The Republican health care plan targets a key protection for Americans who get their health insurance through work. The bill that passed the U.S. House on Thursday would allow health insurance companies to impose lifetime and annual caps on benefits for those who get coverage through a large-employer plan.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 9 hours ago.
GOP health care bill would allow employers to cap benefits
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Campaign Cash Pours In Against Republicans Who Voted To Repeal The Affordable Care Act
WASHINGTON ― What are the political ramifications of threatening to let your constituents die needlessly?
Up until May 4, 2017, it would have been a theoretical question for which political scientists lacked the data to answer. But come 2018, we’ll find out.
Democrats feel like they already know the answer. For a party that just watched its signature legislative achievement get repealed in a tight vote on the House floor, Democrats had quite the spring in their step, even breaking into song as the vote was gaveled. “Nah, nah, nah, nah/Nah, nah, nah, nah/Hey, hey, hey, goodbye,” Democrats bellowed in unison to their Republican colleagues in the chamber.
Democrats sang “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” on the House floor after Republicans narrowly passed the American Health Care Act. pic.twitter.com/ubGPxSco4W
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) May 4, 2017
The song appalled Rep. Tom MacArthur, a Republican from New Jersey who brokered a deal with the Freedom Caucus that got the party to this point.
“I simply don’t look at this through a political lens, and frankly I thought that was beneath the dignity of the House to be singing a song with a political message. This isn’t about politics. This is about the American people having health care and making sure that prices come down,” he said.
The dignity of the House of Representatives aside, MacArthur, elected in 2014, was unaware that his own party had serenaded Democrats with the same song as they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
The taunt was accurate then: Democrats were swept out of office, and voting against Obamacare wasn’t enough to save many of them. Of the 32 Democrats who voted against the Affordable Care Act out of political concern, 21 lost or retired in the next cycle. The problem is not only the individual vote, it is also the collective action taken by the party ― and voters are fond of doling out collective punishment. If the effect is anything like what happened in 2010, any Republican who won his or her seat by 20 points or less is now vulnerable.
The bill passed by the Republican House gives states the option of ignoring Affordable Care Act requirements that people with pre-existing conditions have affordable access to health care. In its place, the state must create a “high-risk pool” ― traditionally, an underfunded program that comes nowhere close to providing the kind of coverage needed.
Political punishment, in the form of massive amounts of cashing flowing to House Republican opponents, is already being doled out. Rep. Darrell Issa, a vulnerable Republican from California, told reporters “none of your business” when asked Wednesday how he’d vote. By Thursday, he seemed no more willing to share his position with the public, even as the clock on the vote ticked down to zero. Often, members of Congress who want to avoid a tough vote wait until the very end in hopes that theirs won’t be needed. With the tally at 215 yes votes, one short of the total, Issa finally cast his vote, putting it over the top and bringing a loud cheer from the Republican side. (It finished with 217, as there is a political maxim that a one-vote win should be avoided at all costs, because it lets the opponent say that every single vote was “the deciding vote.”)
Democratic activists responded by raising at least $100,000 in a single day dedicated to whomever becomes Issa’s opponent, according to Michelle Finocchi of the group Swing Left, which launched after the election with the aim of funneling Democratic energy from blue districts into areas where it could make a difference.
Another $300,000 was raised by a Swing Left page that split the money evenly among 35 swing districts where a Republican voted yes. “We informally collaborated on this with Jon Favreau and Crooked Media,” said Finocchi. “It’s the result of playing around, brainstorming, trying things out and seeing what worked. The genesis of the ideas was how to turn lemons into lemonade in this awful moment.” She said $150,000 of that came in right around the time of the vote.
And another page set up on ActBlue was on its way to an additional $300,000 raised by the time this story was published and has probably climbed much higher since.
The progressive website Daily Kos put out its own call for donors to help defeat the 24 most vulnerable Republicans who voted for the bill. In less than four hours, the site collected nearly $200,000 from more than 4,000 donors. That was even before Daily Kos emailed the fundraising appeal to its 3.5 million members.
That, at least, will be counterbalanced by one critical but overlooked element of the repeal bill. The politics of the vote are bad for Republicans on every level save one: Wealthy backers of Republican politicians have expected a major tax cut to come from control of both Congress and the White House. Delivering on that promise will pay off in campaign contributions and other benefits, as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act amounts to an extraordinarily large tax cut directed at the wealthiest people in the country.
“Obviously the president really wanted a win here,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). “The Republicans themselves needed to dispose of this so they could extract the tax dollars. I mean, they’re getting something like $800-900 billion in returned taxes. So they want to use that money for their tax cut plan. And I don’t think they care that they’re taking it away from people who needed it.”
Leah Greenberg, chief strategy officer for the progressive movement Indivisible, a federated group of hundreds of local chapters, said that the vote was sparking an upsurge in activity, with at least 21 protests against individual members of Congress already planned and more likely coming. In February, she said, 250 events were scheduled during the congressional recess. That surged to 450 during the most recent recess. The one coming up is likely to see even more.
“My Republican colleagues are going to be really, really sorry that they rushed this bill to the floor before they got an amended CBO score,” DeGette said, because once that Congressional Budget Office projection becomes available, Americans “are going to be shocked to wake up to find out, if this Trumpcare bill passes, many millions more will lose their coverage.”
