Thanks, gocomics.org
Tag: Affordable Care Act
City of Columbus vs Trump
❝ A coalition of cities and individuals across America, represented by Democracy Forward, filed suit against President Trump and his Administration for intentionally and unconstitutionally sabotaging the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and increasing the cost of health coverage for American families. The President’s actions to undermine the ACA are not just detrimental to American families, they are a violation of the Constitution he swore to uphold.
The suit was filed on behalf of the cities of Columbus, Ohio, Baltimore, Maryland, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois, and citizens from Charlottesville, Virginia…
❝ The lawsuit seeks to hold the President accountable and force the Trump Administration to implement the law in good faith…
The suit was filed August 2 in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.
Trump has no interest in aiding citizens’ need for affordable healthcare. That includes a greater-than-average number of fools who voted for him, support his attacks on human kindness.
Obamacare’s individual mandate is working
❝The individual mandate is among Obamacare’s most hated provisions. About two in three of Americans think the requirement to buy health insurance is a bad idea.
But recent enrollment data shows that the mandate is working. The exact type of people the requirement was meant to target — young, healthy adults who might forgo coverage were it not for a government fine — signed up in record numbers this year.
❝Having a decent number of young and health people in the insurance pool is integral to making costs affordable for everyone, which is exactly why the mandate exists in the first place. And architects of Obamacare’s enrollment strategy say that talking about the mandate — something Obamacare supporters didn’t really start doing until 2015 — has been core to making it work…
❝”The first year we were concerned it would be interpreted as a negative message, possibly turning people off,” says Anne Filipic, who runs Enroll America, a national nonprofit focused on getting the uninsured signed up for the health law’s insurance expansion.
But 2015 was different. Survey research had shown that, despite the mandate’s unpopularity, reminding the uninsured of the fees they’d face for remaining uninsured was an excellent way to encourage them to buy coverage. The penalty rose from $95 in 2014 to $695 in 2016…
New data suggests the new message was successful. In 2015, people under 35 made up 35 percent of Healthcare.gov’s open enrollment sign-ups. In 2014, the number stood at 33 percent. What’s more: Healthcare.gov netted 980,000 new enrollees under 35 this year, a big increase over the 670,000 new sign ups last year…
❝”The increase in young people is very encouraging,” she says. “The fine is going up, and we’re three years into this now. So the repeated message, seeing friends and family get coverage, all those things are now starting to come together.”
Americans are funny. We’re supposed to hate government unless it benefits us directly. So, insurance – when required – is something we try to avoid even though we benefit as individuals as much as collectively by costs coming down as a result of a broader compass of coverage.
So it was with auto insurance. So it is with health insurance.
Now, if we can only get the cretins in Congress to move ahead on single-payer provisions and negotiated prescription prices.
New Obamacare customers are happy
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We’ve known for a few months now that lots of people signed up for health insurance this year in new marketplaces. A new survey shows that the people who did so are also pretty happy with their purchases.
The survey, from the Commonwealth Fund, a research group, came to similar conclusions as other surveys about the expansion of health insurance. It found that about 15 percent of adults younger than 65 now lack health insurance, down from 20 percent before the Affordable Care Act rolled out in January.
What was more surprising is that people who got the new coverage were generally happy with the product. Overall, 73 percent of people who bought health plans and 87 percent of those who signed up for Medicaid said they were somewhat or very satisfied with their new health insurance. Seventy-four percent of newly insured Republicans liked their plans. Even 77 percent of people who had insurance before — including members of the much-publicized group whose plans got canceled last year — were happy with their new coverage.
Larry Levitt, the senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation, another research group that polls on the Affordable Care Act, said he wasn’t sure we’d see such high satisfaction so early…
The Commonwealth poll appears to be the first national survey since the health-law passed to have gone beyond questions about insurance status and asked about satisfaction and usage.
Of course, since the article appears in the newest copout version of the NY TIMES, they meet the editorial requirement of stuffing the end of the article with beaucoup “what-ifs” just in case you might take a positive view – of a positive poll.
Perish the thought that changing times, a wee bit of change in politics as usual, might support even further movement in a population world-reknowned for ennui.
RTFA for more good news about legislation that benefits 99.9% of this nation.
Obamacare does at least 21 things that you may not know about
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Obamacare is the law that extends health insurance coverage to millions of Americans.
It is also the law that requires restaurants to post calorie labels, employers to provide adequate break times for breast feeding and starts funding programs meant to train people for adulthood (seriously).
Tucked inside the Affordable Care Act’s 2,000 pages of legislation are hundreds of new programs that have little, if anything, to do expanding insurance coverage. Some are pet favorites of legislators, who tacked a tiny provision into a very large law. Others raise small amounts of revenue to help pay for the insurance expansion. And others are just… weird. There are 21 programs that are, indeed, part of Obamacare.
1. Obamacare makes funds available for “training for adulthood.” True story…
2. And it imposes a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning…
5. Discrimination against plans and providers not offering assisted suicide is explicitly prohibited.
Physician-assisted suicide is an incredibly controversial topic, and different states have different laws about the practice. A federal law in 1997 prohibited federal funds appropriated by Congress from being used to pay for assisted suicide.
