(AP) — A foreign government was likely behind a cyber breach of health insurance company Anthem Inc. that compromised more than 78 million consumers' records, investigators said Friday. The California Department of Insurance said Anthem — the nation's second-largest health insurer — has agreed to make $260 million in improvements to its information security systems. The hackers accessed Social Security numbers, birthdates and employment details for customers — all key ingredients for stealing someone's identity.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 1 day ago.
Investigators link insurer cyber breach to foreign nation
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Obama Dares Republicans To Show Their Obamacare Replacement Before Repeal
President Barack Obama on Friday issued a stark, simple challenge to Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare: If you really have a better alternative, show it to the American people first.
“If they are so convinced they can do it better, then they shouldn’t be afraid to make that presentation,” Obama said, even promising to vouch for such a plan.
“I’m saying to every Republican right now, if you in fact can put a plan together that is demonstrably better than what Obamacare is doing, I will publicly support repealing Obamacare and replacing it with your plan.”
Obama made the comments during a live, wonky interview with Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff of Vox. The interview took place at the Blair House, the residence across the street from the White House where, famously, Obama presided over an eight-hour bipartisan discussion of health policy in early 2010, shortly before Congress passed what would become the Affordable Care Act.
Nearly seven years later, the law has helped more than 20 million people to get health insurance, reducing the number of Americans without coverage to historic lows. But some people now pay higher premiums because of the law’s changes, and in some parts of the country markets are losing insurers and have yet to stabilize.
Those problems have undermined the law’s popularity and now its very existence is in jeopardy. Republicans, who have been pledging to repeal Obamacare since it first became law, have majorities in both chambers of Congress. On Jan. 20, President-elect Donald Trump, who made Obamacare repeal a top priority, will take office.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP leaders have already laid out their strategy. They plan to act quickly to eliminate Obamacare’s funding, using special fast-track procedures reserved for fiscal issues, while leaving elements of the law in place for a fixed amount of time ― up to four years.
The idea, GOP leaders say, is to make sure the people who now get coverage through Obamacare won’t lose insurance, while giving Republicans time to figure out a new system to take Obamacare’s place.
But it’s not clear that Republicans can actually keep Obamacare’s insurance markets going during a transition period ― nor is it clear that Republicans actually have a way to deliver on their frequent promises to provide better coverage at lower costs.
“If they can come up with something better, I’m for it,” Obama said. “But they have to show it. And that’s not too much to ask.”
One particular problem for Republicans, Obama said, is that providing health care to people ultimately requires money, because many low- and middle-income people simply don’t have enough money to pay for decent insurance ― and virtually nobody except the super-wealthy could pay the bills associated with a serious medical episode on their own.
“If they can come up with something better I’m for it. But they have to show it. And that's not too much to ask."
President Barack Obama
Putting more money into the program, by increasing the financial assistance available to people who buy coverage, would be one way to make it work better for more people, Obama said. He also reiterated his support for a “public option” ― that is, a government-run insurance plan that could compete with private plans and offer options in areas where few insurers are now selling.
But, Obama noted, Republicans oppose a public option. And they envision significantly less government spending on health care, not more ― and it’s difficult to square that with a system that would make it easier, not harder, for people to pay their medical bills.
Obama also said that Republicans have been promising to outline their schemes ever since the original health care debate in 2009, including at that Blair House session, but to this day have never settled on a single common vision ― or put out a plan that, according to independent assessments, could provide roughly equal or better levels of coverage at lower costs.
That is why, Obama said, Republicans have an obligation to publish their plans now ― and subject them to independent scrutiny, from a variety of sources ― before dismantling the system that Obamacare put in place, thus jeopardizing the well-being of people who now depend on the program.
“The idea of repeal first and replace later is just a huge disservice to the American people and something that whether you’re a Republican or Democrat you should be opposed to doing,” Obama said. “These are real lives at stake.”
Obama’s interview came on the same day that a new Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation poll found little enthusiasm for the GOP strategy of repeal before replacement. One day before, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) became the latest in a series of Republican senators to voice their own concerns about the quick repeal strategy.
“You now have Republican governors, some Republican senators, who say we don’t think this is a good idea,” Obama said.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
“If they are so convinced they can do it better, then they shouldn’t be afraid to make that presentation,” Obama said, even promising to vouch for such a plan.
“I’m saying to every Republican right now, if you in fact can put a plan together that is demonstrably better than what Obamacare is doing, I will publicly support repealing Obamacare and replacing it with your plan.”
Obama made the comments during a live, wonky interview with Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff of Vox. The interview took place at the Blair House, the residence across the street from the White House where, famously, Obama presided over an eight-hour bipartisan discussion of health policy in early 2010, shortly before Congress passed what would become the Affordable Care Act.
Nearly seven years later, the law has helped more than 20 million people to get health insurance, reducing the number of Americans without coverage to historic lows. But some people now pay higher premiums because of the law’s changes, and in some parts of the country markets are losing insurers and have yet to stabilize.
Those problems have undermined the law’s popularity and now its very existence is in jeopardy. Republicans, who have been pledging to repeal Obamacare since it first became law, have majorities in both chambers of Congress. On Jan. 20, President-elect Donald Trump, who made Obamacare repeal a top priority, will take office.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP leaders have already laid out their strategy. They plan to act quickly to eliminate Obamacare’s funding, using special fast-track procedures reserved for fiscal issues, while leaving elements of the law in place for a fixed amount of time ― up to four years.
The idea, GOP leaders say, is to make sure the people who now get coverage through Obamacare won’t lose insurance, while giving Republicans time to figure out a new system to take Obamacare’s place.
But it’s not clear that Republicans can actually keep Obamacare’s insurance markets going during a transition period ― nor is it clear that Republicans actually have a way to deliver on their frequent promises to provide better coverage at lower costs.
“If they can come up with something better, I’m for it,” Obama said. “But they have to show it. And that’s not too much to ask.”
One particular problem for Republicans, Obama said, is that providing health care to people ultimately requires money, because many low- and middle-income people simply don’t have enough money to pay for decent insurance ― and virtually nobody except the super-wealthy could pay the bills associated with a serious medical episode on their own.
“If they can come up with something better I’m for it. But they have to show it. And that's not too much to ask."
President Barack Obama
Putting more money into the program, by increasing the financial assistance available to people who buy coverage, would be one way to make it work better for more people, Obama said. He also reiterated his support for a “public option” ― that is, a government-run insurance plan that could compete with private plans and offer options in areas where few insurers are now selling.
But, Obama noted, Republicans oppose a public option. And they envision significantly less government spending on health care, not more ― and it’s difficult to square that with a system that would make it easier, not harder, for people to pay their medical bills.
Obama also said that Republicans have been promising to outline their schemes ever since the original health care debate in 2009, including at that Blair House session, but to this day have never settled on a single common vision ― or put out a plan that, according to independent assessments, could provide roughly equal or better levels of coverage at lower costs.
That is why, Obama said, Republicans have an obligation to publish their plans now ― and subject them to independent scrutiny, from a variety of sources ― before dismantling the system that Obamacare put in place, thus jeopardizing the well-being of people who now depend on the program.
“The idea of repeal first and replace later is just a huge disservice to the American people and something that whether you’re a Republican or Democrat you should be opposed to doing,” Obama said. “These are real lives at stake.”
Obama’s interview came on the same day that a new Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation poll found little enthusiasm for the GOP strategy of repeal before replacement. One day before, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) became the latest in a series of Republican senators to voice their own concerns about the quick repeal strategy.
“You now have Republican governors, some Republican senators, who say we don’t think this is a good idea,” Obama said.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
↧
Why There Is No Obamacare Replacement -- In One Picture
There is no conservative replacement health reform plan for Obamacare -- because Obamacare is a conservative health reform plan.
After six years of promising to repeal 'n' replace the President's signature domestic achievement, Republican lawmakers have no coherent alternative to the Affordable Care Act for one good reason: because the Affordable Care Act was once the market-based alternative to a real, not imagined, "government takeover" of health care.
What has always made the ACA a political pariah to Republicans, typified by the bizarre claim by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday that "Obamacare" has "ruined" and "dismantled" our health care system, is the plan's namesake -- far more than its necessarily complex architecture or any of its actual details, unless you count the details they made up.
And so, if only for kicks, how about some actual historic facts and context about a health reform plan that was actually decades in the making, only three years into full implementation, and on the eve of blind destruction by demagogues who have no idea what they're taking about.
The chart below illustrates where the ACA sits, ideologically, relative to all other health reform plan models.This chart places the ACA along a continuum of all serious reform options developed, debated, and discarded or ignored since the 1980s. They are all here: from the single-payer, centrally controlled models popular with those who detest corporations and the corrupting influence of money in medicine -- two actual, not imagined "government takeovers of health care" -- to a fully free-market, laissez faire model favored by those who detest regulation and the heavy hand of government in medicine.
On the far left, the federal (or provincial) government is the main insurer, owns most hospitals, and employs most doctors. This pure form of single-payer seems to be supported or reviled in equal measure, especially by the nation's physicians. As a model for nationwide reform, it is as much a religion as a public policy framework -- people believe it will be either health care's Messiah or its anti-Christ -- and no one will convince them otherwise. This model is the foundation for many of the systems in Europe, and the systems in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Unbeknownst to many under their actual care today, there are two working systems based on this model in the US today: Kaiser, and the Veterans Health Administration.
The second model, Medicare-for-All, differs from the pure form of single-payer by retaining the current independence of most hospitals and doctors. This model jettisons private insurance companies and covers all Americans directly, while an all-encompassing Medicare program pays for covered care delivered by today's crazy quilt of providers: large and small physician groups, for-profit, religious-affiliated, independent and academic hospitals, the works. This is what Medicare beneficiaries have today -- except for the 31 percent who opt for privatized "Medicare Advantage" plans offered by commercial insurers. Medicare-for-all is supported by those who believe it would bring the relative efficiencies, fairness, and low administrative costs of Medicare to all of us -- and reviled by those who think Medicare works like hell. Because there are oceans of data to support both views, this too is ultimately a matter of secular faith: government, good; government, evil.
To the right of Medicare-for-all is "managed competition," the basis for the reform plan proposed in 1993 by President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton and derided as "Hillarycare." This model is built on the traditional system of multiple private insurers and providers, but highly organizes and regulates both. It achieves universal access by mandating employers and individuals to participate and by requiring everyone -- with or without current coverage -- to give up what they have and commit to one of several competing vertical insurer/provider entities. The managed competition model is based on managed care theories developed in the 1970s; when proposed by the Clintons in 1990s, it was popular with much of the Washington technocracy -- and vilified by conservatives. Modified versions of this model exist in Germany and Israel, and in a handful of US markets (e.g., Hawaii, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, sort of) with vertically integrated providers that compete with Kaiser.
Back in the mid-1990s, most Republicans and many health industry experts attacked "HillaryCare" as cumbersome, over-engineered, and hyper-bureaucratic; it was destroyed in the court of public opinion by an insurer-funded TV ad campaign that people remember better than any details of the plan itself. Conservatives hated the plan so much, in fact, that the folks over at the Heritage Foundation came up with their own market-based alternative. The plan achieved universal access by requiring people to purchase their own insurance, but enabled them to do so through a competitive marketplace, with subsidies for the poor. Hmm. Sounds familiar, no?
The Heritage plan sounds familiar because it was the conservative alternative to government-driven plans like single-payer and Hillarycare, and because it became the basis for Mitt Romney's health reform plan implemented in Massachusetts -- which is turn was the basis for - for what? It was the basis for the plan one click from the far right of our spectrum of health reform models: President Obama's plan, known as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," or the ACA, until it was branded -- derisively by Republicans -- as "Obamacare." (I tried to point all this out in the New York Times in 2012, while working at a conservative think tank, for which I was ridiculed by my own colleagues, excoriated on Capitol Hill, and received death threats, a few years before getting death threats for publishing actual facts was in vogue.)
Notwithstanding all the political noise that long ago drowned out all discussion of actual facts about the actual law: Obamacare is a radical endorsement and extension of the status quo. This is why everything that was ever wrong with the health insurance system -- ever increasing premiums, deductibles, and co-payments, the perennial narrowing networks of providers, and all of its byzantine administrative processes -- has now been laid at the feet of the plan. This is why the House Speaker has no qualms about uttering utter nonsense about Obamacare "ruining" and "dismantling" the health care system.
To minimize actual (not perceived or politicized) disruption to most people's coverage - a major and valid criticism of the Clinton plan -- the architects of the ACA retained most of the features of the traditional employer, insurance and provider systems. The ACA merely expanded the system toward universal access by mandating that most of the uninsured participate in it, unless their incomes were low enough to qualify them for an expanded version of Medicaid.
Because Obamacare requires insurers to cover all comers -- and does away with caps on those with catastrophically expensive medical situations -- it is funded by mandated participation by all of us too young for Medicare and too well off for traditional Medicaid, either directly or through employers. Expanding the exact same plan to include Health Savings Accounts and allowing consumers to buy coverage across the stateliness -- two line-item policy ideas Republicans tout as the major levers in their magical mystery replacement plan -- could be appended onto the ACA with a dozen pages of legislation.
