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

[TeyshaBlue]

Already answered that a million times....single payor.

[boutons_deux]

Already answered that a million times....single payor.

We all know that govt health insurance/single payer won't ever happen, because America is ed and un able, BigCorp/BigFinance owns Congress and s America.

But you're love to snark away at ACA's BigCorp-written-and-crippled PROGRESSIVE, HUMANITARIAN attempt to help sick people get health care.

Single payer? Your buddies the Repugs actually REGULATED against the US govt negotiating prices as single buyer from BigPharma and BigMedDevice. So, eg, the DoD can pump the troops full of drugs at retail prices.

[TeyshaBlue]

You just cant carry on a conversation without your asinine red vs blue teddy bear. Pathetic.

[boutons_deux]

You just cant carry on a conversation without your asinine red vs blue teddy bear. Pathetic.

show us where RED has done all for the health care crisis for the poor vs what BLUE has done.

[TeyshaBlue]

Case in point.

[TeyshaBlue]

Single payer? Your buddies the Repugs actually REGULATED against the US govt negotiating prices as single buyer from BigPharma and BigMedDevice. So, eg, the DoD can pump the troops full of drugs at retail prices.

Dumbass. The DOD does not even sniff retail pricing on pharmaceuticals. Never have.
I used to administer the VA pharm contracts....like the DOD contracts, they got the best contact pricing, period.

[TeyshaBlue]

lol crickets

[boutons_deux]

lol crickets

There's been a lot of articles and talk about the cost of drugs recently. A guy on NPR said the Medicare must pay whatever price the drug companies set, so USA pays 2x or the price paid by other countries.

[boutons_deux]

Texas business community at war with legislature over Medicaid expansion


There's an outside chance at real political change in Texas soon, not at the hands of the growing Latino population there. It could come from a much more powerful, and deep-pocketed source: business leaders. They're fed up with the state's Republican governor and legislature's stubborn refusal of Medicaid expansion, and the billions it's going to cost the state.

"It's our money that we are sending to Washington, D.C.," says Bill Hammond, CEO of the Texas Association of Business, which includes many of the state's richest and most powerful business owners. "We are not getting it back," he says. "We pay for it with corporate income tax, we pay for it with our personal income tax and we pay it in the fact that our premiums are higher than they would be if everyone was insured.""Texas businesses pay almost 63 percent of all state and local taxes," Hammond says.

He says if the state expanded Medicaid it would save Texas business billions of dollars a year that could be invested in upgrading equipment, hiring new employees, providing raises and rewarding shareholders.

For every dollar the state would pay into Medicaid expansion, it would earn back $1.30 from the economic activity created, ( govt can't create jobs or wealth! ) according to an analysis by Ray Perryman.

He's an economist who has consulted for the Texas Legislature and six governors. That economic activity would top out at $3 billion in 10 years, creating 300,000 new jobs each year, he says. […]

Totally aside from the health benefits, Perryman says, when you look at the numbers, "You look at them and you say, 'This is a no-brainer. We need to be doing this.' It's really an apolitical situation. It's just math."

What that means in real terms is that one in four Texans is uninsured. It also means that the state's hospitals are losing billions. Parkland Hospital in Dallas, alone, lost $765 million last year in providing uncompensated care helping those uninsured people. All the state's hospitals combined lost $5.5 billion. That's not sustainable, not for Parkland, not for any hospital and certainly not for the state. Yeah, it's simple math and it's a no-brainer, but for Texas Republicans none of that matters because it's Obamacare. Is it going to be enough for a political revolution in Texas?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...28Daily+Kos%29

Texas biggest enemy is the ing s bags it elects.

"We'll show Obama, let's over Texas! Teach him a lesson!"

Blue states thank red states deeply for paying for blue states' Medicaid expansion!

[boutons_deux]

Obamacare-Obstructing States Start to Freak at the Consequences

Tonight the Wall Street Journal has a fascinating look something we may soon hear a lot more about in a very rushed and chaotic fashion. Last month, an outfit called the Milbank Memorial Fund (as best I can tell a relatively non-ideological foundation focused on health care policy) held a secret one day meeting in Chicago for officials from states who may suddenly find their citizens cut off from Obamacare health care insurance subsidies because of the new GOP challenge to the law.

The verdict. Basically that they're screwed.