On a process level, it would be hard for it to have been worse. After years of complaining that Obamacare was rushed or that nobody had read the bill, the GOP bill was rammed to a floor vote so fast the CBO hadn’t had a chance to analyze its impact.
But otherwise the bill is a loser for Republicans. On a broad level, never before in American history has a political party run on the fact that they took something away from constituents (except, I suppose, the Republican Party of Lincoln, which took slavery away from Southern slave owners). And Democratic operatives on both the House and Senate side say they plan to make the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare the central plank of their campaigns in 2018.
“This is a scar they will carry,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said before the vote. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made a case you’ll hear over and over again: Republicans now own the health care system.
When Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act, they did something incomprehensibly stupid that will now rebound to their benefit: They made the window for enrollment October, meaning that premium increases were always announced just days before the election. In both 2014 and 2016, ugly percentage spikes undoubtedly drove voters into the arms of Republicans. This time, voters will have a different party to blame in October 2018, when premium increases are announced.
Democrats were caught by surprise after the passage of health care reform that all of a sudden they owned every problem with the system. Premiums had been rising steadily, networks had been narrowing, deductibles had been increasing long before Obamacare was passed, but once it became law, every negative interaction with the system took on a political dimension. Now Republicans own the system, whether they pass reform into law or not.
There are also regional problems for Republicans. The party is trying to hold on to much-needed seats in New York and California; remarkably, the bill Republicans just voted for would make subsidies in those states unusable for insurance, because the bill bans such money from going to plans that cover abortion, and California and New York require all plans to cover abortion services.
The bill also targets Planned Parenthood for destruction, which will further galvanize women and men who support the organization to turn out and vote.
In Appalachian states, the opioid epidemic has become one of the most important political issues on the table, if not the most important. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) ran his entire 2016 campaign around the issue and cruised to victory. He is now opposed to the House bill. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat up for reelection in 2018 in Ohio, will be able to hang this vote around whomever his opponent is, because it puts at risk the various policy levers and funding mechanisms that have gone toward combating the epidemic.
The same dynamic will hold in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, and will resonate in Minnesota and Wisconsin, too, all states with Senate elections.
How easy is it to hammer them? It takes the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee just six seconds to do it.
Beyond an ability to collectively blame all Republicans for the vote, Democrats will also be able to pin it on specific Republicans who run for the Senate in 2018. The recruiting process is only in its nascent stages, but many of the top prospects Republicans hope to lure to run against red state Democrats are currently members of the House ― and most just voted to gut protections for people with pre-existing conditions or were part of a body that did so.
Take Indiana, where two top GOP prospects to take on Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly are Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita. The DSCC is already up with video of them praising the health care bill.
Immediately after the vote, Tom Perriello, a former congressman whose vote for Obamacare helped cost him his Virginia seat, put out an ad smashing an ambulance, a metaphor for the Republican vote. (Perriello, running for governor of Virginia, said that it was a defunct ambulance without an engine.)
The policy implications of Thursday’s vote could be profound. Senate Republicans are already discarding the House bill, saying they plan to write one of their own. If they do, it would reshape the health care system. If they don’t, and Democrats take back power in 2020, the base will want everything.
Democratic activists considered Obamacare a compromise on top of a compromise, as it wasn’t Medicare for All, and it didn’t even include a public health insurance option. Now that Republicans have set a precedent for rewriting a fifth of the economy in a matter of days without waiting for a CBO analysis, the Democratic base will be demanding the same, but this time for something much grander than the Affordable Care Act.
But first, the effort at repeal is still alive, and Pingree said she worried Democrats were getting too eager. “Some of my colleagues were singing on the floor ‘Goodbye.’ I’m a little worried that we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, and frankly we shouldn’t be cheering this either, if we’re just giddy about thinking they’re losing. This is a solemn occasion. They have just undercut health care for virtually everybody in this country who could be affected by this.”
The politics are, indeed, bad for Republicans, she added. “It’s hard for me to believe it won’t impact the next cycle of elections because the American people are smart, and they’re going to figure this isn’t going to work for them,” she said. “I was here in 2008. I watched a lot of my colleagues lose their election in 2010. It’s because the American people, they won’t let you get away with something. And they’re 10 times more alert about what’s going on today.”
Why, then, did Republicans do what they did? Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) put it succinctly, as he often does. Cole said he wasn’t worried about energizing the Democratic base but that when Republicans gave up earlier on repeal without even taking a vote, their base felt betrayed and lied to. So they had to do something, even if it couldn’t pass the Senate, or risk their base staying home on Election Day.
“I think the Democratic base is already whipped up, and that’s fair enough. But if we had failed to do this, I think it would actually depress our turnout,” he 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 8 hours ago.
Up until May 4, 2017, it would have been a theoretical question for which political scientists lacked the data to answer. But come 2018, we’ll find out.
Democrats feel like they already know the answer. For a party that just watched its signature legislative achievement get repealed in a tight vote on the House floor, Democrats had quite the spring in their step, even breaking into song as the vote was gaveled. “Nah, nah, nah, nah/Nah, nah, nah, nah/Hey, hey, hey, goodbye,” Democrats bellowed in unison to their Republican colleagues in the chamber.