By contrast, the only "replacement" model of any substance that breaks to the right of Obamacare - the one free market economists have been championing for decades -- would be truly disruptive and a complete political non-starter.
This model, on the far right of the chart above, would be a truly free market health care system. It would allow people with commercial insurance or no insurance to purchase their own coverage in an open market; and it would not require anyone to purchase insurance, nor any insurer to cover anyone they did not want to. Under this model, kicked around in the back pages of the health policy literature since the 1990s, all purchasing decisions about coverage and plan design are left to individuals and insurers.
Economists believe this Lord of the Flies model would radically reshape health insurance and downstream medical markets, by driving efficiency in pricing and reducing excess medical resource spending. They believe that market distortions created by the tax deductibility of health insurance purchasing are enormous -- and that the extra political mile it would take to eliminate this tax deduction would be well worth the effort in terms of health care marketplace correction and system self-reform.
As a corollary to this belief, this "direct retail" model extracts employers from the system altogether, converting the health insurance market into something more akin to auto and homeowners insurance markets and maximizing the power of consumer market forces to control health care spending in general. Under this model, everyone is free to purchase whatever mix of insurance and services they want and can find, from whatever organization will sell to them, at whatever price the market yields. Modified versions of this model exist in China and India on top of threadbare single-payer systems incapable of serving the needs of their large and growing populations and emerging middle classes.
Proponents of the only model to the right of Obamacare believe that its inherent pricing efficiency would drive the marketplace to very high-deductible insurance plans, while converting a great deal of medical care to a cash-and-carry system. They believe this model would drive healthy Americans toward Health Savings Accounts and greatly benefit from consumers purchasing whatever plan they wanted across state lines.
In terms of moving us toward universal access, they would augment this model by allowing lower-income people, the uninsured and others priced out of these liberated insurance markets with either a "premium support" or "voucher" program -- two ideas that sound similar but play out differently as health care costs increase. The subsidy mechanism -- and its associated semantic and political branding wars over "premium support" vs. "voucher" -- is also the economic fulcrum in Congressman Paul Ryan's proposal in 2013 for reforming Medicare.
That Obamacare is a right-of-center plan, especially when viewed relative to all viable alternatives, explains why it has always had so little political support from anyone. Liberals hate Obamacare because it is not single-payer, and feeds tens of millions of newly insured people to what they revile as a money-gobbling, profit-obsessed health insurance dragon. Conservatives hate Obamacare because it is the heavy hand of government choking whatever air is left out of the current, dysfunctional health insurance market -- and because they cannot see beyond their political rage at President Obama to recognize their own ideas at the core of his health reform plan. Obamacare has always been a shabby political step-child.
So where is that Republican replacement plan? Don't hold your breath. Health Savings Accounts and buying insurance across state lines may sound nifty to people who have no idea what that means or might look like, but they are at best minor endorsements and extensions of the status quo, chocolate and rainbow sprinkles on the same old sour ice cream.
The only meaningful right-wing replacement plan is the only one to the right of Obamacare in our chart: a health insurance market free-for-all. No tax deductibility, no employer involvement, no fuss, no muss. And what would be the actual effect of implementing that? Everyone who has insurance through their employer today - which is to say almost everybody not in Medicare or Medicaid -- suddenly pays a whole lot more in taxes. Not exactly what any of the Republicans clamoring to repeal 'n' replace want to sell back home.
This is the real reason why, when asked for the details for their replacement plan, the Republicans in Congress have always had, and still have, exactly and only one real answer: "Our replacement plan is Obamacare sucks."
Stay tuned for more of nothing.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
After six years of promising to repeal 'n' replace the President's signature domestic achievement, Republican lawmakers have no coherent alternative to the Affordable Care Act for one good reason: because the Affordable Care Act was once the market-based alternative to a real, not imagined, "government takeover" of health care.
What has always made the ACA a political pariah to Republicans, typified by the bizarre claim by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday that "Obamacare" has "ruined" and "dismantled" our health care system, is the plan's namesake -- far more than its necessarily complex architecture or any of its actual details, unless you count the details they made up.
And so, if only for kicks, how about some actual historic facts and context about a health reform plan that was actually decades in the making, only three years into full implementation, and on the eve of blind destruction by demagogues who have no idea what they're taking about.
The chart below illustrates where the ACA sits, ideologically, relative to all other health reform plan models.This chart places the ACA along a continuum of all serious reform options developed, debated, and discarded or ignored since the 1980s. They are all here: from the single-payer, centrally controlled models popular with those who detest corporations and the corrupting influence of money in medicine -- two actual, not imagined "government takeovers of health care" -- to a fully free-market, laissez faire model favored by those who detest regulation and the heavy hand of government in medicine.
On the far left, the federal (or provincial) government is the main insurer, owns most hospitals, and employs most doctors. This pure form of single-payer seems to be supported or reviled in equal measure, especially by the nation's physicians. As a model for nationwide reform, it is as much a religion as a public policy framework -- people believe it will be either health care's Messiah or its anti-Christ -- and no one will convince them otherwise. This model is the foundation for many of the systems in Europe, and the systems in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Unbeknownst to many under their actual care today, there are two working systems based on this model in the US today: Kaiser, and the Veterans Health Administration.
The second model, Medicare-for-All, differs from the pure form of single-payer by retaining the current independence of most hospitals and doctors. This model jettisons private insurance companies and covers all Americans directly, while an all-encompassing Medicare program pays for covered care delivered by today's crazy quilt of providers: large and small physician groups, for-profit, religious-affiliated, independent and academic hospitals, the works. This is what Medicare beneficiaries have today -- except for the 31 percent who opt for privatized "Medicare Advantage" plans offered by commercial insurers. Medicare-for-all is supported by those who believe it would bring the relative efficiencies, fairness, and low administrative costs of Medicare to all of us -- and reviled by those who think Medicare works like hell. Because there are oceans of data to support both views, this too is ultimately a matter of secular faith: government, good; government, evil.
To the right of Medicare-for-all is "managed competition," the basis for the reform plan proposed in 1993 by President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton and derided as "Hillarycare." This model is built on the traditional system of multiple private insurers and providers, but highly organizes and regulates both. It achieves universal access by mandating employers and individuals to participate and by requiring everyone -- with or without current coverage -- to give up what they have and commit to one of several competing vertical insurer/provider entities. The managed competition model is based on managed care theories developed in the 1970s; when proposed by the Clintons in 1990s, it was popular with much of the Washington technocracy -- and vilified by conservatives. Modified versions of this model exist in Germany and Israel, and in a handful of US markets (e.g., Hawaii, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, sort of) with vertically integrated providers that compete with Kaiser.
Back in the mid-1990s, most Republicans and many health industry experts attacked "HillaryCare" as cumbersome, over-engineered, and hyper-bureaucratic; it was destroyed in the court of public opinion by an insurer-funded TV ad campaign that people remember better than any details of the plan itself. Conservatives hated the plan so much, in fact, that the folks over at the Heritage Foundation came up with their own market-based alternative. The plan achieved universal access by requiring people to purchase their own insurance, but enabled them to do so through a competitive marketplace, with subsidies for the poor. Hmm. Sounds familiar, no?
The Heritage plan sounds familiar because it was the conservative alternative to government-driven plans like single-payer and Hillarycare, and because it became the basis for Mitt Romney's health reform plan implemented in Massachusetts -- which is turn was the basis for - for what? It was the basis for the plan one click from the far right of our spectrum of health reform models: President Obama's plan, known as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," or the ACA, until it was branded -- derisively by Republicans -- as "Obamacare." (I tried to point all this out in the New York Times in 2012, while working at a conservative think tank, for which I was ridiculed by my own colleagues, excoriated on Capitol Hill, and received death threats, a few years before getting death threats for publishing actual facts was in vogue.)
Notwithstanding all the political noise that long ago drowned out all discussion of actual facts about the actual law: Obamacare is a radical endorsement and extension of the status quo. This is why everything that was ever wrong with the health insurance system -- ever increasing premiums, deductibles, and co-payments, the perennial narrowing networks of providers, and all of its byzantine administrative processes -- has now been laid at the feet of the plan. This is why the House Speaker has no qualms about uttering utter nonsense about Obamacare "ruining" and "dismantling" the health care system.
To minimize actual (not perceived or politicized) disruption to most people's coverage - a major and valid criticism of the Clinton plan -- the architects of the ACA retained most of the features of the traditional employer, insurance and provider systems. The ACA merely expanded the system toward universal access by mandating that most of the uninsured participate in it, unless their incomes were low enough to qualify them for an expanded version of Medicaid.
Because Obamacare requires insurers to cover all comers -- and does away with caps on those with catastrophically expensive medical situations -- it is funded by mandated participation by all of us too young for Medicare and too well off for traditional Medicaid, either directly or through employers. Expanding the exact same plan to include Health Savings Accounts and allowing consumers to buy coverage across the stateliness -- two line-item policy ideas Republicans tout as the major levers in their magical mystery replacement plan -- could be appended onto the ACA with a dozen pages of legislation.
By contrast, the only "replacement" model of any substance that breaks to the right of Obamacare - the one free market economists have been championing for decades -- would be truly disruptive and a complete political non-starter.
This model, on the far right of the chart above, would be a truly free market health care system. It would allow people with commercial insurance or no insurance to purchase their own coverage in an open market; and it would not require anyone to purchase insurance, nor any insurer to cover anyone they did not want to. Under this model, kicked around in the back pages of the health policy literature since the 1990s, all purchasing decisions about coverage and plan design are left to individuals and insurers.
Economists believe this Lord of the Flies model would radically reshape health insurance and downstream medical markets, by driving efficiency in pricing and reducing excess medical resource spending. They believe that market distortions created by the tax deductibility of health insurance purchasing are enormous -- and that the extra political mile it would take to eliminate this tax deduction would be well worth the effort in terms of health care marketplace correction and system self-reform.
As a corollary to this belief, this "direct retail" model extracts employers from the system altogether, converting the health insurance market into something more akin to auto and homeowners insurance markets and maximizing the power of consumer market forces to control health care spending in general. Under this model, everyone is free to purchase whatever mix of insurance and services they want and can find, from whatever organization will sell to them, at whatever price the market yields. Modified versions of this model exist in China and India on top of threadbare single-payer systems incapable of serving the needs of their large and growing populations and emerging middle classes.
Proponents of the only model to the right of Obamacare believe that its inherent pricing efficiency would drive the marketplace to very high-deductible insurance plans, while converting a great deal of medical care to a cash-and-carry system. They believe this model would drive healthy Americans toward Health Savings Accounts and greatly benefit from consumers purchasing whatever plan they wanted across state lines.
In terms of moving us toward universal access, they would augment this model by allowing lower-income people, the uninsured and others priced out of these liberated insurance markets with either a "premium support" or "voucher" program -- two ideas that sound similar but play out differently as health care costs increase. The subsidy mechanism -- and its associated semantic and political branding wars over "premium support" vs. "voucher" -- is also the economic fulcrum in Congressman Paul Ryan's proposal in 2013 for reforming Medicare.
That Obamacare is a right-of-center plan, especially when viewed relative to all viable alternatives, explains why it has always had so little political support from anyone. Liberals hate Obamacare because it is not single-payer, and feeds tens of millions of newly insured people to what they revile as a money-gobbling, profit-obsessed health insurance dragon. Conservatives hate Obamacare because it is the heavy hand of government choking whatever air is left out of the current, dysfunctional health insurance market -- and because they cannot see beyond their political rage at President Obama to recognize their own ideas at the core of his health reform plan. Obamacare has always been a shabby political step-child.
So where is that Republican replacement plan? Don't hold your breath. Health Savings Accounts and buying insurance across state lines may sound nifty to people who have no idea what that means or might look like, but they are at best minor endorsements and extensions of the status quo, chocolate and rainbow sprinkles on the same old sour ice cream.
The only meaningful right-wing replacement plan is the only one to the right of Obamacare in our chart: a health insurance market free-for-all. No tax deductibility, no employer involvement, no fuss, no muss. And what would be the actual effect of implementing that? Everyone who has insurance through their employer today - which is to say almost everybody not in Medicare or Medicaid -- suddenly pays a whole lot more in taxes. Not exactly what any of the Republicans clamoring to repeal 'n' replace want to sell back home.
This is the real reason why, when asked for the details for their replacement plan, the Republicans in Congress have always had, and still have, exactly and only one real answer: "Our replacement plan is Obamacare sucks."
Stay tuned for more of nothing.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
↧
An American Life, With or Without the Affordable Care Act
This is just one story of the millions of Americans whose lives have been changed by the Affordable Care Act. This kind of change has been a long time in the making.After nearly 100 years of talk, and decades of trying, President Obama finally made affordable, quality health care for all a reality for America. Today, 20 million more adults have health insurance. Three million additional children have health insurance than in 2008. America's uninsured rate now stands at its lowest level ever. One hundred and five million Americans no longer have lifetime limits on their coverage and 137 million Americans now have a right to coverage for critical preventive services with no out-of-pocket costs, like flu shots, yearly check-ups for women, and birth control.
No matter who you are, chances are you're benefiting from an improved health care system thanks to the Affordable Care Act. You may not realize that there's a lot to lose if Republicans succeed in repealing this law. Here's a look at a few different scenarios that reflect the lives of many Americans, and what happens with and without this law in place.