There's simply no way for states to set up exchanges in time for this year - just at the purest technical level, setting aside whatever politics are involved. And that's setting aside a lot because Republican controlled state legislatures in particular are staunchly against budging in favor of facilitating the functioning of the law. Governors - even GOP governors - tend to be a bit more pragmatic since they face state-wide electorates and are most likely to bear the brunt of any backlash.

Republican state legislatures seem likely to sit back and let the agony happen. At least for a good long time.

The upshot in all these cases is that it is not clear just what the Supreme Court would say if it broadly ruled against the law - whether it would rule in a way that made workarounds relative simple or extremely complicated. But the big issue is political willingness or flexibility in the states. Republicans running for statewide office in blue and purpled states have already made clear enough that they're very worried about the consequences of a subsidy cut off.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/...+%28TPMNews%29

[Capt Bringdown]

'Surprise'—Obamacare insurers desire double-digit hikes
*12% premium hikes on average
*Higher for popular plans

[boutons_deux]

Obamacare insurers

.... don't exist.

There's ACA/Obamacare and totally independent FOR-PROFIT, gouging, rip-off health insurers, many of whom are cheating on ACA for-patient rules.

[boutons_deux]

Some Insured Patients Still Skipping Care Because Of High Costs

A key goal of the Affordable Care Act is to help people get health insurance who may have not been able to pay for it before. But the most popular plans – those with low monthly premiums – also have high deductibles and copays. And that can leave medical care still out of reach for some.

A recent study released by the nonprofit Families USA shows that a lot of folks with coverage like Mitc 's feel a similar burden, and a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds the same thing. The majority of people who buy insurance on state or federal exchanges pick silver-level plans, which often carry a lower monthly premium, but have a high annual deductible – $1,500 or more.

"Consumers are still struggling with unaffordable, out-of-pocket costs," says Lydia Mitts, a senior policy analyst with Families USA. "One in four adults who were fully insured for the whole year still reported they went without some needed medical care because they couldn't afford it," Mitts says.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-s...m_campaign=app

[boutons_deux]

Consumers In 'Grandfathered' Health Plans Can Face Higher Costs

The insurance representative explained that was because the plan Naillon and her husband had through his job was "grandfathered" under the health law. In other words, unlike other health plans, Naillon's insurance policy, which existed before the health law was enacted, doesn't have to cover many preventive services, including contraception.

About a quarter of insured workers today are enrolled in grandfathered plans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and these plans haven't significantly changed their benefits or costs to consumers since 2010.

Old Plans Not Subject To New Rules

These older plans differ in other ways, too. They don't have to guarantee a member's right to appeal a decision by the insurer, for example, and may charge consumers higher copays or higher co-insurance for out-of-network emergency services. The plans also aren't required to comply with the law's limits on a policy-holder's annual out-of-pocket spending (currently $6,600 for someone in an individual plan and $13,200 for families). So, consumers who have these health plans may be on the hook financially for more of their medical care than people with Obamacare policies.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-s...m_campaign=app

iow, no matter what help the govt/taxpayers offer, BigInsurance, BigMedicine is going to spend minimum, charge the maximum, and max out the insurance clients.

And American sheeple are helpless, forced to bend over and take it forever. and none of that sodomy is the fault of Obamacare.

[boutons_deux]

For you simpleton racists blaming Obamacare for high prices of insurance and care

For-profit hospitals mark up prices by more than 1,000 percent because there's nothing to stop them

If you think costs would come down if hospitals were all owned and operated by big for-profit corporations like Hospital Corporation of America, you might want to take a look at a study published last week by the journal Health Affairs.

Of the 50 U.S. hospitals that mark up prices the most, 49 of them are part of for-profit hospital chains, according to the study’s authors, Ge Bai of Washington & Lee University and Gerard Anderson of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Using 2012 data provided by 4,483 hospitals to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Bai and Anderson found that those 50 had an average markup of 1,013 percent over what Medicare pays for the thousands of items on hospitals’ “chargemasters.” (Chargemasters are lists of all the items and services hospitals bill for. Hospitals set their own charges. Few states set any limits on what hospitals can charge.)

That’s almost three times the average markup at the other 4,433 hospitals. The average markup for all those other hospitals—most of them nonprofits—was 340 percent.
Of those high-markup 50, more than a fourth of them are owned and operated by Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). But with 14 hospitals on the list, HCA was just in second place. A full half of the top 50 are owned by HCA’s biggest rival, Community Health Systems, a Franklin, Tennessee company that operates 199 hospitals in 29 states.