Accordingly, the Affordable Care Act contains language prohibiting discrimination against insurance plans and health care providers who refuse to provide physician-assisted suicide. The law appears to be silent on whether insurers discriminate against providers who do offer physician-assisted suicide.
6. The law authorizes funding for grants that target postpartum depression.
The Secretary of HHS is authorized to make grants available for treating individuals who have postpartum depression and psychosis (conditions that occur in women following childbirth). The law also encourages the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct long-term study from 2010-2019 on how pregnancy affects women’s mental health…
7. And it created the Elder Justice Act.
Over 500,000 elderly adults are victims of “elder abuse”—this can take the form of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse, as well as neglect, abandonment, and financial exploitation. As the Boomers reach retirement age and the population’s share of elderly individuals grows, so will this problem…
13. Employers are required to provide reasonable break time for nursing mothers.
Employers must provide a reasonable amount of break time — and a private place that isn’t a bathroom — for an employee to express breast milk for up to one year after giving birth. Breastfeeding the first six months, at a minimum, is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Prior to health reform, there was no federal law that protected nursing mothers; state laws on the issue tended to be very general…
19. It’s easier for students going into primary care and nursing to get loans.
There is a shortage of doctors who practice primary care, which has been attributed to the high cost of medical school and the low compensation for primary care physicians (relative to physicians who specialize). Health reform eased several rules that govern federal loans to medical students who commit to practicing primary care…
Loan limitations have been used by the Feds – at the behest of the American Medical Association – for decades to limit the number of doctors in the United States. An outdated guild solution guaranteeing the highest income in the world for doctors. Like any Congressional mandate it is out-of-date and the Party of NO wasn’t about to respond even to requests from the AMA to join the 21st Century.
Obamacare will significantly increase the number of people with health insurance coverage. It does that by overhauling the individual insurance market — where people buy their own policies — and expanding Medicaid, a public program that covers low-income Americans.
Like the best of legislation coming from Washington DC, Obamacare supersedes much of States Rights. That credo being the last resort of reactionaries especially those of the Confederate persuasion. Fools who fear modern practices simply because they aren’t what granddad enjoyed adore States Rights. Racists adore States Rights. Conservative Libertarians adore States Rights – they needn’t update their philosophy to account for any understanding of a changing world beyond Henry Clay and the cheapskates’ standard version of tax avoidance.
Fake Obamacare sites out to steal your information
Nothing to do with the article – Funny, though
As health exchanges opened Tuesday to high traffic and technical glitches, numerous fake Obamacare websites are out there trying to steal personal information.
Although the federal website exists at healthcare.gov, there are numerous state and third-party websites that don’t have uniform domains.
To prevent getting scammed, “absolutely do not use a search engine as your starting point when looking for coverage,” writes Christopher Budd, threat communications manager for Trend Micro security.
Instead, start at a known trusted source including the federal government’s or your state government’s websites. “Use these sites to identify the resources they’ve identified as trustworthy,” Budd writes. “With that information you can then get more information by going to the sites they recommend – by typing the URL in yourself.”
“A survey of state and third-party sites also shows that official sites aren’t required to provide the ability to verify the site using SSL [secure socket layers]: many of them don’t provide it for site verification at all, though the federal site does…”
Identity thieves, and other cybercriminals have been buying vaguely official-sounding domain names for months in anticipation of harvesting unsuspecting healthcare consumers’ data, and some of these scam sites actually have better search-engine rankings than official sites.
There’s a sucker born every minute. And just before the doctor cuts the cord, there’s a scumbag born a few minutes earlier trying to steal his momma’s milk.
Congressional Republicans oppose right-wing nutballs blocking government funding to stop ObamaCare
U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said Friday attempts by congressional Republicans to defund the Affordable Care Act are “dishonest” and cannot succeed.
In an interview with the conservative Washington Examiner newspaper, Coburn criticized fellow Republicans who signed a pledge not to vote for a continuing resolution to provide routine funding for government operations unless funding for the healthcare reform law, commonly known as Obamacare, are stripped from it…
Coburn, a physician and a consistent opponent of the Affordable Care Act, said he opposed the Republican gambit because the votes aren’t there for it to be successful.
“You’re going to set an expectation among the conservatives in our party that we can achieve something that we’re not able to achieve,” he said. “It’s not an achievable strategy. It’s creating the false impression that you can do something when you can’t. And it’s dishonest.”
Coburn said the strategy “is a good way for Republicans to lose the House…”
Coburn’s comments came as Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said the idea of shutting down the U.S. government to block healthcare reform implementation is “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
Support is building among congressional Republicans for using a continuing resolution as leverage to block implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is among the loudest voices supporting the stand…
Burr said Thursday stopping the funding in not achievable and argued Republicans risk taking the blame if the government is shut down over the issue.
“I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” said Burr. “As long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law. Defunding the Affordable Care Act is not achievable through shutting down the federal government.”
Not that DUMB stops Republicans very often. It will be a chuckle to see who prevails between traditional conservatives dedicated to making money for insurance companies and the medical-industrial complex – versus the nutball brigade rolling around with all four feet in the air like a hound in cowshit. Only the crap is Tea Party ideology instead of something potentially useful.
Eideard 