A young married couple receive news that they are going to have their first child, and decide to move closer to their family. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) they can find health care coverage through the Marketplace even though their new jobs, which have a combined income of $40,000, do not provide coverage.
*More on how the ACA helps: *
· They are able to easily go online and compare plans to find one that works for them. As a result of their move, they qualify for a special enrollment period, and can choose a plan that provides coverage right away.
· What’s more, they receive financial assistance that provides over $4,250 a year to reduce their premiums, covering over 55 percent of the cost, as well as reduces their out-of-pocket costs.
· Thanks to the consumer protections in the ACA, their plan covers maternity benefits. It also covers preventive services like prenatal care with no out-of-pocket costs.
· She goes to a hospital that takes part in the voluntary ACA program that helps to prevent unnecessary early deliveries and maximize the health of the mom and baby. The family may also qualify for a home visit that provides best practices for new parents.
· The baby’s immunizations and well child visit are covered with no out-of-pocket cost.
*If the ACA were repealed*:
· Pregnancy could be considered a pre-existing condition, meaning when this family looked for new coverage after moving, insurers could deny them coverage or charge exorbitant rates.
· Their plan would likely not include maternity coverage, as was the case for over 60 percent of enrollees in individual market plans in 2011.
· They’d receive no financial assistance to help ensure they can find a good plan within their budget. They would receive no help in paying their out-of-pocket costs.
· The programs that support healthy pregnancies, births, and newborns would no longer exist, putting the family at greater risk of health problems.
· And the family would likely have to pay out of pocket for each visit and shot for their new baby, putting them further behind on other household payments.
A Medicare beneficiary with pre-diabetes later develops diabetes, with significant associated costs and complications. She also suffers a fall and a subsequent hospitalization. The preventive services available through the ACA help her delay the onset of diabetes, and the ACA also helps to prevent further hospitalization and reduce medical problems. This allows the new grandmother to spend more time with her granddaughter.
*More on how the ACA helps**:*
· She can receive a free annual wellness visit, including a diabetes screening. Her doctor diagnoses her with pre-diabetes, meaning her blood sugar is high and she is at risk for developing diabetes in the future.
· Her physician refers her to a Diabetes Prevention Program, which Medicare will start paying for nationwide. This Program suggests improvements in her diet and encourages her to increase her physical activity, helping her lose weight and reducing her chances of developing diabetes.
· When she suffers a serious fall and is hospitalized, her hospital has improved patient safety practices as a result of the ACA, reducing the chance of her acquiring a potentially deadly infection during her stay.
· Additionally, her hospital has improved its coordination with home health and other post-acute care providers, providing her with a smooth transition from the hospital back to her home, helping her recover more quickly and preventing a costly readmission to the hospital.
· While preventive measures delay her development of diabetes, after five years, she does develop diabetes and requires insulin, which she gets through her Medicare Part D prescription drug plan. As a result of the ACA phasing out the Medicare “donut hole,” affected beneficiaries have saved an average of $2,127 on prescription drugs through July 2016, and her savings on these medications will increase annually until the “donut hole” is entirely closed in 2020.
*If the ACA were repealed:*
· She would pay a copayment for her annual visit to her physician, which could cause her to skip the visit in order to save money.
· As a result, she would not learn that she has pre-diabetes. Even if she were finally diagnosed with pre-diabetes, Medicare would not pay for the Diabetes Prevention Program, and thus she could quickly develop full-blown diabetes.
· Because of the reopening of the Medicare “donut hole,” she would pay significantly more for her insulin and other medications, eating into her limited income and potentially causing her to skip doses in order to save money.
· When she is finally discharged home after her fall, she would not have any assistance to help her understand her medications or how to contact the home health agency that will provide her follow up care. The unmanaged transition could lead her health to quickly deteriorate, resulting in a readmission to the hospital.
A man with a low income suffers from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Thanks to the ACA, he has access to private insurance, despite his pre-existing condition, and to Medicaid in his state, and both have strong protections for enrollees with mental health challenges. Because his annual income is $12,000, he qualifies for Medicaid.
*More on how the ACA helps**:*
· Individuals with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level are now eligible for Medicaid expansion in States that choose to expand.
· With coverage under his State’s Medicaid expansion, he is able to get the care and treatment he needs.
· If his income rises by $5,000, he will qualify for private individual health insurance with financial assistance. For the first time, this man cannot be denied coverage based on a pre-existing mental health condition.
· Individual market coverage must include mental health and substance use disorder services as an “essential health benefit” and the coverage must be generally comparable to the benefits offered for medical and surgical benefits.
*If the ACA were repealed**:*
· He would not afford coverage or doctor’s visits, and would have no regular source of primary care, so his condition would remain undiagnosed.
· As a result of his lack of regular care, he would go to the emergency room frequently to receive care.
· Lacking coverage, he would be unable to afford medication or to see a psychiatrist, which would cause his condition to worsen. Such circumstances often lead to substance use disorders.
A couple with insurance through their employer gives birth to their second child, who is born with a congenital heart defect. Because of the complexity of the defect, the child requires immediate specialized care and will continue to need special heart care throughout his life. The ACA helps this family by preventing them from reaching an annual or lifetime limit on what insurance will cover. And, this child will always be insurable even though he has a pre-existing condition.
*More on how the ACA helps**:*
· There is no annual or lifetime dollar limit on the couple’s insurance plan. This means that they will not have to worry about medical bankruptcy because of the high cost of their son’s care. Prior to the ACA, 105 million people with employer plans had lifetime limits on their coverage, encompassing 59 percent of all workers covered by their employer’s health plan.
· Their employer-provided plan also must now cap the out-of-pocket costs they can pay, and since the ACA became law an additional 22 million people have gained protection against catastrophic costs.
· In addition, the ACA allows them to keep their son on their plan until he is 26, so they do not have to worry about how he will obtain coverage in the future, which was a serious problem for many young adults. Prior to the ACA, one in three young adults between the ages of 19 and 25 were uninsured.
· And, because of the ACA’s ban on insurer discrimination against individual’s with pre-existing conditions, these parents do not have to worry about whether their son can access coverage when he is no longer on their plan.
*If the ACA were repealed:*
· This couple would face significant financial burdens in caring for their son. Given the significant costs associated with caring for complex heart defects, they could very quickly reach the lifetime limit on their plan, in addition to the significant out-of-pocket costs they would incur.
· They would then be forced to either find a new job that provided coverage without a lifetime limit or find a way to pay for the costs of their son’s care on their own.
· In addition, their employer’s plan would not necessarily need to cover their son until age 26, meaning that, once he is older, he would need to find an alternative source of coverage to provide for his ongoing care.
· And, because of discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions, he may not ever be able to obtain coverage again.
A 55-year-old man with a history of high cholesterol loses his job. He decides to start his own small business. The ACA helps him find affordable health coverage even though he has a pre-existing condition. And, it makes it easier for him to provide health insurance to his employees as his small business grows by providing tax credits and ensuring premium dollars go to providing care rather than padding insurers’ profits.
*More on how the ACA helps**:*
· He is able to obtain coverage on the Marketplace after losing his job, meaning that he is free to start his own business rather than work for a large business just to keep his health coverage.
· He cannot be discriminated against because of his high cholesterol, which affects over 73 million Americans.
· Moreover, if his high cholesterol leads to a heart attack or other significant health event, his insurer cannot cancel his plan over a technicality regarding the form he filled out when signing up for coverage, such as forgetting to report that he had chicken pox as a child.
· All individual market plans now cover prescription drugs, so he can obtain medication to help address his high cholesterol and prevent future health problems.
· As his business expands, he can use the Marketplace for small businesses to easily compare and shop for plans for his employees and offer them a range of options that work for his business and for them.
· An ACA provision requires that plans spend at least 80 percent of premiums on covering the cost of care or making quality improvements, to ensure he is getting the best value for his dollar. Thanks to this provision, nearly $2.8 billion in rebates have been paid to Americans from 2011-2015.
· And, because of the ACA, his small business qualifies for a tax credit worth up to 50 percent of the cost he pays for his employees’ coverage.
*If the ACA were repealed:*
· This man would have significant trouble finding coverage.
· To start his own business, he would likely have to forgo insurance, as his pre-existing condition would make it difficult to find an affordable plan.
· He would be in danger of his insurer canceling his plan the moment he had a significant health condition, and his plan might not cover the prescription drugs he needs to treat his high cholesterol, as was the case for almost one in ten people in the individual market prior to the ACA.
· If he were able to start his own business, he could find it difficult to provide health care for his employees, particularly given the lack of a small business tax credit to help offset costs.
· His employees, now forced to find insurance on their own without ACA consume protections, would face the same sorts of issues he did in finding coverage. They may also prefer to work for a company that offers health benefits.
· And his insurance company could use less of his premium dollars to provide care, instead using them to pay for marketing or company profits.
A newly married woman with a family history of breast cancer is seeking a new individual market insurance plan. Thanks to the ACA, she can find affordable coverage despite her family history of break cancer. Her coverage will provide free preventive services to help her manage her risk of breast cancer. She is also considering starting a family. Her coverage will also cover important preventive services for women who may become pregnant and provide her with contraception, both free of charge.
*More on how the ACA helps**:*
· She does not need to worry that her family history of breast cancer will be treated as a pre-existing condition that prevents her from getting an offer of coverage, being charged more for coverage, or having cancer treatment excluded from coverage.
· Her coverage will include free breast cancer genetic test counseling and, as she gets older, free mammograms as appropriate.
· And any coverage that she receives will provide a range of free preventive screenings that are important for women who may become pregnant.
· It will also cover a yearly physical at no cost.
· In addition, she will be able to obtain birth control free of charge, and her plan will be required to cover care provided at community health centers and family planning clinics.
*If the ACA were repealed:*
· This woman could face significant problems finding coverage and making family planning decisions that are right for her.
· She could be excluded from coverage or charged exorbitant rates because of her family history.
· If she were able to find coverage, it would likely not provide preventive services free of charge, making it more difficult to manage her risk of breast cancer.
· She would find it more difficult to engage in effective family planning. Screenings could be costly, and she would have to pay for contraceptive coverage as well.
· She would not be guaranteed an annual well woman’s visit without out of pocket costs.
· And there would be no guarantee that her plan would cover care at nearby community health centers or family planning clinics, which could require her to travel significant distances to get needed care at an affordable cost.
Jeanne Lambrew is Deputy Assistant to the President for Health Policy. Reported by The White House 1 day ago.
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Fix and Replace
Six times in the 20th century, starting with Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, Americans debated legislation that would enact some form of national health insurance. Under presidents ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, the nation considered the issue and failed to act. Then, in his first term, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, President Barack Obama was able to pass the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court found the ACA to be constitutional.
While there are many complaints about the ACA, the legislation has done something that was needed in the United States: It provided a way for millions of Americans to get health insurance. By and large, these are working Americans employed by companies that could not offer health insurance as part of the wage package. In this last election cycle, the phrase has become "repeal and replace." The assumption is that there ought to be some form of national health insurance. The crucial question now is: Replace it with what?
There are three important topics in health care policy that always intersect: who is covered and how they are covered by insurance, the cost of medical care, and choice about what procedures and care are delivered. You cannot fix one without affecting the other two. So we need to look for a replacement model that will both give people access to health care (ACA) and address the other issues of cost and choice.
The cost of health care is not merely an economic issue; it is also a social and ethical issue. We live in a world of limited resources, and we already spend over $3.8 trillion on health care as a nation. That is roughly $10,000 annually per person. And as we spend more of our resources on health care, we have fewer resources to address other areas of need, such as police protection, education, or good transportation.
While the U.S. outspends every other nation in the world, our health care outcomes are not the best. Comparatively, life expectancy in the U.S. is 42nd in the world. And 60 years after President Kennedy started the President's Council on Physical Fitness, the United States is now the second most obese nation in the world, with 31.8 percent of its population classified as obese.
There are many reasons that the cost of health care has escalated, but, to borrow from Shakespeare, the fault of spending so much on health care lies "not in the stars but in ourselves." Many of the diseases and illnesses that afflict Americans do not simply happen to us. They are self-inflicted. Many of our daily decisions about how we live contribute to illness and sickness. We have come to treat our bodies like cars or appliances. We use them until they break, and then we get them repaired or replaced.
One way to address these three issues simultaneously is to put more control over health care into the hands of patients and put more responsibility on patients. The way we purchase health care is unlike anything else in American life. Someone else -- the HR office of our employers or those who design government programs like Medicare -- make decisions about what is covered (procedures, drugs) in our plans. We don't make those choices, which is unlike many other goods and services that we purchase.
So how can we provide health insurance for everyone, control the cost of health care, and allow individuals greater choice as to what is included in their health care coverage?
One way to do this would be to develop a new model for health insurance that puts individuals in charge of their insurance and incentivizes them to take better care of themselves. Rather than have insurers or the government design health care packages (which procedures are included, which aren't) and systems (which doctors and hospitals are in-network or out-of-network), devise a system of insurance vouchers and let people make their own decisions about what they want covered and by whom.