At the very top of the markup list was North Okaloosa Medical Center in Crestview, Florida. That hospital, in the Sunshine State’s panhandle, had the distinction of marking up its costs an average of 1260 percent. The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan took a look at North Okaloosa’s markups. She found, for example, that the hospital charged $79,350 to treat a hemorrhage. That’s compared to Medicare’s reimbursement of $5,177.

As the authors noted in their Health Affairs article,

“Collectively, this system (of giving hospitals free rein to mark up their costs) has the effect of charging the highest prices to the most vulnerable patients and those with the least market power.”

Those who are the most vulnerable, of course, are the uninsured and under-insured. Bai and Anderson pointed out that even when (or if) the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, there will still be 30 million people without insurance. When those folks get sick or injured and wind up in the hospital, they’ll be on the hook to pay whatever the hospitals decide to charge. This means that even with the ACA, thousands of families will still find themselves in bankruptcy court every year because of medical bills they can’t possibly pay.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/...est+Stories%29

[boutons_deux]

Republicans keep voting to make Obamacare more expensive

Peter Orszag notes that at the precise moment health-care costs look to be picking up again, House Republicans are voting to repeal one of Obamacare's most powerful cost controls — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).

Orszag, who helped conceive of the board when he worked in the Obama administration, offers a useful history of the idea and a rundown of its promise. But I want to make a slightly different point.

When Obamacare was grinding through the legislative process, a common conservative complaint was that its cost controls would prove to be a bait-and-switch: Democrats would pass harsh, deficit-reducing measures like the IPAB or the excise tax into law, which would make it look like Obamacare saved money, but then Democrats would repeal those policies before they took effect.

That complaint is proving half true. Members of Congress really are trying to repeal some of Obamacare's toughest cost controls, and if they succeed, they really would make Obamacare a budget-buster.

The catch is that it's not Democrats trying to repeal Obamacare's cost controls, but Republicans.
That's true on two levels, actually.

First, Republicans are trying to repeal specific policies, like IPAB, that are unpopular because they control costs.

But second, Republicans are trying to repeal Obamacare in its entirety — a move that Congress's official budget agency says would increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two decades, and for which Republicans have produced no offsets.

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8783965...bamacare-costs

Obamacare is making Repugs repeal medical cost controls!

[boutons_deux]

Where an anti-Obamacare ruling would hit hardest:


http://dlccdigital.ngpvanhost.com/fo...=E.20151308.w4

[boutons_deux]

Consider this, Republicans: 86 percent of people really, really like their Obamacare

With the Supreme Court about to decide King v. Burwell, the case that will decide whether more than six million people can keep their Obamacare insurance, a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund shows just how much is at stake in this decision.

That includes the political dimension, because it turns out that huge majorities of people newly insured through Obamacare really like it.

Eighty-six percent of the people who are newly insured through Obamacare are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the coverage, whether in private plans or expanded Medicaid.

A total of 91 percent are satisfied with the doctors who are covered in their plans, and nearly 70 percent have used their coverage and seen a doctor.

Among them, 62 percent say they would not have been able to access or afford this coverage before the law.

Those high satisfaction rates continue with the ease with which people have found care—78 percent found it easy to find a primary doctor and 60 percent got their first appointment to see that doctor within two weeks, and 53 percent of people needing to see a specialist got those appointments with in two weeks.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...28Daily+Kos%29

[Capt Bringdown]

29 hour work week & no benefits thanks to Obamacare.
Q:Who would have guessed this would have happened?
A: Anyone who isn't an Obot

The 29 hour work week: It's not just for nasty Republican restaurant owners anymore ;-).
Who would have ever guessed this would happen! I mean, yeah, Mr. Right-wing Olive Garden did it. But a city government in an uber liberal state skirts the ObamaCare mandate by limiting the most lowly paid employees to 29 hours/week? OMGee!!!! And BTW, where's the outrage from the local media over this? Non-existent.
-- more -->>

[boutons_deux]

If employers screw their low-paid employees and hide behind ACA, it's not the fault of ACA.

