double down, is that ghetto slang?
they doubled it? they downed it? upped it? they are owned by the corps as much as the Repugs.
smh. it means they voted to extend it when their turn came up. the etymology is from gambling. it also means to bet the same amount when your turn to bet again comes up in games of chance. you have doubled down. It is apt because when the democrats had it come back around in the legislative cycle they voted yay just like the GOP did when they were in power. You repeat yourself and parrot your alternet and nakedcapitalism tripe. You double down by nature.
Deal with it.
reasoning with boutons "i'm open midned" deux
none of you right wingers have shown me any actions, policies, etc redeeming the Repugs over the last 40 years, and esp not since 2000.
but I remain open minded, so show me
I did.
all debunked bul
Really? You debunked the auto bailout?
Saying it didnt happen is not debunking btw.
You failed to debunk the SSC...Romneycare...EPA...etc. Obfuscate? For sure Goal Post move? Check.
lol 2000. Moving closer to the predicted 30 minute window.
especially since 2000, but 1990 is pretty much when the Repugs went fully insane.lol 2000. Moving closer to the predicted 30 minute window.
I'll move it back to 1850 so you right wingers can claim Abe as your own.
Fox News outraged that all the people it told not to buy insurance can't get insurance until fall
Brian Beutler catches the latest Obamacare fauxrage from Fox News: millions of people won't be able to sign up for health insurance until November. So all those young people who Republicans, and Fox News, told that they shouldn't be signing up because freedom are now deprived of freedom by having to wait until the next open enrollment period. Here's Fox News:
There is yet another ObamaCare surprise waiting for consumers:
from now until the next open enrollment at the end of this year, most people will simply not be able to buy any health insurance at all, even outside the exchanges.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...l?detail=email
One can expect with some confidence that this fantastic decline in a huge and hugely expensive epidemic will continue and probably accelerate as poor people get care under ACA and expanded Medicaid (but not in red states, of course, they're screwed by the Repug politicians)
For Diabetics, Health Risks Fall Sharply
Federal researchers on Wednesday reported the first broad national picture of progress against some of the most devastating complications of diabetes, which affects millions of Americans, finding that rates of heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure and amputations fell sharply over the past two decades.
The biggest declines were in the rates of heart attacks and deaths from high blood sugar, which dropped by more than 60 percent from 1990 to 2010, the period studied. While researchers had had patchy indications that outcomes were improving for diabetic patients in recent years, the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, do ents startling gains.
“This is the first really credible, reliable data that demonstrates that all of the efforts at reducing risk have paid off,” said Dr. David M. Nathan, director of the Diabetes Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the study. “Given that diabetes is the chronic epidemic of this millennium, this is a very important finding.”
The number of Americans with diabetes more than tripled over the period of the study and is now nearly 26 million. Nearly all the increase came from Type 2 diabetes, which is often related to obesity and is the more common form of the disease. An additional 79 million Americans have pre-diabetes, which means they are at high risk of developing the disease.
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who wrote the study, estimate that diabetes and its complications account for about $176 billion in medical costs every year. The study measured outcomes for both Type 1 and Type 2.
Researchers said the declines were the fruit of years of efforts to improve the health of patients with Type 2 diabetes. Doctors are much better now at controlling the risk factors that can lead to complications — for example, using medications to control blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure — health experts said. What is more, a widespread push to educate patients has improved how they look after themselves. And a major effort among health care providers to track the progress of diabetes patients and help steer the ones who are getting off track has started to have an effect.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/17...?from=homepage
even red states don't want Obamacare repealed, they want it fixed and expanded
Health Law’s Middle-Ground Approach Leaves It Unloved
We gave them three options:
The government should not be involved;
the government should help people buy private insurance;
and the government should provide it directly.
When given three options for how the government should treat middle-class people without insurance, many people supported the most conservative or most liberal option.
Percentage giving different answers to question about the government's role in providing health insurance for middle-income people under age 65 who don't get insurance at work.
In Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina, nearly four in 10 said the government should provide health insurance, as it does through Medicare and, for many poor people, through Medicaid. About one-third of people in Arkansas gave the same answer.
Similar numbers of people in the four states gave the opposite answer. Roughly a third in Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, and less than three in 10 in Kentucky, said that health insurance is one’s own responsibility and that the government should not be involved.
Private insurance, paid for with financial help from the government, gets the lowest level of support of all three options — and that’s the system now in place for many Americans via Obamacare.
A majority of Republicans in all four states said middle-class workers who are uninsured are not the government’s responsibility, while roughly half of Democrats favored expanding a Medicare/Medicaid-type system to them. It’s not surprising, then, that neither of the parties has been entirely happy with the way the law turned out.
