be exceeded by the votes of three-fourths of the members elected to each House of the General Assembly.
That’s the 1934 amendment to the Arkansas Cons ution which requires a 3/4s supermajority in order to spend money for nearly any purpose. If the Arkansas legislature wanted to pay off unreconstructed Confederates who took up arms against their fellow countrymen, a 7/10ths supermajority would be more than enough to move forward. But since these lawmakers want to keep providing health care to the less fortunate, the state cons ution says they are out of luck unless they can chase down more votes.
To put this 3/4s majority requirement in perspective, that’s less than the United States Cons ution requires to expel a Member of Congress, to ratify a treaty, or to remove the President of the United States from office. Earlier this month, neither the U.S. House nor the U.S. Senate was able to muster anywhere close to a 3/4s majority in order to pass a bill that would have done nothing more than preventing the United States from destroying its own credit rating. Indeed, when you consider how dysfunctional Congress has become, despite having much lower thresholds to pass legislation even if you accept the legitimacy of the filibuster, it’s a miracle Arkansas is able to function at all.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...-cons ution/
Why Republicans Will Never Stop Lying About Obamacare
Politically speaking, here’s the thing about those melodramatic ads attacking the Affordable Care Act currently running on TV: In terms of actual policy, they’re as futile as the 40-odd votes to repeal the law that House Republicans have already cast.
GOP hardliners are like a drunk in a bar fight threatening to whip somebody twice his size if only his friends would let go of his arms.
It’s all over but the shouting.
Even if Republicans make big gains in the 2014 congressional elections, they can’t possibly win enough votes to overcome a presidential veto. What’s more, chances of capturing the White House in 2016 on a platform of canceling millions of Americans’ health insurance benefits appear so remote as to be downright delusional. Like it or not, the ACA is here to stay.
the Washington Post reported last month that “the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that if the market’s age distribution freezes at its current level—an extremely unlikely scenario—‘overall costs in individual market plans would be about 2.4 percent higher than premium revenues.’”
That’s a minor problem, but nothing like a “death spiral.”
In terms of affecting health care policy, then, the TV ads are largely symbolic — scripted melodramas calculated to arouse the partisan passions of the GOP “base” in states where control of the U.S. Senate could be determined this fall. Financed by Americans for Prosperity, the Scrooge McDuck-style front group controlled by the Koch brothers and fellow anti-government tycoons, they’re aimed less at killing the Affordable Care Act than convincing voters that Democrats are their enemies.
AFP has run a commercial featuring a group of actors pretending to be ordinary Louisiana citizens whose health insurance was canceled due to “Obamacare.” But it’s make-believe; a scripted TV drama as fictive as a Viagra advertisment.
In Michigan, 49-year-old leukemia patient Julie Boonstra earnestly explained to viewers that her existing health care policy had been canceled due to the Affordable Care Act, implying that she’d also lost her doctor and been broadsided by ruinous costs.
Fact checks by the Washington Post and Detroit News, however, determined that Boonstra hadn’t lost her doctor at all. What’s more, her monthly premiums under the Affordable Care Act cost roughly half what she’d been paying ($571, from $1,100). Her out-of-pocket expenses almost precisely matched those savings — overall, a wash.
A determined opponent of the law, apart from her understandable anxiety about changing insurance carriers while fighting cancer, Boonstra turned out to have suffered no real losses. Not to mention that she now has a policy that can’t be rescinded due to a “previously existing condition.”
And so it goes. Los Angeles Times economics columnist Michael Hiltzik has made a minor specialty out of fact checking these successive tales of woe. It’s left him wondering if there are really any “Obamacare” victims at all.
“What a lot of these stories have in common,” he writes “are, first of all, a subject largely unaware of his or her options under the ACA or unwilling to determine them; and, second, shockingly uninformed and incurious news reporters, including some big names in the business, who don’t bother to look into the facts of the cases they’re offering for public consumption.”