I would argue that a new model of insurance can accomplish several important goals simultaneously. First, it gets the employer and insurance companies out of the business of deciding what should or should not be included in people's insurance packages. The individual decides what he or she wants done and by whom. Second, it may help to make people (the consumers) more aware of the costs of health care and what they are actually spending. Right now, there is a complete disassociation of patients from the cost of care, in part because physician and hospital bills are unlike any other bills that people receive. When people receiver a bill for purchases, the bill usually represents the unit cost of the product or service. But in health care, the costs are spread over populations of people and are often the product of negotiations between insurers and health care providers; in short, the bills are largely convoluted fiction.
Not all but much of what happens to us when our health breaks down is self-inflicted. We need a health insurance system that puts more responsibility on patients for their own health and their health care.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
While there are many complaints about the ACA, the legislation has done something that was needed in the United States: It provided a way for millions of Americans to get health insurance. By and large, these are working Americans employed by companies that could not offer health insurance as part of the wage package. In this last election cycle, the phrase has become "repeal and replace." The assumption is that there ought to be some form of national health insurance. The crucial question now is: Replace it with what?
There are three important topics in health care policy that always intersect: who is covered and how they are covered by insurance, the cost of medical care, and choice about what procedures and care are delivered. You cannot fix one without affecting the other two. So we need to look for a replacement model that will both give people access to health care (ACA) and address the other issues of cost and choice.
The cost of health care is not merely an economic issue; it is also a social and ethical issue. We live in a world of limited resources, and we already spend over $3.8 trillion on health care as a nation. That is roughly $10,000 annually per person. And as we spend more of our resources on health care, we have fewer resources to address other areas of need, such as police protection, education, or good transportation.
While the U.S. outspends every other nation in the world, our health care outcomes are not the best. Comparatively, life expectancy in the U.S. is 42nd in the world. And 60 years after President Kennedy started the President's Council on Physical Fitness, the United States is now the second most obese nation in the world, with 31.8 percent of its population classified as obese.
There are many reasons that the cost of health care has escalated, but, to borrow from Shakespeare, the fault of spending so much on health care lies "not in the stars but in ourselves." Many of the diseases and illnesses that afflict Americans do not simply happen to us. They are self-inflicted. Many of our daily decisions about how we live contribute to illness and sickness. We have come to treat our bodies like cars or appliances. We use them until they break, and then we get them repaired or replaced.
One way to address these three issues simultaneously is to put more control over health care into the hands of patients and put more responsibility on patients. The way we purchase health care is unlike anything else in American life. Someone else -- the HR office of our employers or those who design government programs like Medicare -- make decisions about what is covered (procedures, drugs) in our plans. We don't make those choices, which is unlike many other goods and services that we purchase.
So how can we provide health insurance for everyone, control the cost of health care, and allow individuals greater choice as to what is included in their health care coverage?
One way to do this would be to develop a new model for health insurance that puts individuals in charge of their insurance and incentivizes them to take better care of themselves. Rather than have insurers or the government design health care packages (which procedures are included, which aren't) and systems (which doctors and hospitals are in-network or out-of-network), devise a system of insurance vouchers and let people make their own decisions about what they want covered and by whom.
I would argue that a new model of insurance can accomplish several important goals simultaneously. First, it gets the employer and insurance companies out of the business of deciding what should or should not be included in people's insurance packages. The individual decides what he or she wants done and by whom. Second, it may help to make people (the consumers) more aware of the costs of health care and what they are actually spending. Right now, there is a complete disassociation of patients from the cost of care, in part because physician and hospital bills are unlike any other bills that people receive. When people receiver a bill for purchases, the bill usually represents the unit cost of the product or service. But in health care, the costs are spread over populations of people and are often the product of negotiations between insurers and health care providers; in short, the bills are largely convoluted fiction.
Not all but much of what happens to us when our health breaks down is self-inflicted. We need a health insurance system that puts more responsibility on patients for their own health and their health care.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
↧
↧
HUFFPOST HILL - Washington To Have Forgotten Russia Report By Kickoff Saturday
Rep. Duncan Hunter handled the controversy surrounding his rabbit plane ticket expenses like a total pro, taking the heat off of himself by vandalizing a child’s painting. Congress certified Donald Trump’s electoral college victory with Faith Spotted Eagle strongly positioned in the establishment lane. And Wikileaks tweeted that it wants to create an invasive database of verified Twitter users. This will undoubtedly be discussed at our Aspen Ideas Festival panel, “Verified Lives Matter.” Joining us will be Mika Brzezinski and Pharrell’s hat (Tom Friedman has a scheduling conflict, but we’ll air a pre-recorded video he filmed from the brass-lined train car where Charlie Rose lives). This is HUFFPOST HILL for Friday, January 6th, 2016:
*DNI RUSSIA REPORT OUT - *Here’s the beginning of its “Key Judgments” section: “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. *We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency*. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. *All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence*.” [Full Report]
*Other highlights*:
- “In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016….We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.”
- “We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.”
- “We assess that influence campaigns are approved at the highest levels of the Russian Government—particularly those that would be politically sensitive.”
- “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”
- “Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
*TRUMP GETS INTEL BRIEFING, SAYS IT WAS GREAT - *Christina Wilkie: “Trump released a statement following the meeting, calling the talks ‘constructive” and emphasizing that he has ‘*tremendous respect for the work and service done by the men and women of [the intelligence] community to our great nation*.’ ‘While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat [sic] National Committee, *there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election* including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines,’ Trump said.” [HuffPost]
*CONGRATULATIONS, GS-12s, LOUIE GOHMERT MIGHT FIRE YOU* - Paul Blumenthal: “House Republicans resurrected a decades-old provision in their new rules package that *allows lawmakers to lower the salary or eliminate the job of individual federal employees*. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, championed the arcane provision, called the Holman Rule for the Indiana congressman who created it in 1876, as a tool to allow lawmakers to make *targeted spending reductions or eliminate positions they deem unnecessary*. In an interview with The Washington Post, Griffith said he would like members to use the Holman Rule like a sniper rifle instead of like a shotgun...Democrats also said they feared the rule gives Republicans the tools to root out individual federal workers who hold views or perform work that is not favored by the incoming administration. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team reportedly asked for the names of individual Department of Energy employees who worked on the Paris climate accord.” [HuffPost]
*‘President-elect’s office, please hold... Just kidding, Donald here!’ *Jessica Schulberg: “Donald Trump, who will be president of the United States in 14 days, *answers calls on his cellphone, even when there is no caller identification information available*, according to a Republican senator who is in frequent communication with him. On Sunday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) needed to talk to Trump, he told reporters Friday at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. ‘*I called him on his cellphone, he answered it, we talked*,’ Corker said. ‘And by the way, *my phone says, ‘No caller ID,’* so I’m not saying that has anything to do with me. Nobody has any idea who’s calling when I’m calling.’” [HuffPost]
Today’s great story about nuclear annihilation.
*DELANEY DOWNER -* President-elect Donald Trump likes sending mean tweets that single out auto companies for not making vehicles in the United States, but *there is no such thing as a completely American-made car.* While there are many cars that are ultimately assembled in the U.S., none are composed entirely of American-made parts, thanks to supply chains that go back and forth across national borders. Federal law requires automakers to disclose the percentage of North American content in a vehicle. The most “American” cars, according to the government’s data for 2016, are the Chevrolet Traverse, the GMC Acadia and the Honda Accord, each of which scored 80 percent. “*When was the last car produced that was 100 percent made in America? it might have been the Model T*,” said Frank DuBois, a supply chain expert and professor at American University’s Kogod School of Business. “Nothing is 100 percent made in America.” [HuffPost]
*Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s new book*, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government
Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to eliot@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill
*ALL IN ALL, YOU’RE JUST ANOTHER (UNFUNDED OUTLAY) IN THE WALL** - *All the taco bowl tweets in all the world couldn’t save Trump from this. Christina Wilkie: “*President-elect **Donald Trump** said on Friday that he intends for U.S. taxpayers to fund the construction of his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border*. ‘The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!’ [Trump tweeted]. The tweet Trump wrote on Friday morning followed multiple reports detailing how members of his transition team have been working with congressional Republicans to come up with a way to use taxpayer dollars to pay for building the wall...making U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for the border wall would violate one of Trump’s central campaign promises...Neither Trump nor his transition team have explained how Trump might go about trying to force a sovereign nation like Mexico to fork over billions of dollars for a domestic building project it opposes.” [HuffPost]
*WHO NEEDS TO OPEN UP THOSE LIBEL LAWS WHEN YOU HAVE THE FBI - *Thoughts and prayers to Trump’s in-house counsel, who’ll be spending the next four years filing nothing but nuisance suits. Christina Wilkie and Samuel Levine: “Two weeks before he is sworn in as president, *Donald Trump said Friday he would ask Congress to investigate the source of an **NBC News report **that senior Russian officials celebrated after Trump’s election victory.* ‘I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it,’ [Trump tweetd]. The NBC News story quoted an unnamed intelligence official confirming the post-election celebrating, a detail first reported by The Washington Post. The intelligence official also described the findings of a top-secret, multi-agency report, which lays out the case that Russia stole, then released, thousands of emails intended to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. President Barack Obama was briefed on the report Thursday afternoon. Trump was scheduled to receive the same briefing on Friday in New York. But the fact that someone knew what was in the report before Trump did, and spoke to the press about it, seemed to enrage the president-elect.” [HuffPost]
House Republicans have put three women in charge of committees.
*‘I’M NOT MAD DOG, I’M JUST DISAPPOINTED DOG’* - Fade into the Secretary of Defense-designee doing 500 straight “count ten” exercises. Josh Rogin: “The honeymoon seems to be ending between retired Gen. James N. Mattis and Donald Trump’s transition team amid an increasingly acrimonious dispute over who will get top jobs in the Defense Department — and who gets to make those decisions. *With only two weeks left before Inauguration Day and days before Mattis’s Senate confirmation hearing, most major Pentagon civilian positions remain unfilled. Behind the scenes, Mattis has been rejecting large numbers of candidates offered by the transition team for several top posts, two sources close to the transition said*. The dispute over personnel appointments is contributing to a tenser relationship between Mattis and the transition officials, which could set the stage for turf wars between the Pentagon and the White House in the coming Trump administration.” [WaPo]
Sam Johnson is retiring ― watch for all the Nazis to try and get their Social Security benefits.
*PUBLIC SPLIT ON OBAMACARE REPEAL, NOT KEEN ON GOP STRATEGY* - Jonathan Cohn: “The poll, which the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation conducted in December, finds *the public almost evenly split on whether to repeal the Affordable Care Act ― 49 percent want repeal, 47 percent do not. *Those numbers have a partisan tint, as most Republicans favor repeal and most Democrats oppose it. But even many Republican voters seem unenthusiastic about eliminating the law before Congress crafts a replacement, as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other GOP leaders have proposed. Overall, according to the poll, j*ust 20 percent of Americans say that is their preferred strategy for eliminating Obamacare*. The survey also says 62 percent of Americans think it’s important to guarantee access to health care, even if that means bigger government or more federal spending. That’s more or less what Obamacare has done, by using government programs to help more than 20 million people get health insurance.” [HuffPost]
Hot hipster George Washington is a thing.
*GROWN-ASS-MAN RUNS OFF WITH CHILD’S PAINTING - *It’s even more incredible when you think all the misdeeds of people whose statues line the Capitol building. Matt Fuller: “*After recent controversy over a painting hanging in a Capitol tunnel that depicts cops as pigs, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) removed the art Friday without permission and returned it to the Democratic colleague who had selected the painting as the winning entry in a district-wide contest for high school students.* Hunter apparently unscrewed the painting from the wires it hung on as a group of GOP congressmen looked on, brought the painting to the office of the congressman who had selected the painting ― Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) ― and then bragged to Fox News about his act of censorship...The painting, which had been hanging there since June, caught the attention of some Republican congressmen after an Independent Journal Review article noted that the artwork depicts cops as pigs holding someone up at gunpoint and protesters stand in the background holding signs that read ‘Racism kills’ and ‘History.’ There is also an African-American who is being crucified while holding the scales of justice in the picture.” [HuffPost]
*BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR *- Here’s a dog evolving for some food.
*L.O.L. BEAN - *That sound you hear are the anguished cries of 10,000 lefty moms in Brookline. * *“*L.L. Bean heiress Linda Bean is in hot water with the Federal Election Commission over a political action committee she created to support Republican President-elect Donald Trump. *According to a letter obtained by The Associated Press, federal regulators say Bean’s Making America Great Again LLC was limited to individual contributions of $5,000 in a single year— and Bean contributed $60,000. The group spent $66,862 supporting Trump. Trump won enough support in the 2nd Congressional District to split Maine’s electoral votes, taking one vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s three.” [AP]
*COMFORT FOOD*
- Champagne Jell-O shots are next level.
- One last session with Barack Obama’s anger translator.
- Behold the $9,000 laptop.
*TWITTERAMA*
@daveweigel: Trump is better at getting the media to write about the TV show he produces than Obama was at getting it to write about Merrick Garland.
@NYTMinusContext: at the personal level she’s awkward and something of a dingbat
@DGisSERIOUS: also has wikileaks never heard of Lexis Nexis?
Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com)
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
*DNI RUSSIA REPORT OUT - *Here’s the beginning of its “Key Judgments” section: “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. *We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency*. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. *All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence*.” [Full Report]
*Other highlights*:
- “In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016….We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.”
- “We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.”
- “We assess that influence campaigns are approved at the highest levels of the Russian Government—particularly those that would be politically sensitive.”
- “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”
- “Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
*TRUMP GETS INTEL BRIEFING, SAYS IT WAS GREAT - *Christina Wilkie: “Trump released a statement following the meeting, calling the talks ‘constructive” and emphasizing that he has ‘*tremendous respect for the work and service done by the men and women of [the intelligence] community to our great nation*.’ ‘While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat [sic] National Committee, *there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election* including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines,’ Trump said.” [HuffPost]
*CONGRATULATIONS, GS-12s, LOUIE GOHMERT MIGHT FIRE YOU* - Paul Blumenthal: “House Republicans resurrected a decades-old provision in their new rules package that *allows lawmakers to lower the salary or eliminate the job of individual federal employees*. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, championed the arcane provision, called the Holman Rule for the Indiana congressman who created it in 1876, as a tool to allow lawmakers to make *targeted spending reductions or eliminate positions they deem unnecessary*. In an interview with The Washington Post, Griffith said he would like members to use the Holman Rule like a sniper rifle instead of like a shotgun...Democrats also said they feared the rule gives Republicans the tools to root out individual federal workers who hold views or perform work that is not favored by the incoming administration. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team reportedly asked for the names of individual Department of Energy employees who worked on the Paris climate accord.” [HuffPost]
*‘President-elect’s office, please hold... Just kidding, Donald here!’ *Jessica Schulberg: “Donald Trump, who will be president of the United States in 14 days, *answers calls on his cellphone, even when there is no caller identification information available*, according to a Republican senator who is in frequent communication with him. On Sunday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) needed to talk to Trump, he told reporters Friday at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. ‘*I called him on his cellphone, he answered it, we talked*,’ Corker said. ‘And by the way, *my phone says, ‘No caller ID,’* so I’m not saying that has anything to do with me. Nobody has any idea who’s calling when I’m calling.’” [HuffPost]
Today’s great story about nuclear annihilation.
*DELANEY DOWNER -* President-elect Donald Trump likes sending mean tweets that single out auto companies for not making vehicles in the United States, but *there is no such thing as a completely American-made car.* While there are many cars that are ultimately assembled in the U.S., none are composed entirely of American-made parts, thanks to supply chains that go back and forth across national borders. Federal law requires automakers to disclose the percentage of North American content in a vehicle. The most “American” cars, according to the government’s data for 2016, are the Chevrolet Traverse, the GMC Acadia and the Honda Accord, each of which scored 80 percent. “*When was the last car produced that was 100 percent made in America? it might have been the Model T*,” said Frank DuBois, a supply chain expert and professor at American University’s Kogod School of Business. “Nothing is 100 percent made in America.” [HuffPost]
*Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s new book*, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government
Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to eliot@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill
*ALL IN ALL, YOU’RE JUST ANOTHER (UNFUNDED OUTLAY) IN THE WALL** - *All the taco bowl tweets in all the world couldn’t save Trump from this. Christina Wilkie: “*President-elect **Donald Trump** said on Friday that he intends for U.S. taxpayers to fund the construction of his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border*. ‘The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!’ [Trump tweeted]. The tweet Trump wrote on Friday morning followed multiple reports detailing how members of his transition team have been working with congressional Republicans to come up with a way to use taxpayer dollars to pay for building the wall...making U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for the border wall would violate one of Trump’s central campaign promises...Neither Trump nor his transition team have explained how Trump might go about trying to force a sovereign nation like Mexico to fork over billions of dollars for a domestic building project it opposes.” [HuffPost]
*WHO NEEDS TO OPEN UP THOSE LIBEL LAWS WHEN YOU HAVE THE FBI - *Thoughts and prayers to Trump’s in-house counsel, who’ll be spending the next four years filing nothing but nuisance suits. Christina Wilkie and Samuel Levine: “Two weeks before he is sworn in as president, *Donald Trump said Friday he would ask Congress to investigate the source of an **NBC News report **that senior Russian officials celebrated after Trump’s election victory.* ‘I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it,’ [Trump tweetd]. The NBC News story quoted an unnamed intelligence official confirming the post-election celebrating, a detail first reported by The Washington Post. The intelligence official also described the findings of a top-secret, multi-agency report, which lays out the case that Russia stole, then released, thousands of emails intended to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. President Barack Obama was briefed on the report Thursday afternoon. Trump was scheduled to receive the same briefing on Friday in New York. But the fact that someone knew what was in the report before Trump did, and spoke to the press about it, seemed to enrage the president-elect.” [HuffPost]
House Republicans have put three women in charge of committees.
*‘I’M NOT MAD DOG, I’M JUST DISAPPOINTED DOG’* - Fade into the Secretary of Defense-designee doing 500 straight “count ten” exercises. Josh Rogin: “The honeymoon seems to be ending between retired Gen. James N. Mattis and Donald Trump’s transition team amid an increasingly acrimonious dispute over who will get top jobs in the Defense Department — and who gets to make those decisions. *With only two weeks left before Inauguration Day and days before Mattis’s Senate confirmation hearing, most major Pentagon civilian positions remain unfilled. Behind the scenes, Mattis has been rejecting large numbers of candidates offered by the transition team for several top posts, two sources close to the transition said*. The dispute over personnel appointments is contributing to a tenser relationship between Mattis and the transition officials, which could set the stage for turf wars between the Pentagon and the White House in the coming Trump administration.” [WaPo]
Sam Johnson is retiring ― watch for all the Nazis to try and get their Social Security benefits.
*PUBLIC SPLIT ON OBAMACARE REPEAL, NOT KEEN ON GOP STRATEGY* - Jonathan Cohn: “The poll, which the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation conducted in December, finds *the public almost evenly split on whether to repeal the Affordable Care Act ― 49 percent want repeal, 47 percent do not. *Those numbers have a partisan tint, as most Republicans favor repeal and most Democrats oppose it. But even many Republican voters seem unenthusiastic about eliminating the law before Congress crafts a replacement, as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other GOP leaders have proposed. Overall, according to the poll, j*ust 20 percent of Americans say that is their preferred strategy for eliminating Obamacare*. The survey also says 62 percent of Americans think it’s important to guarantee access to health care, even if that means bigger government or more federal spending. That’s more or less what Obamacare has done, by using government programs to help more than 20 million people get health insurance.” [HuffPost]
Hot hipster George Washington is a thing.
*GROWN-ASS-MAN RUNS OFF WITH CHILD’S PAINTING - *It’s even more incredible when you think all the misdeeds of people whose statues line the Capitol building. Matt Fuller: “*After recent controversy over a painting hanging in a Capitol tunnel that depicts cops as pigs, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) removed the art Friday without permission and returned it to the Democratic colleague who had selected the painting as the winning entry in a district-wide contest for high school students.* Hunter apparently unscrewed the painting from the wires it hung on as a group of GOP congressmen looked on, brought the painting to the office of the congressman who had selected the painting ― Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) ― and then bragged to Fox News about his act of censorship...The painting, which had been hanging there since June, caught the attention of some Republican congressmen after an Independent Journal Review article noted that the artwork depicts cops as pigs holding someone up at gunpoint and protesters stand in the background holding signs that read ‘Racism kills’ and ‘History.’ There is also an African-American who is being crucified while holding the scales of justice in the picture.” [HuffPost]
*BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR *- Here’s a dog evolving for some food.
*L.O.L. BEAN - *That sound you hear are the anguished cries of 10,000 lefty moms in Brookline. * *“*L.L. Bean heiress Linda Bean is in hot water with the Federal Election Commission over a political action committee she created to support Republican President-elect Donald Trump. *According to a letter obtained by The Associated Press, federal regulators say Bean’s Making America Great Again LLC was limited to individual contributions of $5,000 in a single year— and Bean contributed $60,000. The group spent $66,862 supporting Trump. Trump won enough support in the 2nd Congressional District to split Maine’s electoral votes, taking one vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s three.” [AP]
*COMFORT FOOD*
- Champagne Jell-O shots are next level.
- One last session with Barack Obama’s anger translator.
- Behold the $9,000 laptop.
*TWITTERAMA*
@daveweigel: Trump is better at getting the media to write about the TV show he produces than Obama was at getting it to write about Merrick Garland.
@NYTMinusContext: at the personal level she’s awkward and something of a dingbat
@DGisSERIOUS: also has wikileaks never heard of Lexis Nexis?
Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com)
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
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Investigators link Anthem hack to foreign nation
SACRAMENTO — A foreign government was probably behind a breach of health insurance company Anthem Inc. that compromised more than 78 million consumers’ records, investigators said Friday. The California Department of Insurance said Anthem — the nation’s second-largest health insurer — has agreed to make $260 million in improvements to its information security systems. Investigators found with a “significant degree of confidence” that the hackers were acting on behalf of a foreign government, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said. The hackers accessed Social Security numbers, birth dates and employment details for customers — all key ingredients for stealing someone’s identity.
Reported by SFGate 1 day ago.
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President Barack Obama Slams 'Repeal And Delay' Approach To Affordable Care Act
President Barack Obama is on a roll when it comes to publishing journal articles. A day after his epic 56-page article on criminal justice reform for Harvard Law Review dropped, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published his short essay about the perils of the GOP’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, without providing a replacement.
Obama didn’t mince words, calling the plan “reckless,” “irresponsible” and harmful to millions of Americans who have come to rely on some facet of the law to protect their health care coverage.
The health care law has been in Republicans’ crosshairs ever since it was passed, and during his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to replace it with a plan that would cost less, cover more people and still retain everything people liked about Obamacare.
Now that Trump is poised to take office and the GOP controls both the House and Senate, the difficulty of replacing Obamacare with something just as good — if not better — is starting to sink in.
But that’s not stopping politicians from taking the first steps to repeal the law, despite the fact that some Republicans admit it could take two to four years to come up with a suitable replacement.
According to Obama, here are the problems with repealing the law while delaying a replacement plan.
1. It could roll back health care protections like coverage for pre-existing conditions.
“Health care reform isn’t about a nameless, faceless ‘system.’ It’s about the millions of lives at stake — from the cancer survivor who can now take a new job without fear of losing his insurance, to the young person who can stay on her parents’ insurance after college, to the countless Americans who now live healthier lives thanks to the law’s protections.”
Part of the Affordable Care Act’s legacy includes industry-wide improvements to health insurance coverage, whether or not you’re technically on Obamacare. It guarantees coverage for pre-existing conditions for all and free preventive services for job-related health plans created after 2010, and allows young people to stay on their parents’ plans until the age of 26.
Consider Obamacare’s very popular provision that guarantees coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions without charging them higher fees. To make this work, the law relies on the individual mandate, which asks people to either prove they have health insurance or pay a fee when they file their federal taxes. Trump somehow wants to preserve coverage for people with pre-existing conditions while also eliminating the individual mandate.
Individual mandates are necessary to avoid what insurance experts call a “death spiral,” which is when sick people enter the insurance market in droves, but young, healthy people stay away, driving prices up and keeping healthy people even further away from coverage. Without a way to nudge young, healthy people toward insurance coverage, insurance companies are stuck providing care to the sickest people, which will cause the cost of care to increase.
One way to protect people with pre-existing conditions without forcing people to pay the individual mandate would be to gather the sickest people into government-subsidized high-risk pools that concentrate both their care and their health insurance costs, allowing younger, healthier people to pay less for health care, says Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The only problem? Thirty-five states have already tried this, and they’ve mostly failed.
“When you put people into this insurance ghetto, which is these high risk pools, the cost is going to be extraordinarily high,” said health policy expert Sabrina Corlette in an NPR story from November.
2. Republicans may never come up with a replacement plan.
“Given that Republicans have yet to craft a replacement plan, and that unforeseen events might overtake their planned agenda, there might never be a second vote on a plan to replace the ACA if it is repealed. And if a second vote does not happen, tens of millions of Americans will be harmed.”
Approximately 20 million Americans have gained insurance through some aspect of the Affordable Care Act, whether through staying on their parents’ plans, Medicaid expansion or the health insurance marketplace.
Republicans claim that no one will lose their health insurance coverage as a result of replacing Obamacare, but they still haven’t agreed on a new plan or released any details on how they will preserve aspects of the health care law that people like and have come to rely on.
Indeed, Obama says that without a replacement plan, there’s nothing to hold a hearing about, or analyze for cost, or present to the electorate for public comment — all things the president had to do to pass the Affordable Care Act.
3. It leaves insurance companies and health care providers in limbo.
“Insurance companies may not want to participate in the Health Insurance Marketplace in 2018 or may significantly increase prices to prepare for changes in the next year or two, partly to try to avoid the blame for any change that is unpopular.”
Obama also points out that hospitals may have to reduce jobs and services in anticipation of the lack of compensation for medical care if the Medicaid expansion is repealed.
J.B. Silvers, a professor of health finance at Case Western Reserve University and a former health insurance CEO, explained in a Dec. 29 op-ed that all this legislative uncertainty will produce some predictable results: Health insurance companies will leave the marketplace.