Democrats sang “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” on the House floor after Republicans narrowly passed the American Health Care Act. pic.twitter.com/ubGPxSco4W
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) May 4, 2017
The song appalled Rep. Tom MacArthur, a Republican from New Jersey who brokered a deal with the Freedom Caucus that got the party to this point.
“I simply don’t look at this through a political lens, and frankly I thought that was beneath the dignity of the House to be singing a song with a political message. This isn’t about politics. This is about the American people having health care and making sure that prices come down,” he said.
The dignity of the House of Representatives aside, MacArthur, elected in 2014, was unaware that his own party had serenaded Democrats with the same song as they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
The taunt was accurate then: Democrats were swept out of office, and voting against Obamacare wasn’t enough to save many of them. Of the 32 Democrats who voted against the Affordable Care Act out of political concern, 21 lost or retired in the next cycle. The problem is not only the individual vote, it is also the collective action taken by the party ― and voters are fond of doling out collective punishment. If the effect is anything like what happened in 2010, any Republican who won his or her seat by 20 points or less is now vulnerable.
The bill passed by the Republican House gives states the option of ignoring Affordable Care Act requirements that people with pre-existing conditions have affordable access to health care. In its place, the state must create a “high-risk pool” ― traditionally, an underfunded program that comes nowhere close to providing the kind of coverage needed.
Political punishment, in the form of massive amounts of cashing flowing to House Republican opponents, is already being doled out. Rep. Darrell Issa, a vulnerable Republican from California, told reporters “none of your business” when asked Wednesday how he’d vote. By Thursday, he seemed no more willing to share his position with the public, even as the clock on the vote ticked down to zero. Often, members of Congress who want to avoid a tough vote wait until the very end in hopes that theirs won’t be needed. With the tally at 215 yes votes, one short of the total, Issa finally cast his vote, putting it over the top and bringing a loud cheer from the Republican side. (It finished with 217, as there is a political maxim that a one-vote win should be avoided at all costs, because it lets the opponent say that every single vote was “the deciding vote.”)
Democratic activists responded by raising at least $100,000 in a single day dedicated to whomever becomes Issa’s opponent, according to Michelle Finocchi of the group Swing Left, which launched after the election with the aim of funneling Democratic energy from blue districts into areas where it could make a difference.
Another $300,000 was raised by a Swing Left page that split the money evenly among 35 swing districts where a Republican voted yes. “We informally collaborated on this with Jon Favreau and Crooked Media,” said Finocchi. “It’s the result of playing around, brainstorming, trying things out and seeing what worked. The genesis of the ideas was how to turn lemons into lemonade in this awful moment.” She said $150,000 of that came in right around the time of the vote.
And another page set up on ActBlue was on its way to an additional $300,000 raised by the time this story was published and has probably climbed much higher since.
The progressive website Daily Kos put out its own call for donors to help defeat the 24 most vulnerable Republicans who voted for the bill. In less than four hours, the site collected nearly $200,000 from more than 4,000 donors. That was even before Daily Kos emailed the fundraising appeal to its 3.5 million members.
That, at least, will be counterbalanced by one critical but overlooked element of the repeal bill. The politics of the vote are bad for Republicans on every level save one: Wealthy backers of Republican politicians have expected a major tax cut to come from control of both Congress and the White House. Delivering on that promise will pay off in campaign contributions and other benefits, as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act amounts to an extraordinarily large tax cut directed at the wealthiest people in the country.
“Obviously the president really wanted a win here,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). “The Republicans themselves needed to dispose of this so they could extract the tax dollars. I mean, they’re getting something like $800-900 billion in returned taxes. So they want to use that money for their tax cut plan. And I don’t think they care that they’re taking it away from people who needed it.”
Leah Greenberg, chief strategy officer for the progressive movement Indivisible, a federated group of hundreds of local chapters, said that the vote was sparking an upsurge in activity, with at least 21 protests against individual members of Congress already planned and more likely coming. In February, she said, 250 events were scheduled during the congressional recess. That surged to 450 during the most recent recess. The one coming up is likely to see even more.
“My Republican colleagues are going to be really, really sorry that they rushed this bill to the floor before they got an amended CBO score,” DeGette said, because once that Congressional Budget Office projection becomes available, Americans “are going to be shocked to wake up to find out, if this Trumpcare bill passes, many millions more will lose their coverage.”
On a process level, it would be hard for it to have been worse. After years of complaining that Obamacare was rushed or that nobody had read the bill, the GOP bill was rammed to a floor vote so fast the CBO hadn’t had a chance to analyze its impact.
But otherwise the bill is a loser for Republicans. On a broad level, never before in American history has a political party run on the fact that they took something away from constituents (except, I suppose, the Republican Party of Lincoln, which took slavery away from Southern slave owners). And Democratic operatives on both the House and Senate side say they plan to make the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare the central plank of their campaigns in 2018.
“This is a scar they will carry,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said before the vote. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made a case you’ll hear over and over again: Republicans now own the health care system.
When Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act, they did something incomprehensibly stupid that will now rebound to their benefit: They made the window for enrollment October, meaning that premium increases were always announced just days before the election. In both 2014 and 2016, ugly percentage spikes undoubtedly drove voters into the arms of Republicans. This time, voters will have a different party to blame in October 2018, when premium increases are announced.
Democrats were caught by surprise after the passage of health care reform that all of a sudden they owned every problem with the system. Premiums had been rising steadily, networks had been narrowing, deductibles had been increasing long before Obamacare was passed, but once it became law, every negative interaction with the system took on a political dimension. Now Republicans own the system, whether they pass reform into law or not.
There are also regional problems for Republicans. The party is trying to hold on to much-needed seats in New York and California; remarkably, the bill Republicans just voted for would make subsidies in those states unusable for insurance, because the bill bans such money from going to plans that cover abortion, and California and New York require all plans to cover abortion services.
The bill also targets Planned Parenthood for destruction, which will further galvanize women and men who support the organization to turn out and vote.
In Appalachian states, the opioid epidemic has become one of the most important political issues on the table, if not the most important. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) ran his entire 2016 campaign around the issue and cruised to victory. He is now opposed to the House bill. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat up for reelection in 2018 in Ohio, will be able to hang this vote around whomever his opponent is, because it puts at risk the various policy levers and funding mechanisms that have gone toward combating the epidemic.
The same dynamic will hold in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, and will resonate in Minnesota and Wisconsin, too, all states with Senate elections.
How easy is it to hammer them? It takes the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee just six seconds to do it.
Beyond an ability to collectively blame all Republicans for the vote, Democrats will also be able to pin it on specific Republicans who run for the Senate in 2018. The recruiting process is only in its nascent stages, but many of the top prospects Republicans hope to lure to run against red state Democrats are currently members of the House ― and most just voted to gut protections for people with pre-existing conditions or were part of a body that did so.
Take Indiana, where two top GOP prospects to take on Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly are Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita. The DSCC is already up with video of them praising the health care bill.
Immediately after the vote, Tom Perriello, a former congressman whose vote for Obamacare helped cost him his Virginia seat, put out an ad smashing an ambulance, a metaphor for the Republican vote. (Perriello, running for governor of Virginia, said that it was a defunct ambulance without an engine.)
The policy implications of Thursday’s vote could be profound. Senate Republicans are already discarding the House bill, saying they plan to write one of their own. If they do, it would reshape the health care system. If they don’t, and Democrats take back power in 2020, the base will want everything.
Democratic activists considered Obamacare a compromise on top of a compromise, as it wasn’t Medicare for All, and it didn’t even include a public health insurance option. Now that Republicans have set a precedent for rewriting a fifth of the economy in a matter of days without waiting for a CBO analysis, the Democratic base will be demanding the same, but this time for something much grander than the Affordable Care Act.
But first, the effort at repeal is still alive, and Pingree said she worried Democrats were getting too eager. “Some of my colleagues were singing on the floor ‘Goodbye.’ I’m a little worried that we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, and frankly we shouldn’t be cheering this either, if we’re just giddy about thinking they’re losing. This is a solemn occasion. They have just undercut health care for virtually everybody in this country who could be affected by this.”
The politics are, indeed, bad for Republicans, she added. “It’s hard for me to believe it won’t impact the next cycle of elections because the American people are smart, and they’re going to figure this isn’t going to work for them,” she said. “I was here in 2008. I watched a lot of my colleagues lose their election in 2010. It’s because the American people, they won’t let you get away with something. And they’re 10 times more alert about what’s going on today.”
Why, then, did Republicans do what they did? Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) put it succinctly, as he often does. Cole said he wasn’t worried about energizing the Democratic base but that when Republicans gave up earlier on repeal without even taking a vote, their base felt betrayed and lied to. So they had to do something, even if it couldn’t pass the Senate, or risk their base staying home on Election Day.
“I think the Democratic base is already whipped up, and that’s fair enough. But if we had failed to do this, I think it would actually depress our turnout,” he 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 8 hours ago.
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Senate To Write Its Own Obamacare Repeal Bill
The Republican House spent Thursday afternoon celebrating the passage of a Healthcare bill that nobody has scored, let alone read, and already the Senate has poured cold water over the first and so far only achievement of the Trump administration.The reason, as we reported this morning, and as Bloomberg and The Hill confirm, several key Senate Republicans have said they will set aside the narrowly passed House health-care bill and write their own version instead, a sign of how difficult it will be to deliver on seven years of promises to repeal Obamacare. In the wake of the House’s razor-thin 217-213 vote, the Senate made clear it was going in a different direction.
It started with GOP Senator Dean Heller, who is up for reelection in 2018 and is considered one of the most vulnerable. Heller said he wouldn’t support the House’s bill in its current form. “We cannot pull the rug out from under states like Nevada that expanded Medicaid and we need assurances that people with pre-existing conditions will be protected,” he said in a statement.
A second senator, Rob Portman, made clear his concerns over how the House bill treats Medicaid. While ObamaCare expanded the healthcare program to more low-income Americans, the House bill would eliminate that expansion in 2020. “I’ve already made clear that I don’t support the House bill as currently constructed,” Portman said in a statement, “because I continue to have concerns that this bill does not do enough to protect Ohio's Medicaid expansion population, especially those who are receiving treatment for heroin and prescription drug abuse.”