Tellingly, independents — whom both parties are courting — do not fall into the middle option on this issue, either. The option that most closely resembles what is in place was the least-liked position among independents in these four states.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/up...oved.html?_r=0
Dems made the horrible mistake of letting health-insurance-financed puppet Baucus and his insurance industry exec/lobbyist write ACA, and got a very mixed bag that enriches the insurance industry but does finally help the poor and people with medical problems.
iow, Human-Americans wouldn't be helped unless Corporate-Americans got paid off (with taxpayer $100Bs). The health industry return on a few $Ms invested in Baucus has been fantastic.
The Repug states that are expanding Medicaid are doing it by taking taxpayer dollars and giving it to poor people to go buy their own insurance, rather use on traditional Medicaid. A move that many of their base are against.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 04-24-2014 at 11:34 AM.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...2ea_story.htmlThe Obama administration is poised to take over Oregon’s broken health insurance exchange, according to officials familiar with the decision who say that it reflects federal officials’ conclusion that several state-run marketplaces may be too dysfunctional to fix.
In public, the board overseeing Cover Oregon is scheduled to vote Friday whether to join the federal insurance marketplace that sells health plans in most of the country under the Affordable Care Act. Behind the scenes, the officials say, federal and Oregon officials already have agreed that closing down the state marketplace is the best path to rescue what has been the country’s only one to fail so spectacularly that no resident has been able to sign up for coverage online since it opened early last fall.
I found this surprising. Connecticut's state exchange ran so well, easily MUCH better than healthcare.gov, that it offered to help other states.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014...o-other-states
In Poorest States, Political Stigma Is Depressing Participation in Health Law
with a grant from the health care law, two employees played an advertisement they had helped produce to promote the law’s insurance coverage for young, working-class West Virginians.
The ads ran just over 100 times during the recent six-month enrollment period. But three conservative groups ran 12 times as many, to oppose the law and the local Democratic congressman who voted for it.
the partisan divisions and attack ads have depressed participation in some places.
They say the law has been stigmatized for many who could benefit from it, especially in conservative states like West Virginia that have the poorest, most medically underserved populations but where President Obama and his signature initiative are hugely unpopular.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen once they pull out all the stops to trash Obamacare,” Mr. Shattls said. “We’re nonpartisan here. We’re just doing what we’re funded to do, and that is to provide access” to health care.
In the past week, 22 new television ads against the health care law and for Republican federal candidates ran in 14 states. Since last spring, 76 percent of the more than 38,000 Republican-sponsored television ads nationally, and 79 percent in West Virginia, have attacked the law, according to Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks political advertising.
“The controversy about Obamacare does seem to have interfered with people’s ability to sort out the value of the marketplace for getting health insurance for themselves,”
“Literally, people thought there would be chips embedded in their bodies if they signed up for Obamacare,”
Far to the east, at a branch of the Shenandoah Valley Medical System in Martinsburg, Sara R. Koontz, a social worker, said she had heard people express fears about chip implants as well as “death panels” as she sought to enroll uninsured residents.
Some told her that they would rather pay a penalty than sign up for insurance, she said, and even people who did enroll paused in their excitement to ask, “Wait — this isn’t that Obamacare, is it?”
Until recently, Mr. Jenkins was a Democrat, a member of Valley Health’s board and executive director of the West Virginia State Medical Association, which has supported the Affordable Care Act. Now, as a Republican, he backs its repeal.
“Evan knows Obamacare is a mess,” said an ad from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which blamed the law for lost jobs, dropped coverage and high premiums. An ad from the group Americans for Prosperity, backed by the conservative billionaires David H. and Charles G. Koch, denounced Mr. Rahall for supporting the law, saying it was “going to hurt a lot of people.”
Many professionals here dispute such claims. “It’s working, and you can show it’s working,” Dr. Becker said.
Nationwide, more people have signed up for private plans than for Medicaid, but the results are the opposite in West Virginia, where about 15 percent of residents — 270,000 of 1.8 million — lacked insurance when the law took effect. Initial sign-ups for Medicaid, about 115,000 since Oct. 1, are nearly double what actuaries projected, and roughly five times the number of people believed to have bought private plans
Many of the uninsured were also deterred from participating by cultural factors: unfamiliarity with insurance, computer illiteracy, Appalachian isolation and, most of all, cost. But also at play was hostility to Mr. Obama.
(
a lot attributed to the A.C.A. that is not actuarially accurate.”
“I worry,” Mr. Samples said, “about people not understanding what their options are.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/27...?from=homepage
confusing and lying to their base is the Repugs' fundamental strategy.
States Are Running Out Of Excuses For Refusing To Expand Medicaid
Accepting Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion could be a better financial deal for states than initially predicted, according to new data from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Expanding Medicaid to extend health coverage to additional low-income Americans will costabout a third of what the CBO projected earlier this year, according to the agency’s updated estimates of Obamacare’s financial impact. Back in early February, the CBO estimated that state spending on Medicaid and CHIP would be $70 billion higher over the next decade because of the expansion. Now, that figure has been revised down to $46 billion.
Ultimately, states will only need to spend about 1.6 percent more on their public health insurance programs than they would have spent in the absence of health reform. And that’s before the potential long-term savings from Medicaid expansion — like the benefits of providing increased mental health treatment to low-income people — are factored in.