This could be fixed, but Repugs have and will block any fixes to ACA. They supposedly have their "plan" to screw Americans out of health care.

ty employers are just another reason for-profit insurance must be replaced with govt public insurance paid from with pay check deductions to achieve universal health insurance.

but this is America, and the VRWC's War on Employees will screw them down lower and lower.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...se-to-obamacar

plenty of data exposing the "29 hour" rightwingnut propaganda

search "how many employers use the 29 hours to avoid health insurance"

[boutons_deux]

Republicans’ raging civil war: GOP can’t decide how best to take away your healthcare

There’s been a spate of stories recently on how Republicans are fretting that they won’t be able to deal with the potential political fallout of crippling the Affordable Care Act. With a Supreme Court decision in King v. Burwell still pending and the fate of the ACA’s health insurance subsidies in the majority of states hanging in the balance, Republican politicians are in the awkward position of rooting for the subsidies to be killed but also seeking to avoid the blowback that would come from effectively kicking millions of people off their insurance.

This tension was perfectly expressed by Sen. Susan Collins when asked by the New York Times if she wants the high court to invalidate the ACA’s subsidies:

Asked if she hoped the court would rule for the plaintiffs, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, paused a moment, then said: “Yes, I guess I do. It would provide an opportunity to transition to a new law, or an improved version of the Affordable Care Act.” But she added, “I don’t think it would be fair to cut off people who have been using Obamacare subsidies.”

So Sen. Collins is pretty sure wants the court to cut off the subsidies, but she doesn’t think cutting off the subsidies would be fair. It’s the picture of clarity.

Collins, like many of her party colleagues, envisions a scenario in which Congress acts to temporarily reinstate the ACA’s subsidies while doing violence to other parts of the law, which, in theory, will buy the GOP time to craft its own replacement for the ACA in time for the 2016 elections. The problem with this approach is the same problem that’s plagued Republican healthcare policymaking efforts for years: irreconcilable internal divisions.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/17/repu...ur_healthcare/

[boutons_deux]

If the Repug SCOTUS5 VRWC shills kill ACA, here's some b/g into the arguments they will have accepted.

Four Giant Problems With The Supreme Court Case Against Obamacare

Sometime within the next two weeks, the Supreme Court will reveal whether it will take health care away from millions of people at the request of the conservative attorneys behind a case known as King v. Burwell. The premise of the King plaintiffs’ arguments is that most of the text of the Affordable Care Act does not count. Instead, they claim, a single sentence of the law must be plucked out of context which, if read entirely in isolation, seems to suggest that tax credits which enable millions of people to afford health insurance should be cut off in approximately three dozen states.

This is not how laws are supposed to be interpreted. To the contrary, as

Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a 2014 opinion of the Court, there is a “fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.”

Nor have the attorneys hoping to gut Obamacare merely asked the Supreme Court to creatively interpret the Affordable Care Act. They’ve also developed an alternative history of the law’s passage where Congress actually intended to use the threat of lost tax credits to force states to set up health insurance exchanges, rather than having the federal government operate exchanges in those states.

The details of this alternative history have not fared well in the face of scrutiny, however. Here are a few examples of claims made by the attorneys behind King v. Burwell that have since been revealed as false:

The Myth of Ben Nelson

The King plaintiffs’ central claim is that Congress considered the question of whether state or federal bureaucrats would operate the Affordable Care Act’s health exchanges to be a matter of such superseding importance that they were willing to deny health care to millions of people — and potentially toss numerous states’ health insurance markets into a catastrophic “death spiral” — in order to ensure that only state officials operated these exchanges. According to the plaintiffs’ brief, former Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), as well as some unnamed “other senators,” insisted that the law be designed this way because “it was important to keep the federal government out of the process, and thus insufficient to merely allow states the option to establish Exchanges.”

Their brief offers no support for this claim, however, beyond a citation to a 2010 Politico article that does not actually bolster their claim at all. The claim was also repudiated by Senator Nelson himself, who wrote in a letter to Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) that

“I always believed that tax credits should be available in all 50 states regardless of who built the exchange, and the final law also reflects that belief as well.”

The Letter That Was Literally A Joke

Shortly after oral arguments in King, Michael Carvin, the lead attorney for the King plaintiffs, spoke on a panel sponsored by the insurance industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans. During this panel, he claimed that he had uncovered a letter sent by state officials asking the federal Department of Health and Human Services to identify the legal authority that permits it to “administer premium tax credits” in the federally-run exchanges. Thus, Carvin claimed that this letter was proof that state officials believed that there was no legal authority permitting such credits during the implementation phase of the Affordable Care Act.