Senator Lamar Alexander pointed to the difficulties to come. He highlighted his three priorities for the bill, which include rescuing Americans in areas where their health marketplaces may not have any insurers offering plans in 2018. "The Senate will now finish work on our bill, but will take the time to get it right,” Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement.
Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted that “A bill — finalized yesterday, has not been scored, amendments not allowed, and 3 hours final debate — should be viewed with caution.”
Finally, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who has been very critical of the House bill, said Thursday she hopes they start with "a clean slate" in the Senate.
* * *
With as many as five (tentative) holdouts already, the bill - in its current form - is effectively dead in the Senate. To get a bill through his chamber, Mitch McConnell will need to unite moderate and conservative wings of the party that want to pull the measure in entirely different directions. Since the GOP controls the chamber 52-48, he can lose no more than two Republicans and still pass it, given the united Democratic opposition.
Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah said Republicans’ goal will be to craft a measure that can get 51 votes. “Coupled with the constraints imposed by the budget reconciliation process, we must manage expectations and remain focused on the art of the doable as we move forward,” he said in a statement after the House vote Thursday.
Likely changes could focus on Medicaid and adding increased financial assistance, in the form of tax credits, to help low-income Americans afford health insurance.
It’s possible the Senate could run into the same problem the House toiled over for almost two months. Move the bill to right, and moderates will defect. Move the bill to the center, and the measure will lose conservative votes.
An eleventh-hour amendment to the House bill from Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) — a former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who came out against the bill earlier this week — helped secure the support of enough House moderates to pass the bill.
Finally, recall that prior to the March debacle, it was widely accepted that the biggest bottleneck for Obamacare repeal will be not in the House, but the Senate.
Still, despite the mounting hurdles, Trump was optimistic, and predicted he’ll be able to ultimately sign the bill into law. "I went through two years of campaigning and I'm telling you: No matter where I went, people are suffering so badly with the ravages of ObamaCare," he said. "We're going to get this passed through the Senate, I feel so confident."
The market, however, did not share his enthusiasm and while hospital stocks dipped on the House vote, they quickly bounced back on the news the Senate would start over with its own version, with the Bloomberg North America Hospitals Index up 0.9 percent at 2:39 p.m. Hospitals fear the winding-down of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will leave them with more customers who can’t afford to pay. Reported by Zero Hedge 8 hours ago.
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AMA Rips AHCA After Passage
The American Medical Association slammed the Republican healthcare bill after it was passed by the House, saying it would "result in millions of Americans losing access to quality, affordable health insurance."
Reported by Newsmax 7 hours ago.
↧
How Did Health Insurance Get So Complicated? Here Are Some Answers
*By J.B. Silvers, Case Western Reserve University*
With the passage of the Republicans’ health care act, the House of Representatives seems to be saying that coming up with a plan to insure Americans really wasn’t all that hard after all. It just took a bit more of a subsidy –- $8 billion to be precise – for really sick people to make Congress comfortable with the alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
But from being a professor of health finance and a former insurance CEO, I know that it is really much more difficult than this to keep all the insurers competing aggressively in the market, all the providers focused on high quality and all the patients choosing wisely among their options for coverage and care.
One of the biggest underlying problems is confusion over what we are buying here and what incentives are necessary to get everyone to behave.
What are we buying anyway?
The first confusion is over the very nature of health insurance. The discussion often reveals an assumption that we are just buying a service and paying for it much as we finance a new car. So why should I pay more in financing costs than I actually get? If I want a VW, why should I pay for a BMW? I don’t need maternity services or mental health, but they are part of the standard package of essential benefits that I have to buy. And this drives up my premium.But health insurance is not car financing. By its very nature, it is the strangest of products, one that I hope I will not have to use but is there when I need it. I am not buying specific services but access to potential services, the particulars of which are unknowable in advance. This ticket to ride is very valuable, but pricing it is devilishly difficult.
To make this work, I have to share my potential need with a large group of like-minded consumers who also hope they won’t have to use the ticket. But unlike the lottery, where I want to win and get all that money for the $2 ticket I bought, I am unhappy if I “win” with my health insurance and get back more than I paid when I have a serious illness. It is this confusing nature of the product that leads to bad policy and bad purchasing decisions.
Proposed patch will wear thin
The patch proposed by the AHCA is to pull out of the insurance pool more of those who are likely to need services, leaving the rest with a premium that is closer to what they actually are likely to need on a one-to-one basis.
Loosening up the requirements on pricing to let insurers charge more for people with varying conditions moves us even closer to this image. Why shouldn’t the sick pay more since they use more services? The apparent hope is to come closer to the implicit assumption of health care as car financing – I get what I pay for.
Unfortunately for all of us, this is a losing proposition. There will always be more at the margin who would qualify for coverage under the high-risk pools, driving the cost of these beyond any arbitrary funding, be it $8 billion or $800 billion.
Our experience in many states in the past is that these pools are inevitably underfunded, leaving those who would qualify the butt of a cruel joke – they can’t get conventional health insurance, but the cost of even the high-risk pool is excessive due to underfunding.