“When they leave the market, it is also easy to guess that the political and economic price will be substantial in terms of patient access, provider uncompensated care costs and employment in the health sector — a major job creator,” Silvers writes. “It is hard to predict these costs, but they could be into the billions of dollars.”
Those insurance companies that stay will continue to dramatically increase premiums to compensate for all the extra risk they’re taking on, as no one has any clue if the government subsidies that help people stay on the individual marketplace* *or the individual mandate* *— two unpopular provisions that also happen to mitigate risk for insurance providers — will be eventually struck down, Silvers explains.
Obama’s essay is just one of many appeals against the GOP’s so-called repeal and delay plan. The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn and Laura Barron-Lopez point out that conservative voices from the Washington Examiner and the Washington Post have recently questioned the strategy, as have conservative health care advisers James Capretta and Joseph Antos.
Some Republican politicians ― including Trump, it appears ― are also questioning the wisdom of the approach. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said repealers may assume responsibility for the eventual failure of Obamacare, while Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also warned against moving too fast, highlighting the need to “make sure nobody’s left out.”
*Read Obama’s full article here.*
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
Obama didn’t mince words, calling the plan “reckless,” “irresponsible” and harmful to millions of Americans who have come to rely on some facet of the law to protect their health care coverage.
The health care law has been in Republicans’ crosshairs ever since it was passed, and during his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to replace it with a plan that would cost less, cover more people and still retain everything people liked about Obamacare.
Now that Trump is poised to take office and the GOP controls both the House and Senate, the difficulty of replacing Obamacare with something just as good — if not better — is starting to sink in.
But that’s not stopping politicians from taking the first steps to repeal the law, despite the fact that some Republicans admit it could take two to four years to come up with a suitable replacement.
According to Obama, here are the problems with repealing the law while delaying a replacement plan.
1. It could roll back health care protections like coverage for pre-existing conditions.
“Health care reform isn’t about a nameless, faceless ‘system.’ It’s about the millions of lives at stake — from the cancer survivor who can now take a new job without fear of losing his insurance, to the young person who can stay on her parents’ insurance after college, to the countless Americans who now live healthier lives thanks to the law’s protections.”
Part of the Affordable Care Act’s legacy includes industry-wide improvements to health insurance coverage, whether or not you’re technically on Obamacare. It guarantees coverage for pre-existing conditions for all and free preventive services for job-related health plans created after 2010, and allows young people to stay on their parents’ plans until the age of 26.
Consider Obamacare’s very popular provision that guarantees coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions without charging them higher fees. To make this work, the law relies on the individual mandate, which asks people to either prove they have health insurance or pay a fee when they file their federal taxes. Trump somehow wants to preserve coverage for people with pre-existing conditions while also eliminating the individual mandate.
Individual mandates are necessary to avoid what insurance experts call a “death spiral,” which is when sick people enter the insurance market in droves, but young, healthy people stay away, driving prices up and keeping healthy people even further away from coverage. Without a way to nudge young, healthy people toward insurance coverage, insurance companies are stuck providing care to the sickest people, which will cause the cost of care to increase.
One way to protect people with pre-existing conditions without forcing people to pay the individual mandate would be to gather the sickest people into government-subsidized high-risk pools that concentrate both their care and their health insurance costs, allowing younger, healthier people to pay less for health care, says Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The only problem? Thirty-five states have already tried this, and they’ve mostly failed.
“When you put people into this insurance ghetto, which is these high risk pools, the cost is going to be extraordinarily high,” said health policy expert Sabrina Corlette in an NPR story from November.
2. Republicans may never come up with a replacement plan.
“Given that Republicans have yet to craft a replacement plan, and that unforeseen events might overtake their planned agenda, there might never be a second vote on a plan to replace the ACA if it is repealed. And if a second vote does not happen, tens of millions of Americans will be harmed.”
Approximately 20 million Americans have gained insurance through some aspect of the Affordable Care Act, whether through staying on their parents’ plans, Medicaid expansion or the health insurance marketplace.
Republicans claim that no one will lose their health insurance coverage as a result of replacing Obamacare, but they still haven’t agreed on a new plan or released any details on how they will preserve aspects of the health care law that people like and have come to rely on.
Indeed, Obama says that without a replacement plan, there’s nothing to hold a hearing about, or analyze for cost, or present to the electorate for public comment — all things the president had to do to pass the Affordable Care Act.
3. It leaves insurance companies and health care providers in limbo.
“Insurance companies may not want to participate in the Health Insurance Marketplace in 2018 or may significantly increase prices to prepare for changes in the next year or two, partly to try to avoid the blame for any change that is unpopular.”
Obama also points out that hospitals may have to reduce jobs and services in anticipation of the lack of compensation for medical care if the Medicaid expansion is repealed.
J.B. Silvers, a professor of health finance at Case Western Reserve University and a former health insurance CEO, explained in a Dec. 29 op-ed that all this legislative uncertainty will produce some predictable results: Health insurance companies will leave the marketplace.
“When they leave the market, it is also easy to guess that the political and economic price will be substantial in terms of patient access, provider uncompensated care costs and employment in the health sector — a major job creator,” Silvers writes. “It is hard to predict these costs, but they could be into the billions of dollars.”
Those insurance companies that stay will continue to dramatically increase premiums to compensate for all the extra risk they’re taking on, as no one has any clue if the government subsidies that help people stay on the individual marketplace* *or the individual mandate* *— two unpopular provisions that also happen to mitigate risk for insurance providers — will be eventually struck down, Silvers explains.
Obama’s essay is just one of many appeals against the GOP’s so-called repeal and delay plan. The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn and Laura Barron-Lopez point out that conservative voices from the Washington Examiner and the Washington Post have recently questioned the strategy, as have conservative health care advisers James Capretta and Joseph Antos.
Some Republican politicians ― including Trump, it appears ― are also questioning the wisdom of the approach. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said repealers may assume responsibility for the eventual failure of Obamacare, while Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also warned against moving too fast, highlighting the need to “make sure nobody’s left out.”
*Read Obama’s full article here.*
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 day ago.
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Justice Department Probing Premium Assistance for Dialysis Patients
Justice Department investigators are probing a controversial arrangement under which kidney-care companies support charitable efforts to help patients pay health-insurance premiums, according to disclosures from major dialysis providers.
Reported by Wall Street Journal 1 day ago.
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Officials: Foreign government may have breached health data
(AP) — A foreign government may have been behind a cyber breach of health insurance company Anthem Inc. that compromised the records of more than 78 million consumers, investigators said Friday. Anthem, the nation's second-largest health insurer, has agreed to make $260 million in improvements to its information security systems as part of a settlement with insurance regulators in most U.S. states and territories. Federal law enforcement officials requested that Jones not identify the foreign government due to an ongoing investigation, said Madison Voss, a spokeswoman for the insurance department. Foreign spy agencies amass as much data as possible from various data breaches to identify espionage targets, gain leverage over them and hone their approach, cyber security experts said. Foreign governments don't use hacked data to steal identities on a large scale, Rasmussen said, but rogue operatives have on occasion used the data for criminal activity. Anthem notified the public and its customers through mail, e-mail, news releases, website postings and state regulators, the report said.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 1 day ago.
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Biggest winners of an Obamacare repeal: The young, healthy and rich
In one of the latest rounds of government-by-tweet, Donald Trump has once again revealed that he doesn't have a clue about the markets for health care and health insurance.
Reported by Denver Post 1 day ago.
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Session starts Wednesday: Here's a rundown, Hampton Roads
Legislative sessions are like the proverbial box of chocolates: You never know what you're going to get.
What you won't get is easier to predict as legislators prepare for Wednesday's start to the 2017 General Assembly.
Medicaid expansion, which would provide health insurance to hundreds of thousands... Reported by dailypress.com 51 minutes ago.
What you won't get is easier to predict as legislators prepare for Wednesday's start to the 2017 General Assembly.
Medicaid expansion, which would provide health insurance to hundreds of thousands... Reported by dailypress.com 51 minutes ago.
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Robert Reich: Three Big Reasons Republicans Can’t Replace Obamacare – OpEd
Republicans are preparing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and have promised to replace it with something that doesn’t leave more than 20 million Americans stranded without health insurance.
Yet they haven’t come up with a replacement. And they won’t, for three reasons.
First, Republicans say they want the replacement to be “market-based.” But Obamacare is already market based – relying on private, for profit health insurers.
That’s already a problem. The biggest health insurers – Anthem, Aetna, Humana, Cigna, and United Health – are so big they can get the deals they want from the government by threatening to drop out of any insurance system Republicans come up with. Several have already dropped out of Obamacare.
Even now they’re trying to merge into far bigger behemoths that will be able to extort even better terms from the Republicans.
Second, every part of Obamacare depends on every other part. Trump says he’d like to continue to bar insurers from denying coverage to individuals with preexisting conditions.
But this popular provision depends on healthy people being required to pay into the insurance pool, a mandate that Republicans vow to eliminate.
The GOP also wants to keep overall costs down, but they haven’t indicated how. More than 80 percent of Americans who buy health insurance through Obamacare receive federal subsidies. Yet Republicans have no plan for raising the necessary sums.
Which gets us to the third big reason Republicans can’t come up with a replacement. Revoking the tax increases in Obamacare – a key part of the repeal – would make it impossible to finance these subsidies.
The two biggest of these taxes – a 3.8-percentage-point surtax on dividends, interest and other unearned income; and a 0.9-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax that helps fund Medicare – are also the most progressive. They apply only to people earning more than $200,000 per year.
Immediately repealing these taxes, as the GOP says it intends to do, will put an average of $33,000 in the hands of the richest 1 percent this year alone, and a whopping $197,000 into the hands of the top 0.1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.
It would also increase the taxes of families earning between $10,000 and $75,000 – including just about all of Trump’s working class voters.
Worse yet, eliminating the payroll tax increase immediately pushes Medicare’s hospital fund back toward the insolvency that was looming before Obamacare became law.
Ultimately, the only practical answer to these three dilemmas is Medicare for all – a single payer system. But Republicans would never go for it.
So without Obamacare, Republicans are left with nothing. Zilch. Nada.
Except the prospect of more than 20 million people losing their health insurance, and a huge redistribution from the working class to the very rich. Reported by Eurasia Review 17 hours ago.
Yet they haven’t come up with a replacement. And they won’t, for three reasons.
First, Republicans say they want the replacement to be “market-based.” But Obamacare is already market based – relying on private, for profit health insurers.
That’s already a problem. The biggest health insurers – Anthem, Aetna, Humana, Cigna, and United Health – are so big they can get the deals they want from the government by threatening to drop out of any insurance system Republicans come up with. Several have already dropped out of Obamacare.
Even now they’re trying to merge into far bigger behemoths that will be able to extort even better terms from the Republicans.
Second, every part of Obamacare depends on every other part. Trump says he’d like to continue to bar insurers from denying coverage to individuals with preexisting conditions.
But this popular provision depends on healthy people being required to pay into the insurance pool, a mandate that Republicans vow to eliminate.
The GOP also wants to keep overall costs down, but they haven’t indicated how. More than 80 percent of Americans who buy health insurance through Obamacare receive federal subsidies. Yet Republicans have no plan for raising the necessary sums.
Which gets us to the third big reason Republicans can’t come up with a replacement. Revoking the tax increases in Obamacare – a key part of the repeal – would make it impossible to finance these subsidies.
The two biggest of these taxes – a 3.8-percentage-point surtax on dividends, interest and other unearned income; and a 0.9-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax that helps fund Medicare – are also the most progressive. They apply only to people earning more than $200,000 per year.
Immediately repealing these taxes, as the GOP says it intends to do, will put an average of $33,000 in the hands of the richest 1 percent this year alone, and a whopping $197,000 into the hands of the top 0.1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.
It would also increase the taxes of families earning between $10,000 and $75,000 – including just about all of Trump’s working class voters.
Worse yet, eliminating the payroll tax increase immediately pushes Medicare’s hospital fund back toward the insolvency that was looming before Obamacare became law.
Ultimately, the only practical answer to these three dilemmas is Medicare for all – a single payer system. But Republicans would never go for it.
So without Obamacare, Republicans are left with nothing. Zilch. Nada.
Except the prospect of more than 20 million people losing their health insurance, and a huge redistribution from the working class to the very rich. Reported by Eurasia Review 17 hours ago.
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Women No Longer Pay More For Health Care Just For Being Women
WASHINGTON ― Before President Barack Obama took office, being a woman came with a surcharge.
Most women had to pay out of pocket for birth control, even though preventing pregnancy saves money for everyone ― including insurance companies, men and the federal government. And women were charged more than men for the same health insurance plans because they tend to have babies, visit the doctor more often and live longer.
The Obama administration was the first to treat women’s preventative health care, including birth control, as a necessity instead of a luxury. The Affordable Care Act banned insurance companies from the practice of “gender rating” and required all insurance plans to cover the full range of contraception methods and well-woman visits, without a co-pay.
“It has really revolutionized how the health care system deals with reproductive health care, particularly family planning,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, told The Huffington Post. “Women now expect that birth control is a part of regular health care. We had to fight to get that done, but it’s been a sea change.”