The problem with this claim, however, is that the letter Carvin cites was quite literally a joke.

The origin of the letter, according to a state official who signed it, was an onerous demand for information that federal officials sent to state governments. As a kind of practical joke, some of the state officials who received this federal demand drafted their own letter — the one Carvin cites — making a similarly long and onerous request for information from the federal government.

It is true that this letter from the state officials does include a request for information regarding the federal government’s authority to administer tax credits, but that request was not made in earnest. Rather, as the state official who signed the letter explained to ThinkProgress, “We weren’t spoofing a letter from the Feds exactly, but we were very much spoofing their proposed do entation requirements of states that wanted to set up a state-based exchange by restating these in a form that would apply to the Feds.” He added that letter was drafted “purely to illustrate the inanity of the federal requirements — and their own inability to provide anywhere near close to the same information to the states.”The letter Carvin sites, in other words, was a satirical act of trolling. It is not evidence that state officials doubted the legality of tax credits paid in federally-run exchanges.
Blindsiding State Officials


One legal obstacle that the King plaintiffs must overcome is that, even if the justices were to conclude that the plaintiffs’ idiosyncratic reading of the statute is correct, that reading raises serious cons utional problems if it is adopted by the Court. One of these problems is known as the clear statement doctrine.

The King plaintiffs claim that the law offers states a kind of coercive choice — set up your own health exchange or your residents will lose their share of billions of dollars worth of tax credits. Yet, as the Supreme Court explained in Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, a state is not bound by ambiguous or uncertain conditions. “[I]f a State is unaware of the conditions or is unable to ascertain what is expected of it,” the condition is void. Moreover, as the Court explained in a subsequent case, the question of whether states are able to ascertain whether federal money comes with conditions is evaluated “from the perspective of a state official who is engaged in the process of deciding whether the State should accept . . . the obligations that go with those funds.”

Six state attorneys general who support the King plaintiffs filed a brief claiming, without evidence, that state officials were “well aware” that the Affordable Care Act “conditioned the availability of tax credits on States establishing exchanges.” Yet this claim hasn’t just been proven false, it was proven false by statements made by officials within four of the six states that these attorneys general represent.

Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman (R), for example, explained his decision to allow the federal government to set up Nebraska’s exchange by stating that “[o]n the key issues, there is no real operational difference between a federal exchange and a state exchange.” Similarly, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) wrote that “[b]y refusing to implement state-based exchanges, the state is ceding nothing,” a statement which cannot be squared by the claim that the state was actually ceding tax credits for its residents. Lower-ranking state officials involved in Georgia and West Virginia’s exchanges made similar statements.

Additionally, multiple officials from states whose attorneys general did not sign a brief siding with the King plaintiffs also indicated that they were unaware of the supposed condition hidden within the Affordable Care Act. Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (R) said that he was unaware of any “clear benefits of a state run exchange to our citizens.” While Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) said that “there’s no real substantive difference between a federal exchange, or a state exchange.” A brief filed by the governors or attorneys general of 24 states the last time Obamacare was threatened by the Supreme Court said that the law “can only operate in the manner that Congress intended” if the tax credits are “intact.”

The Plaintiff Who Has No Business Being In Court


Finally, the plaintiff who lent his name to King v. Burwell, David King, appears to have no business being involved in this lawsuit as anything other than a spectator. That’s because of a doctrine known as “standing,” which requires plaintiffs to establish that they are actually hurt in some way by a law in order to challenge the law in court.

As part of their narrative explaining why they believed Mr. King did have standing to bring this suit, his attorneys told a lower court that “King is not eligible for employer- or government-sponsored health coverage that satisfies” the law’s requirement that most people either carry insurance or pay higher income taxes. Subsequent reporting, if it does not completely disprove it, at least raises a serious cloud of doubt over this claim. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that King is qualified for “medical coverage with no premiums through the Department of Veterans Affairs.” And King himself confirmed in a more recent interview with the New York Times that “he was not really worried about the outcome of the case, King v. Burwell, because as a Vietnam veteran, he has access to medical care through the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...-false-claims/

[boutons_deux]

Meet the Diehard Right Wingers Who Just Can't Quit Obamacareho Just Can't Quit Obamacare

A Republican lifer in Wranglers and cowboy boots, Pierce is his party’s old school ideal: a self-sufficient small-business owner living off the land, growing steaks for people who can afford them. He’s also a prominent Arizona state senator, formerly president of the senate and majority whip.