This is the real concern over high-risk pools as an alternative to offering coverage to all, regardless of pre-existing conditions. While economists suggest that this excess demand is the patient’s fault (the so-called “moral hazard” of excess demand when something is covered), no one chooses to have a heart condition, diabetes or a birth defect.
Payment shapes decisions and incentives
Another problem comes from, again, the misconception of health insurance as the financing of a known product. Besides just paying for services when needed, we also want to create incentives for prevention and high quality and lowest cost settings to provide them when they are needed.
The Affordable Care Act has moved health care far down this path through value-based payment, which rewards providers for higher quality and lower total cost over the whole spectrum of care, not just for a single service.
But while providers have received the message loud and clear and reacted with major advances on quality and cost, we have far to go in creating similar incentives for the patient. This is where the “skin in the game” argument, as a way to make individuals more responsible for their own care, has some credibility.
But AHCA supporters went further. Under their replacement bill, it is OK to penalize people for being sick, even if it is not their “fault,” and regardless of their wealth or income.
The new legislation’s subsidies depend on age, not income, and entirely remove the cost-sharing reductions that make high-deductible plans on the Obamacare exchanges feasible for the working poor just above the poverty level.
With these changes, clearly health insurance is no longer affordable for those who were the main target of the ACA.
Admittedly, premiums for those other than the near poor are higher under the ACA, even if health care inflation in general has been largely tamed. Those who support the lower-premium, stripped-down plans of the AHCA replacement bill focus on the concerns of those who now must buy more expensive policies that cover everything they might need – but without the subsidies the poor receive.
So if I think I can predict what I will need and want a plan that will finance this like my new car, then I probably don’t need insurance at all.
And, if I do want coverage and can afford to pay for it, the replacement legislation will do just fine. Because I have the money, I can buy a BMW policy, if I choose.
However, if I am poor – or if I care about a stable insurance market – this is a jalopy with recycled tires, a torn leather seat and an engine about to blow.
J.B. Silvers, Professor of Health Finance, Case Western Reserve University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
-- 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 6 hours ago.
With the passage of the Republicans’ health care act, the House of Representatives seems to be saying that coming up with a plan to insure Americans really wasn’t all that hard after all. It just took a bit more of a subsidy –- $8 billion to be precise – for really sick people to make Congress comfortable with the alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
But from being a professor of health finance and a former insurance CEO, I know that it is really much more difficult than this to keep all the insurers competing aggressively in the market, all the providers focused on high quality and all the patients choosing wisely among their options for coverage and care.
One of the biggest underlying problems is confusion over what we are buying here and what incentives are necessary to get everyone to behave.
What are we buying anyway?
The first confusion is over the very nature of health insurance. The discussion often reveals an assumption that we are just buying a service and paying for it much as we finance a new car. So why should I pay more in financing costs than I actually get? If I want a VW, why should I pay for a BMW? I don’t need maternity services or mental health, but they are part of the standard package of essential benefits that I have to buy. And this drives up my premium.But health insurance is not car financing. By its very nature, it is the strangest of products, one that I hope I will not have to use but is there when I need it. I am not buying specific services but access to potential services, the particulars of which are unknowable in advance. This ticket to ride is very valuable, but pricing it is devilishly difficult.
To make this work, I have to share my potential need with a large group of like-minded consumers who also hope they won’t have to use the ticket. But unlike the lottery, where I want to win and get all that money for the $2 ticket I bought, I am unhappy if I “win” with my health insurance and get back more than I paid when I have a serious illness. It is this confusing nature of the product that leads to bad policy and bad purchasing decisions.
Proposed patch will wear thin
The patch proposed by the AHCA is to pull out of the insurance pool more of those who are likely to need services, leaving the rest with a premium that is closer to what they actually are likely to need on a one-to-one basis.
Loosening up the requirements on pricing to let insurers charge more for people with varying conditions moves us even closer to this image. Why shouldn’t the sick pay more since they use more services? The apparent hope is to come closer to the implicit assumption of health care as car financing – I get what I pay for.
Unfortunately for all of us, this is a losing proposition. There will always be more at the margin who would qualify for coverage under the high-risk pools, driving the cost of these beyond any arbitrary funding, be it $8 billion or $800 billion.
Our experience in many states in the past is that these pools are inevitably underfunded, leaving those who would qualify the butt of a cruel joke – they can’t get conventional health insurance, but the cost of even the high-risk pool is excessive due to underfunding.
This is the real concern over high-risk pools as an alternative to offering coverage to all, regardless of pre-existing conditions. While economists suggest that this excess demand is the patient’s fault (the so-called “moral hazard” of excess demand when something is covered), no one chooses to have a heart condition, diabetes or a birth defect.
Payment shapes decisions and incentives
Another problem comes from, again, the misconception of health insurance as the financing of a known product. Besides just paying for services when needed, we also want to create incentives for prevention and high quality and lowest cost settings to provide them when they are needed.
The Affordable Care Act has moved health care far down this path through value-based payment, which rewards providers for higher quality and lower total cost over the whole spectrum of care, not just for a single service.
But while providers have received the message loud and clear and reacted with major advances on quality and cost, we have far to go in creating similar incentives for the patient. This is where the “skin in the game” argument, as a way to make individuals more responsible for their own care, has some credibility.