“Health reform’s Medicaid expansion, which many opponents wrongly claim will cripple state budgets, is an even better deal for states than previously thought,” Edwin Park, the vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the independent research group that first flagged the revision, noted.
Many of the GOP leaders who have continued to resist Medicaid expansion say that it’s simply too expensive, or insinuate that the federal government won’t follow through on its commitment to provide funding. But those talking points don’t match up with reality.
The CBO numbers aren’t the only evidence that states’ concerns are overblown. Last month, a study found that the people who are enrolling in Medicaid tend to be in better physical and mental health than the people who are already in the program. That means the states that agree to expand Medicaid aren’t burdening their programs with a flood of sick and costly patients.
There’s also a significant human cost to resisting Medicaid expansion. Thanks to GOP-led states’ continued resistance to this policy, about 5.8 million impoverished Americans don’t have any access to affordable health care whatsoever. Harvard researchers recently estimated that as many as 17,000 people will die directly as a result of their states refusing to expand Medicaid.
Nonetheless, many GOP lawmakers haven’t indicated they’re ready to give up the fight against this aspect of Obamacare. Several states have recently laid the groundwork to continue blocking expansion even if the governor’s mansion is occupied by a Democrat.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...aid-expansion/
Repugs are "DEATH PANELISTS" voting their base to death.
Scott Went Looking For Obamacare Horror Stories But Found Satisfied Seniors
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) went to a senior center on Tuesday to warn of the dangers of Obamacare and hear horror stories about the law. But instead Scott found almost all the seniors he talked to were satisfied with the new law.
There were 20 seniors who were assembled at a roundtable at the Volen Center in Boca Raton for Scott's visit, according to The Florida Sun Sentinel. But the seniors expressed satisfaction with their health care and even praised Obamacare.
Harvey Eisen, 92, said he was "completely satisfied" with Obamacare, according to the Sun Sentinel. Eisen also cast doubt about Scott's claim about cuts to Medicare that come through Obamacare. But that wouldn't be the end of the world even if there were, Eisen said.
"I can't expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut," Eisen said.
Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, said she expected Obamacare to become more popular.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...+%28TPMNews%29
Envisioning the End of Employer-Provided Health Plans
The days of Americans getting health insurance through their employers may be numbered — and the change could be just as profound as the shift of employers forcing employees to manage their own retirement savings.
As the Affordable Care Act goes from thousands of pages of legalese to actual, real-life public policy, the future of employer-provided health insurance is one of the most fascinating questions. Will employers call for — and their workers accept — the practice of buying health insurance through government exchanges? How much will companies save, and will they pass those savings on to employees? Will it make workers more mobile and ready to shift jobs, or will employer-paid health insurance become a sought-after perk?
The answers go to the heart of how things work in a sector that is one-eighth of the American economy. A new report gives some hints of how large the impact might be.
By 2020, about 90 percent of American workers who now receive health insurance through their employers will be shifted to government exchanges created by the health law, according to a projection by S&P Capital IQ, a research firm serving the financial industry.
It’s not an outlandish notion. Ezekiel Emanuel, an architect of the Affordable Care Act, has long predicted a similar shift.
But the scope and speed of the shift is surprising. So is the amount of money that companies could save. The S&P researchers tried to estimate what it would save the biggest American companies.
Their answer: $700 billion between 2016 and 2025, or about 4 percent of the total value of those companies. The total could reach $3.25 trillion for all companies with more than 50 employees.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/01...?from=homepage
But the key is that one of the "companies" selling health on the exchanges must be 1)state no-profit coops 2) federal no-profit health insurance
Gallop traces the ongoing failure: http://www.gallup.com/poll/168821/un...ate-drops.aspx
Pro-life Repugs and their pro-life "Christians" murdering the poor (they're criminals, takers, moochers, blacks, browns, anyway, right?) by refusing Medicaid expansion.
Death Panels!
Mortality Drop Seen to Follow ’06 Health Law
The death rate in Massachusetts dropped significantly after it adopted mandatory health care coverage in 2006, a study released Monday found, offering evidence that the country’s first experiment with universal coverage — and the model for crucial parts of President Obama’s health care law — has saved lives, health economists say.
The study tallied deaths in Massachusetts from 2001 to 2010 and found that the mortality rate — the number of deaths per 100,000 people — fell by about 3 percent in the four years after the law went into effect. The decline was steepest in counties with the highest proportions of poor and previously uninsured people. In contrast, the mortality rate in a control group of counties similar to Massachusetts in other states was largely unchanged.
A national 3 percent decline in mortality among adults under 65 would mean about 17,000 fewer deaths a year.
“It’s big,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania and an authority on life expectancy. Professor Preston, who was not involved in the study, called the study “careful and thoughtful,” and said it added to a growing body of evidence that people with health insurance could reap the ultimate benefit — longer life.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/06...?from=homepage
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