Obama’s signature health care law saved women $1.4 billion on birth control pills alone in 2013, the year after it went into effect. More than 55 million women now get their contraception and well-woman visits for free, and unintended pregnancy in the United States is at a 30-year low. But those benefits may be short-lived, as Republicans are threatening to repeal Obamacare once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Richards said Planned Parenthood had a “flood of women” calling in the days after Trump was elected, trying to get intrauterine devices and other long-term forms of birth control while their insurance is still required to cover them.
“We had historic numbers of people calling, because women understood this is a benefit they got under Obama that’s now at risk,” Richards said.
This piece is part of a series on Obama’s legacy that The Huffington Post will be publishing over the next week. Read other pieces in the series here.
Even if they decide to keep some aspects of Obamacare, the incoming Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress will probably not be friendly to the birth control access provisions. Republicans see the birth control coverage rule as an affront to religious freedom, arguing that employers who morally oppose birth control shouldn’t have to provide it in their health plans. And Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), said in 2012 that birth control does not need to be covered because women have never had trouble paying for it.
“Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one,” Price said at the time. “The fact of the matter is this is a trampling on religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.”
It’s a real risk for this new administration to try to take women back to the 1950s ― particularly young women who have grown up under this administration.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood
Republicans have also repeatedly tried to defund Planned Parenthood, the largest family planning provider in the country, because of some of its clinics provide abortions. Planned Parenthood receives about $70 million a year in Title X federal family planning funds to provide birth control, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted infection testing to low-income patients. But nearly half the states in the country have attempted to withhold money from Planned Parenthood, and Republicans in Congress plan to spend $1.6 million in taxpayer dollars this year to investigate the family planning provider.
Senate Democrats are prepared to battle for Planned Parenthood funding and the birth control benefit under the new administration.
“It would be truly appalling and a grave mistake for Republicans in Congress and the incoming administration to attempt to force women to pay more for the preventative health care they need,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “If they do try, they should know that I, together with millions of women across the country, will be ready to fight back as hard as we can against any attempt to roll back women’s health care and to protect the progress we’ve made.”
The Obama administration issued a rule in December that prevents states from defunding Planned Parenthood for political reasons. But that rule probably won’t last under Trump.
Still, Republicans may find that it’s much more difficult to take away access to preventative care now that women have now come to expect it. Even if they repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, eliminate birth control coverage and roll back abortion rights, Obama has already shown women what equitable health care feels like and has motivated a new generation of women to fight for it.
“It’s a real risk for this new administration to try to take women back to the 1950s ― particularly young women who have grown up under this administration,” Richards said. “It’s like lighting a match and dropping it on dry tinder.”type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related coverage... + articlesList=586d1824e4b0de3a08fa54fc,584eea35e4b04c8e2bb0cee2,586bfbfbe4b0d9a5945cc204
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 12 hours ago.
Most women had to pay out of pocket for birth control, even though preventing pregnancy saves money for everyone ― including insurance companies, men and the federal government. And women were charged more than men for the same health insurance plans because they tend to have babies, visit the doctor more often and live longer.
The Obama administration was the first to treat women’s preventative health care, including birth control, as a necessity instead of a luxury. The Affordable Care Act banned insurance companies from the practice of “gender rating” and required all insurance plans to cover the full range of contraception methods and well-woman visits, without a co-pay.
“It has really revolutionized how the health care system deals with reproductive health care, particularly family planning,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, told The Huffington Post. “Women now expect that birth control is a part of regular health care. We had to fight to get that done, but it’s been a sea change.”
Obama’s signature health care law saved women $1.4 billion on birth control pills alone in 2013, the year after it went into effect. More than 55 million women now get their contraception and well-woman visits for free, and unintended pregnancy in the United States is at a 30-year low. But those benefits may be short-lived, as Republicans are threatening to repeal Obamacare once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Richards said Planned Parenthood had a “flood of women” calling in the days after Trump was elected, trying to get intrauterine devices and other long-term forms of birth control while their insurance is still required to cover them.
“We had historic numbers of people calling, because women understood this is a benefit they got under Obama that’s now at risk,” Richards said.
This piece is part of a series on Obama’s legacy that The Huffington Post will be publishing over the next week. Read other pieces in the series here.
Even if they decide to keep some aspects of Obamacare, the incoming Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress will probably not be friendly to the birth control access provisions. Republicans see the birth control coverage rule as an affront to religious freedom, arguing that employers who morally oppose birth control shouldn’t have to provide it in their health plans. And Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), said in 2012 that birth control does not need to be covered because women have never had trouble paying for it.
“Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one,” Price said at the time. “The fact of the matter is this is a trampling on religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.”
It’s a real risk for this new administration to try to take women back to the 1950s ― particularly young women who have grown up under this administration.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood
Republicans have also repeatedly tried to defund Planned Parenthood, the largest family planning provider in the country, because of some of its clinics provide abortions. Planned Parenthood receives about $70 million a year in Title X federal family planning funds to provide birth control, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted infection testing to low-income patients. But nearly half the states in the country have attempted to withhold money from Planned Parenthood, and Republicans in Congress plan to spend $1.6 million in taxpayer dollars this year to investigate the family planning provider.
Senate Democrats are prepared to battle for Planned Parenthood funding and the birth control benefit under the new administration.
“It would be truly appalling and a grave mistake for Republicans in Congress and the incoming administration to attempt to force women to pay more for the preventative health care they need,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “If they do try, they should know that I, together with millions of women across the country, will be ready to fight back as hard as we can against any attempt to roll back women’s health care and to protect the progress we’ve made.”
The Obama administration issued a rule in December that prevents states from defunding Planned Parenthood for political reasons. But that rule probably won’t last under Trump.
Still, Republicans may find that it’s much more difficult to take away access to preventative care now that women have now come to expect it. Even if they repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, eliminate birth control coverage and roll back abortion rights, Obama has already shown women what equitable health care feels like and has motivated a new generation of women to fight for it.
“It’s a real risk for this new administration to try to take women back to the 1950s ― particularly young women who have grown up under this administration,” Richards said. “It’s like lighting a match and dropping it on dry tinder.”type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related coverage... + articlesList=586d1824e4b0de3a08fa54fc,584eea35e4b04c8e2bb0cee2,586bfbfbe4b0d9a5945cc204
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 12 hours ago.
↧
Obamacare meant coverage for many who've been sick; what will a repeal mean?
If there were no Affordable Care Act and I had to purchase health insurance on my own, I wouldn't be able to buy a policy. Even with the good insurance policy I have through my employer, I have still been...
Reported by nola.com 11 hours ago.
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Montana may be a model for the Medicaid work requirement
Montana State Senator Ed Buttrey is a no-nonsense businessman from Great Falls. Like a lot of Republicans, he's not a fan of the Affordable Care Act, nor its expansion of Medicaid, the health insurance for the poor and disabled.
Reported by CNNMoney 11 hours ago.
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Yes We Can! Hollywood stars pay tribute to Barack Obama's 8 years in White House
From Leonardo DiCaprio to Tom Hanks, Hollywood A-listers lent their voices to a farewell tribute honouring the outgoing US President Barack Obama.
In the video Yes We Can: Your Most Memorable Moments from the Obama Presidency, celebrities shared the achievements Obama made during his tenure in the White House, reported People magazine.
The video was shared just one day before Obama, 55, and his wife Michelle, First Lady of the United States, hosted a party for their friends and major donors at the White House.
Those in attendance included George and Amal Clooney, Robert De Niro, Nick Jonas, Jordin Sparks, Kelly Rowland as well as Chrissy Teigen and John Legend.
"When I was at the UN and I heard our president say that climate change is the most important issue facing, not only this generation but also future generations, it was inspiring," DiCaprio said in the clip.
Hanks shared, "When he just changed all the rules on the table in regards to Cuba with the most succinct motivation imaginable, which is 'What we've been doing hasn't worked' which made all the sense in the world."
For many celebrities, simply seeing his 2008 election was their favourite moment during the Obama administration. "I never cried before, from an election result," John Legend said in the video.
Kerry Washington said, "You really felt those first three words of the Constitution, 'We the People.' It was one of the first times in my life that I felt like I was really part of that 'We'."
Meanwhile, Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes reflected on watching the Obama family celebrate in Grant Park in 2008.
"Just the magic of that moment of that man, who we'd all been on this journey with, take that stage with his family. I was sitting at home in my living room and I felt like I was a part of that crowd in the park," she said.
Samuel L. Jackson said, "The moment that we got the Affordable Care Act passed, because I have relatives that can't afford health insurance, so it was really a great thing to know that if something happened to them, they could get cared for."
Ellen DeGeneres and Kobe Bryant looked back on the funnier moments from the last eight years, saying "The CVS experience with (First Lady Michelle Obama) was pretty cool and dancing with Barack at his birthday party. And he's a good dancer. He should not get any flack for that you're a good dancer."
And for Michael Jordan, Obama's legacy is what he will always remember. "How often do we remember Jackie Robinson everybody knows him. To me, he will be the Jackie Robinson of politics."
-Watch the video - -
ReportEntertainmentPTIWashington D C
· Barack Obama
· Michelle Obama
· John Legend
· Leonardo DiCaprio
· Tom Hanks
· Amal Clooney
· George Clooney
· Chrissy Teigen
· Ellen DeGeneres
· Kelly Rowland
· Kerry Washington
· Kobe Bryant
· Michael Jordan
· Nick Jonas
· Robert De Niro
· Samuel L Jackson
· Shonda Rhimes
· Hollywood
Sun, 8 Jan 2017-03:21pm
Date updated:
Sunday, 8 January 2017 - 3:21pm
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US President Barack Obama smiles before presenting actor Tom Hanks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, during a ceremony honoring 21 recipients, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, November 22, 2016.
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From Print Edition: Reported by DNA 16 hours ago.
In the video Yes We Can: Your Most Memorable Moments from the Obama Presidency, celebrities shared the achievements Obama made during his tenure in the White House, reported People magazine.
The video was shared just one day before Obama, 55, and his wife Michelle, First Lady of the United States, hosted a party for their friends and major donors at the White House.
Those in attendance included George and Amal Clooney, Robert De Niro, Nick Jonas, Jordin Sparks, Kelly Rowland as well as Chrissy Teigen and John Legend.
"When I was at the UN and I heard our president say that climate change is the most important issue facing, not only this generation but also future generations, it was inspiring," DiCaprio said in the clip.
Hanks shared, "When he just changed all the rules on the table in regards to Cuba with the most succinct motivation imaginable, which is 'What we've been doing hasn't worked' which made all the sense in the world."
For many celebrities, simply seeing his 2008 election was their favourite moment during the Obama administration. "I never cried before, from an election result," John Legend said in the video.
Kerry Washington said, "You really felt those first three words of the Constitution, 'We the People.' It was one of the first times in my life that I felt like I was really part of that 'We'."
Meanwhile, Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes reflected on watching the Obama family celebrate in Grant Park in 2008.
"Just the magic of that moment of that man, who we'd all been on this journey with, take that stage with his family. I was sitting at home in my living room and I felt like I was a part of that crowd in the park," she said.
Samuel L. Jackson said, "The moment that we got the Affordable Care Act passed, because I have relatives that can't afford health insurance, so it was really a great thing to know that if something happened to them, they could get cared for."
Ellen DeGeneres and Kobe Bryant looked back on the funnier moments from the last eight years, saying "The CVS experience with (First Lady Michelle Obama) was pretty cool and dancing with Barack at his birthday party. And he's a good dancer. He should not get any flack for that you're a good dancer."
And for Michael Jordan, Obama's legacy is what he will always remember. "How often do we remember Jackie Robinson everybody knows him. To me, he will be the Jackie Robinson of politics."
-Watch the video - -
ReportEntertainmentPTIWashington D C
· Barack Obama
· Michelle Obama
· John Legend
· Leonardo DiCaprio
· Tom Hanks
· Amal Clooney
· George Clooney
· Chrissy Teigen
· Ellen DeGeneres
· Kelly Rowland
· Kerry Washington
· Kobe Bryant
· Michael Jordan
· Nick Jonas
· Robert De Niro
· Samuel L Jackson
· Shonda Rhimes
· Hollywood
Sun, 8 Jan 2017-03:21pm
Date updated:
Sunday, 8 January 2017 - 3:21pm
Article Images:
US President Barack Obama smiles before presenting actor Tom Hanks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, during a ceremony honoring 21 recipients, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, November 22, 2016.
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From Print Edition: Reported by DNA 16 hours ago.
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↧
Republicans Would Repeal Obamacare In Precisely The Way They Accuse Democrats Of Enacting It
The story that Obamacare opponents tell about its enactment is that backers conceived the health insurance proposal in secret, misled the public about its provisions, and passed it without thinking through the consequences.
That’s a totally accurate account ― of what Republicans are planning to do right now.
Congress returned from its holiday break on Tuesday. And the first order of business, GOP leaders have promised, is repealing the Affordable Care Act ― the 2010 law that has brought the number of Americans without insurance to a record low, but has also raised premiums for some people while fueling an intense partisan backlash.
The process of repealing Obamacare would take several legislative steps. Republican leaders have promised to move through them swiftly, so that Donald Trump can sign a bill effectively killing the law within his first few weeks of office.