But AHCA supporters went further. Under their replacement bill, it is OK to penalize people for being sick, even if it is not their “fault,” and regardless of their wealth or income.
The new legislation’s subsidies depend on age, not income, and entirely remove the cost-sharing reductions that make high-deductible plans on the Obamacare exchanges feasible for the working poor just above the poverty level.
With these changes, clearly health insurance is no longer affordable for those who were the main target of the ACA.
Admittedly, premiums for those other than the near poor are higher under the ACA, even if health care inflation in general has been largely tamed. Those who support the lower-premium, stripped-down plans of the AHCA replacement bill focus on the concerns of those who now must buy more expensive policies that cover everything they might need – but without the subsidies the poor receive.
So if I think I can predict what I will need and want a plan that will finance this like my new car, then I probably don’t need insurance at all.
And, if I do want coverage and can afford to pay for it, the replacement legislation will do just fine. Because I have the money, I can buy a BMW policy, if I choose.
However, if I am poor – or if I care about a stable insurance market – this is a jalopy with recycled tires, a torn leather seat and an engine about to blow.
J.B. Silvers, Professor of Health Finance, Case Western Reserve University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
-- 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 6 hours ago.
↧
↧
Crypto Currencies Go Ballistic
By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
Market dislocations occur when financial markets, operating under stressful conditions, experience large widespread asset mispricing.
Welcome to this week’s edition of “World Out Of Whack” where every Wednesday we take time out of our day to laugh, poke fun at and present to you absurdity in global financial markets in all its glorious insanity.
While we enjoy a good laugh, the truth is that the first step to protecting ourselves from losses is to protect ourselves from ignorance. Think of the “World Out Of Whack” as your double thick armour plated side impact protection system in a financial world littered with drunk drivers.
Selfishly we also know that the biggest (and often the fastest) returns come from asymmetric market moves. But, in order to identify these moves we must first identify where they live.
Occasionally we find opportunities where we can buy (or sell) assets for mere cents on the dollar – because, after all, we are capitalists.
-In this week’s edition of the WOW: Crypto Currencies Go Ballistic-
I've received at least 5 emails on this topic now.
What on earth is going on with the altcoins?
Here's one message I share with you from a particular gent who, apart from being a thoughtful, intelligent, and successful guy, has more hair than me:
"Dear Chris,
Just curious, have you been following crypto-currencies – the altcoins in particular ? There are two very interesting developments under way:
1. The total market value of all crypto-currencies has almost doubled from about $18 billion to about $34 billion … in just FOUR MONTHS !!
2. While BTC has increased in price about 40% from $956 to $1,335, its market share has dropped dramatically from about 90% to just over 60% … also in just FOUR MONTHS !! Altcoins such as ETH, Ripple, Dash, and especially PIVX have increased in value 600% or more (FYI, the percentage increase for PIVX is not a misprint – it increased in value 173 times). . See spreadsheet below
The growth in the overall value of the crypto-currency markets makes me wonder if we reached an inflection point where the ‘dam has broken’ so to speak and a flood of money is about to pour into this market (n.b., SEC has agreed to revisit the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF application as well as an application for an ETF that would invest in ETH).
The reasons behind the performance of the altcoins is something of a mystery to me. I get it that the likes of Microsoft and Chase-Morgan announced they would be backing ETH which would explain its increase in price, but I do not know why the other altcoins have done so well especially relative to BTC. BTC is about the only crypto-currency the vast majority of the investing ever has heard of and yet major amounts of money are flowing into the altcoins yet I have no idea how more than a handful of people with substantial amounts of money even know about these altcoins let alone why they would have invested in them.
FYI - I have begun diversifying into ETH. It’s now 13% of my crypto-currency position. I also am planning to take small positions in many of the other altcoins listed below over the next few months.
Pretty unbelievable"
WTF is happening?
Take a look at the Bitcoin market cap:
And this - all the altcoins combined market cap:
And Bitcoin's dominance wanes:
Ok... so this presents a host of questions.
-*Let's Start With What We Do Know...*-
Bitcoin, which I've written about extensively, got one helluva boost in the last week, rising to over US$1,400. Now, this was pretty easy to figure out. All it requires is curiosity, a stubby finger, and Google.
With those three things we can see that about 50% of trading volume in the 24 hours leading up to this record breaking rally came from the Bitcoin-JPY exchange rate.
We also know that our sake drinking friends recently deemed the cryptocurrency a legal form of payment. It seems that, given the option of holding yen and BTC, Mrs. Watanabe did some math.
Then, over in the land of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and rioting-latte-drinkers we had the stern-faced suits at the SEC suggest they'd be reviewing their decision for Zuckerberg's-old-buddies-proposed ETF, the Winklevii brothers (plural).
All obviously bullish for Bitcoin. No surprises there.
-*Altcoins*-
As my friend mentions in the article above, we've got the likes of Microsoft and the vampire squid's half brother JP Morgan backing Ethereum so it's easy to see why Ethereum got a shot of espresso.
-*What About the Others?*-
You tell me.
I suspect it's a momentum driven "who's next" game being played, though I profess I'm largely unencumbered by knowledge when it comes to the hundreds of altcoins out there.