Politically, however, printed facts rarely prevail against televised fictions. Anyway, repealing the Affordable Care Act isn’t the point. It’s inflaming the GOP base and defeating Democrats.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/republic...ing-obamacare/
Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-06-2014 at 07:30 AM.
GOP’s Own Health Care Bill Will Lead 1 Million To Lose Employer-Sponsored Insurance
A new report finds that health care reform would reduce the number of people receiving employer-based coverage, increase dependence on government-sponsored health care, and raise the national deficit. But the analysis, released on Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, isn’t an examination of President Obama’s signature health care law. It details the consequences of one of the GOP’s bills to amend it.
The proposal, which Republicans voted for in the House Ways and Means Committee earlier this month, would alter the definition of full time employment under the Affordable Care Act from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week and exempt more businesses from penalties for not offering employer-based insurance or lower the overall penalty burden. Under existing law, employers with more than 50 workers pay a penalty if their full-time employees (defined as working an average of 30 hours a week) receive subsidized coverage in the law’s health care exchanges.
CBO concluded that the GOP proposal would lead to the very same problems Republicans have identified in Obamacare. H.R.2575 would reduce the number of people receiving employment-based coverage by 1 million, increase “the number of people obtaining coverage through Medicaid” or the health care exchanges by between 500,000 and 1 million, and raise the budget deficits by $73.7 billion. The ranks of the uninsured would also grow by “less than 500,000 people.”
Enacting the proposal “would probably provide an incentive for some employers to redefine work hours so that more employees would be categorized as part-time,” the report continues. “Because many more workers work 40 hours per week (or slightly more) than work 30 hours per week (or slightly more), the changes made by H.R.2575 could affect many more workers than are affected under current law.”
The bill, which has attracted 208 sponsors (including 8 Democrats), could come to a vote in the House “as early as next week.”
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...red-insurance/
How One Governor Is Trying To Avoid Responsibility For Denying Health Care To 600,000 Poor People
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) has the power to follow several other GOP governors’ lead and negotiate an alternative to the Affordable Care Act’s optional Medicaid expansion — a provision that would extend basic health benefits to more than 600,000 of the poorest Georgians — with the Obama administration. Instead, Deal’s administration is pushing a GOP-sponsored state bill that would take the matter out of the executive branch’s hands and require lawmakers to give legislative approval to any Medicaid expansion plan.
...
Since the health law originally intended every state to expand Medicaid, it includes funding cuts to hospitals that serve large numbers of poor and uninsured patients who often can’t pay their medical bills — cuts that were meant to be mitigated by an influx of newly-insured poor people under the Medicaid expansion. But when the Supreme Court ruled the expansion optional for states in 2012, rural hospitals in anti-Obamacare states found themselves in a precarious position. Four rural Georgia hospitals have closed their doors in the last two years over excessive uncompensated care costs — a trend that’s expected to continue in states refusing the expansion.
A study by the Commonwealth Fund found that Georgia taxpayers will be forced to s out $3 billion through 2022 to help fund other states’ Medicaid expansions, even though state residents won’t enjoy any of the benefits of the health law provision themselves.
Deal has previously come under fire for accepting more than $550,000 from health care lobbied interests — including more than $100,000 from private insurance companies opposed to the ACA — while refusing the generous federal funds to extend health benefits to more than half a million poor Georgians.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...aid-expansion/
The ACA is ed. I just renewed my employees and their families for another year with private insurance. I don't care if it did cost me a load of money, I just couldn't justify throwing them into that mess.
Another advantage of ACA
As Full Disclosure Nears, Doctors’ Pay for Drug Talks Plummets
As transparency increases and blockbuster drugs lose patent protection, drug companies have dramatically scaled back payments to doctors for promotional talks. This fall, all drug and medical device companies will be required to report payments to doctors.
http://www.propublica.org/article/as...ailynewsletter
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