So it’s somewhat surprising that he has invited me to his home district in order to sell me on the benefits of Obamacare.


Here in Yavapai County, most everybody you’ll meet is Republican. In 2012, Mitt Romney received nearly two votes here to each of Obama’s. And yet in this rural red county in a very red state, it’s only taken a couple of years for federally-subsidized health care to quietly seep into the hinges of everyday life and governance. The rate of sign-ups for the program in the county has nearly doubled from 2014, when 22 percent of the area’s potential market share chose a plan through the federal exchange, to March 2015, when 43 percent did, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The latter figure ranks the county sixth among 54 areas in the state in percentage of the potential market share which has signed up, outranking far more liberal areas in Arizona.

This is what Obamacare Country looks like.

Yavapai County acts as a pop.-200,000 lab slide of a phenomenon occurring in conservative regions around the country, where party politics have been pitted against everyday pragmatism, often resulting in spectacular GOP infighting.

When Pierce backed up the governor with a vote in the state senate, he became a magnet for the ire of conservatives. The powerful conservative group Americans for Prosperity, backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, listed him in its “Hall of Shame” for his “disgusting” act of “betrayal.” County Republicans voted to censure him, a largely symbolic gesture of scorn.

14 out of the state’s 15 sheriffs, nine of whom were Republican, backed the expansion. One of those sheriffs was Yavapai County’s Scott Mascher, whose own conservative bona fides include vowing not to enforce federal gun control laws, but who argued that the Medicaid expansion would help reduce recidivism and length of stays for mentally ill prisoners. (The lone holdout among the sheriffs was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who that year was busy losing a federal lawsuit that accused him of racial profiling in targeting Latinos during traffic stops.)

The expansion of Medicaid, following the Arizona legislature’s deep cuts to who was eligible for the state health care program, was a lifeline for dozens of hospitals and medical centers which were in danger of closing because so many uninsured people could not pay.

After Obamacare coverage went into effect in January 1, 2014, hundreds of thousands of residents—including those with new Medicaid cards and people with subsidized private insurance—could suddenly pay their bills.

... a LONG article, but you get the idea, if you want to

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslic...sidies-arizona

ACA is helping Ms of poor, rural, redneck red-state Repugs obtain and pay for health insurance.

[RandomGuy]

Nation's uninsured rate drops sharply in Affordable Care Act era

The number of Americans who had no health insurance last year was at one of the lowest levels ever recorded, according to an authoritative government survey released Monday.

About 36 million people, or 11.5% of the entire population, were uninsured in 2014. That's down from 16% in 2010, when President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act was signed into law. More than 170 million people had private health plans. However, the progress of expanding coverage remains unstable as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hand down a ruling in King v. Burwell, which will decide the fate of subsidized health insurance for 6.4 million people.

The latest figures come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health Interview Survey (PDF), one of the most comprehensive analyses of health coverage in the U.S. The CDC interviewed almost 112,000 people for the report.

The rates of the uninsured dropped for every age bracket studied. The most pronounced decline was for people ages 19 to 25. Their uninsured rate in 2010 was 33.9% and fell to 20% last year. The ACA allowed children and young adults to stay on their parents' health plans until they are 26.

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/arti...NEWS/150629968

Sign up was bumpy and costly, unless you compare the costs to overall health care spending, which was 2,900,000,000,000 (yeah, that's what a trillion looks like when you put the zeros in) in 2013.
http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statisti...highlights.pdf

Obamacare is doing a lot more to get people into health insurance than anything Republicans have proposed on the national level.

Thanks Mitt.

[RandomGuy]

... a LONG article, but you get the idea, if you want to

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslic...sidies-arizona

Thanks, that was interesting. Hadn't thought about what a loss of health care funding could mean for county sheriffs. It was informative in that regard.

Laura Norman of the West Yavapai Guidance Clinic, a 16-bed operation which takes many of Rhodes’s released prisoners, says the local mental health community will be watching the SCOTUS decision closely. “We actually have a very good idea of what will happen, because we’ve seen it before,” says Norman. “People who don’t need to be in jail will be in jail. Psychiatric issues will go unaddressed. People who don’t need to go to the ER will be in the ER. There are many people who are functioning extremely well in our community who will no longer be able to do that.” At the moment, Arizona receives $145 million in active grants through the ACA, part of which goes to funding clinicians in rural areas.