Such a vote could have dramatic consequences for millions of Americans, certainly in the long term and quite possibly in the short term. But Republicans have held no hearings about the vote and its possible impact, and they’ve mostly dodged questions from reporters.
All they have offered the American people are vague promises that the transition will be smooth ― and that whatever system emerges as a replacement will be better than what exists today. It’s not clear how much they have even considered the likely effects of repeal, let alone how they would deal with them.
Republicans Can’t Be Sure How Repeal-And-Delay Will Play Out
About the only thing certain right now is that Republicans intend to pursue a “repeal-and-delay” strategy ― stripping out the law’s funding and spending mechanisms right away, but leaving elements of its coverage expansion in place for up to four years so that they will have time to craft a replacement.
A major goal of the delay, Republicans say, is to protect the more than 20 million people who now get insurance through Obamacare “so that no one is left out in the cold, so that no one is worse off,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) vowed last month.
But many insurers selling Obamacare policies have tolerated losses in the hopes of realizing future profits. If those profits aren’t going to materialize, insurers have little incentive continue selling Obamacare policies. They will be particularly antsy if repeal legislation immediately eliminates the individual mandate ― a financial penalty on people who decline to get coverage designed to encourage healthy people to sign up for insurance. Insurers rely on premiums from those healthy customers to offset the costs of people with high medical expenses.
Since the election, Republicans have been quietly negotiating with insurers over what it would take to keep carriers from hiking rates or abandoning states. The most obvious solution would be to shovel money at the companies, in order to cover big losses they might incur. But this would be difficult to accomplish politically, because such an infusion of funds would be exactly the kind of “bailout” that Republicans have vilified in the past and that many voters hate.
If the idea is to maintain coverage for those now relying on Obamacare, the best-case scenario is probably that Republicans make enough deals, through a combination of direct subsidies and regulatory changes, to keep state insurance markets functioning in some kind of zombified form. The worst-case scenario is a true insurance market “death spiral” that, as a recent Urban Institute analysis found, could cause millions of people to lose insurance in just the first year.
Republicans May Never Agree On An Obamacare Replacement
The long-term question looming over the repeal project, about the shape of the would-be Obamacare replacement plan, is another matter entirely.
Over the past few years, Republicans have made some very ambitious promises, usually involving supposedly superior benefits for less money. During the campaign, Trump went so far as to vow that everybody would have coverage when Republicans were done.
But a repeal bill is likely to eliminate the revenue that funds Obamacare, starting with $350 billion in taxes that fall on the richest Americans. Without such revenue, it’s pretty much impossible to produce a law that would insulate people from medical bills as much as Obamacare has. And it’s unlikely a Republican Congress would agree to reinstate that revenue, since it would amount to a tax increase.
Not that Republicans even know what kind of replacement they want. The party is deeply divided over government’s role in boosting health care access ― with some Republicans worrying aloud about cancer patients who couldn’t afford chemotherapy without insurance, and other Republicans suggesting it wouldn’t be so bad if people had to think twice before taking a kid with a broken arm to the emergency room.
It’s entirely reasonable to assume that, even after three or four years, Republicans would find themselves unable to coalesce around an alternative ― leaving 20 million or even 30 million Americans without coverage, according to the Urban Institute analysis.
Republicans Have Barely Addressed These Questions Publicly
So far, Republicans have held no hearings on how their transitional period is likely to play out, or the steps they are contemplating in order to keep insurance markets stable. And even now, nearly seven years after first promising to craft an Obamacare replacement, Republicans have held virtually no hearings on what that replacement might look like.
In fact, in response to inquiries from The Huffington Post last month, representatives from the five House and Senate committees with direct jurisdiction over health care legislation could cite only two hearings since 2010 that focused specifically on how to craft a new health care program. (Republican-led committees have held many more hearings on Obamacare, but nearly all focused on the law’s perceived problems, not possible replacements.)
The process that first produced Obamacare in 2009 and 2010 unfolded a bit differently. It featured its share of backroom deals and at least one big vow that Democrats would break. (“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”) But it also featured more than a year of public deliberation, including upwards of 130 hearings across the five committees, according to a tally that Democratic staffers compiled at the time.
Many of these hearings included testimony from both liberal and conservative experts, with opportunities for tough questions by both parties. And that followed a presidential campaign in which the Democratic candidates, including the eventual nominee and future president, coalesced quickly around a model for reform and spent their time litigating their relatively narrow disputes in detail.
Republicans still have a chance to do the same thing ― to explain in more detail exactly how they would proceed, to consider the immediate consequences, to offer details on how the process is supposed to end, and to do it all in a way that public can observe.
But doing that would require more time. It would also presuppose their procedural objections to Obamacare were about principle, rather than finding another excuse to bash a law they didn’t like.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.
That’s a totally accurate account ― of what Republicans are planning to do right now.
Congress returned from its holiday break on Tuesday. And the first order of business, GOP leaders have promised, is repealing the Affordable Care Act ― the 2010 law that has brought the number of Americans without insurance to a record low, but has also raised premiums for some people while fueling an intense partisan backlash.
The process of repealing Obamacare would take several legislative steps. Republican leaders have promised to move through them swiftly, so that Donald Trump can sign a bill effectively killing the law within his first few weeks of office.
Such a vote could have dramatic consequences for millions of Americans, certainly in the long term and quite possibly in the short term. But Republicans have held no hearings about the vote and its possible impact, and they’ve mostly dodged questions from reporters.
All they have offered the American people are vague promises that the transition will be smooth ― and that whatever system emerges as a replacement will be better than what exists today. It’s not clear how much they have even considered the likely effects of repeal, let alone how they would deal with them.
Republicans Can’t Be Sure How Repeal-And-Delay Will Play Out
About the only thing certain right now is that Republicans intend to pursue a “repeal-and-delay” strategy ― stripping out the law’s funding and spending mechanisms right away, but leaving elements of its coverage expansion in place for up to four years so that they will have time to craft a replacement.
A major goal of the delay, Republicans say, is to protect the more than 20 million people who now get insurance through Obamacare “so that no one is left out in the cold, so that no one is worse off,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) vowed last month.
But many insurers selling Obamacare policies have tolerated losses in the hopes of realizing future profits. If those profits aren’t going to materialize, insurers have little incentive continue selling Obamacare policies. They will be particularly antsy if repeal legislation immediately eliminates the individual mandate ― a financial penalty on people who decline to get coverage designed to encourage healthy people to sign up for insurance. Insurers rely on premiums from those healthy customers to offset the costs of people with high medical expenses.
Since the election, Republicans have been quietly negotiating with insurers over what it would take to keep carriers from hiking rates or abandoning states. The most obvious solution would be to shovel money at the companies, in order to cover big losses they might incur. But this would be difficult to accomplish politically, because such an infusion of funds would be exactly the kind of “bailout” that Republicans have vilified in the past and that many voters hate.
If the idea is to maintain coverage for those now relying on Obamacare, the best-case scenario is probably that Republicans make enough deals, through a combination of direct subsidies and regulatory changes, to keep state insurance markets functioning in some kind of zombified form. The worst-case scenario is a true insurance market “death spiral” that, as a recent Urban Institute analysis found, could cause millions of people to lose insurance in just the first year.
Republicans May Never Agree On An Obamacare Replacement
The long-term question looming over the repeal project, about the shape of the would-be Obamacare replacement plan, is another matter entirely.
Over the past few years, Republicans have made some very ambitious promises, usually involving supposedly superior benefits for less money. During the campaign, Trump went so far as to vow that everybody would have coverage when Republicans were done.
But a repeal bill is likely to eliminate the revenue that funds Obamacare, starting with $350 billion in taxes that fall on the richest Americans. Without such revenue, it’s pretty much impossible to produce a law that would insulate people from medical bills as much as Obamacare has. And it’s unlikely a Republican Congress would agree to reinstate that revenue, since it would amount to a tax increase.
Not that Republicans even know what kind of replacement they want. The party is deeply divided over government’s role in boosting health care access ― with some Republicans worrying aloud about cancer patients who couldn’t afford chemotherapy without insurance, and other Republicans suggesting it wouldn’t be so bad if people had to think twice before taking a kid with a broken arm to the emergency room.
It’s entirely reasonable to assume that, even after three or four years, Republicans would find themselves unable to coalesce around an alternative ― leaving 20 million or even 30 million Americans without coverage, according to the Urban Institute analysis.
Republicans Have Barely Addressed These Questions Publicly
So far, Republicans have held no hearings on how their transitional period is likely to play out, or the steps they are contemplating in order to keep insurance markets stable. And even now, nearly seven years after first promising to craft an Obamacare replacement, Republicans have held virtually no hearings on what that replacement might look like.
In fact, in response to inquiries from The Huffington Post last month, representatives from the five House and Senate committees with direct jurisdiction over health care legislation could cite only two hearings since 2010 that focused specifically on how to craft a new health care program. (Republican-led committees have held many more hearings on Obamacare, but nearly all focused on the law’s perceived problems, not possible replacements.)
The process that first produced Obamacare in 2009 and 2010 unfolded a bit differently. It featured its share of backroom deals and at least one big vow that Democrats would break. (“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”) But it also featured more than a year of public deliberation, including upwards of 130 hearings across the five committees, according to a tally that Democratic staffers compiled at the time.
Many of these hearings included testimony from both liberal and conservative experts, with opportunities for tough questions by both parties. And that followed a presidential campaign in which the Democratic candidates, including the eventual nominee and future president, coalesced quickly around a model for reform and spent their time litigating their relatively narrow disputes in detail.
Republicans still have a chance to do the same thing ― to explain in more detail exactly how they would proceed, to consider the immediate consequences, to offer details on how the process is supposed to end, and to do it all in a way that public can observe.
But doing that would require more time. It would also presuppose their procedural objections to Obamacare were about principle, rather than finding another excuse to bash a law they didn’t like.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.
↧
Obama health care legacy: Coverage, conflict, and questions
WASHINGTON (AP) — Although his signature law is in jeopardy, President Barack Obama's work reshaping health care in America is certain to endure in the broad public support for many of its underlying principles, along with conflicts over how to secure them. The belief that people with medical problems should be able to get health insurance is no longer challenged. "The American people have now set new standards for access to health care based on the Affordable Care Act," former Surgeon General David Satcher says. —The government has opened up massive files of health care billing data, enabling independent analysts to look for patterns of questionable spending. Passed with no Republican votes, the 2010 health care law broke the pattern of major safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which had bipartisan backing. "If Medicare had been repealed, stories about Lyndon Johnson would have been different," said Robert Blendon, professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Approaches that partisan are difficult to sustain as lasting, permanent features of the health care system," said Mark McClellan, Medicare administrator under Republican President George W. Bush. The health care law, or ACA, enabled her to get better treatment for advanced breast cancer. The law provides subsidized private insurance along with a Medicaid expansion for low-income people. Among the controversial claims was that the law deserved much credit for a historic slowdown in national health care spending from 2009-2013.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 11 hours ago.
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Obama Accuses Sanders Supporters Of Undermining Obamacare
With the Obamacare repeal process having officially started (the replacement of the Affordable Care Act is a different matter entirely, and will likely take years to be enacted), outgoing president is watching his biggest legacy slowly melt before his eyes, and has started to point fingers. And one place where he is casting blame is criticism from the far left wing of his own Democratic Party which he says helped feed into the unpopularity of Obamacare.At a town hall event with Vox Media, Obama acknowledged the politics have been stacked against his reforms, mainly blaming Republicans who he said refused to help make legislative fixes to Obamacare, which provides subsidies for private insurance to lower-income Americans who do not have healthcare plans at work. *But Obama also said Liberals like former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had contributed to the program's unpopularity* according to Reuters.
During Sanders' campaign for the presidential nomination, he proposed replacing Obamacare with a government-run single-payer health insurance system based on Medicare, the government plan for elderly and disabled Americans.
"In the 'dissatisfied' column are a whole bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a single-payer plan," Obama said in the interview.
"The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don't think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered," Obama said.
Ironically Sanders believes that Obama did not go far enough in finalizing the law which is viewed unfavorably by more Americans than those who have a favorable view of Obamacare.
Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sanders, agreed that many people would rather the government "take on the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies" and play a bigger role in providing healthcare.
"There are many millions of Americans, including many of Bernie's supporters, who don’t understand why we are the only major country on earth that does not provide healthcare as a right and they don’t understand why we pay more but get less for what we spend on healthcare," Briggs said.
Polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation last month showed 46 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Obamacare, while 43 percent have a favorable view. Americans are also split on whether the law should be repealed.
As noted previously, Trump and congressional Republicans have vowed to quickly repeal the law, but Obama and Democrats have argued they should reveal a replacement plan before dismantling the program.
While the White House is adamant that more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage through Obamacare, the outcome has been one of soaring costs while services rendered have deteriorated. Coverage was extended by expanding the Medicaid program for the poor and through online exchanges where consumers can receive income-based subsidies.
Obama has been spending part of his last two weeks in office urging supporters to speak out against plans by Republicans - who will soon control both the White House and Congress - to dismantle the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Last week the Senate official launched the process of repealing Obamacare. Reported by Zero Hedge 10 hours ago.
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