Here I lean on a friend, entrepreneur, fellow investor, and super nice guy Rolf Versluis, who wrote an excellent piece on altcoins. Read it. You will be better of for it... and probably more attractive, too.
-*The Bigger Picture*-
Blockchain is here to stay.
Anyone that thinks bank issued fiat currency as we know it today is going to still be with us in the next 50 years or likely less simply isn't paying attention.
Central banks absolutely will begin to use a blockchain to create their own currencies.
The simplest way for any central bank to do this right now would be for them to fork the Bitcoin protocol into a new protocol that is unchanged, except that the central bank would set and adjust the block mining reward as they see fit - not unlike modern day paper currency.
In this way the central bank’s crypto-currency would be decentralized in transactions and centralized in supply.
The Bank of England are already working on this, as discussed in this article.
Now, any blockchain could be used. It doesn't have to be the Bitcoin protocol as India proved with Indiastack.
A hypothetical situation...
Central bank A creates its own crypto currency, forbids the use of any others. Not any different from the situation today, except that it's fiat currency which individuals are forbidden from creating.
What's stopping them?
They're broke.
The monetary system is held together by termites and desperately needs a fix. QE and negative rates haven't done the trick and instead have left us with unimaginable debt loads.
Like the chubby boy north of Seoul, they're running out of options.
This is not to mention the unprecedented level of transparency a government would have with a crypto-currency. Every single transaction that takes place is irrefutable, tracked, and registered on the blockchain. Taxation could take place at source. A few lines of code would solve that problem.
Forget about banning cash, which can be transacted hand to hand as well as via the banking system.
With a crypto-currency everything would go through the chosen protocol meaning that when you buy that "pleasure toy" for your wife or shell out for drug rehab for your wayward cousin, it's all recorded, registered, archived - ready to be mined by "algos" which will eventually preclude you from buying too much booze since your health insurance won't permit it.
TOTAL control.
Bliss to sociopaths from Washington to Beijing and everywhere in-between. Not only can taxation take place at source but try speak out against the establishment and watch them seize your entire net worth with a click of a button.
At a policy level: think of the immediacy of data provided to policy makers, who - though they have proven completely inept at managing an economy - will see a treasure trove of granular data and think to themselves, "whoah Janet, this is exactly what we've needed all along".
Undeterred by a wall of evidence suggesting they're buffoons incapable of walking your dog and with a new set of tools they'll gleefully set to work.
The blockchain, when compared to their existing toolbox, will appear to be what a chainsaw is to scissors. Whoopeee!
Can you feel the onrushing Orwellianism?
Fools will say, “If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” This is 100% true and completely plausible, if government were benevolent. It's not.
Right now we don't know whether governments will succeed or not.
We do know that the technology allowing for such a world exists. In a situation where things really come unglued it's possible their legitimacy comes into question and - combined with their inevitable incompetence - paves the way for something entirely different.
Remember, these discussions we're having here are based on technology which only a decade ago never even existed.
When gunpowder was created it would have been easy to extrapolate a view as dystopian as ever.
That never happened.
Maybe we get lucky and we find a world with more, not less freedom.
The jury's still out.
-*Question for the Week*-
Cast your vote here and also see what others think will happen
- Chris
"The entire human populace is now taking charge of the means of production and changing the rules of the game. They’re making their own freaking currencies, for God’s sake." ? Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
--------------------------------------
Liked this article? Don't miss our future missives and podcasts, and
get access to free subscriber-only content here.
-------------------------------------- Reported by Zero Hedge 6 hours ago.
Market dislocations occur when financial markets, operating under stressful conditions, experience large widespread asset mispricing.
Welcome to this week’s edition of “World Out Of Whack” where every Wednesday we take time out of our day to laugh, poke fun at and present to you absurdity in global financial markets in all its glorious insanity.
While we enjoy a good laugh, the truth is that the first step to protecting ourselves from losses is to protect ourselves from ignorance. Think of the “World Out Of Whack” as your double thick armour plated side impact protection system in a financial world littered with drunk drivers.
Selfishly we also know that the biggest (and often the fastest) returns come from asymmetric market moves. But, in order to identify these moves we must first identify where they live.
Occasionally we find opportunities where we can buy (or sell) assets for mere cents on the dollar – because, after all, we are capitalists.
-In this week’s edition of the WOW: Crypto Currencies Go Ballistic-
I've received at least 5 emails on this topic now.
What on earth is going on with the altcoins?
Here's one message I share with you from a particular gent who, apart from being a thoughtful, intelligent, and successful guy, has more hair than me:
"Dear Chris,
Just curious, have you been following crypto-currencies – the altcoins in particular ? There are two very interesting developments under way:
1. The total market value of all crypto-currencies has almost doubled from about $18 billion to about $34 billion … in just FOUR MONTHS !!
2. While BTC has increased in price about 40% from $956 to $1,335, its market share has dropped dramatically from about 90% to just over 60% … also in just FOUR MONTHS !! Altcoins such as ETH, Ripple, Dash, and especially PIVX have increased in value 600% or more (FYI, the percentage increase for PIVX is not a misprint – it increased in value 173 times). . See spreadsheet below
The growth in the overall value of the crypto-currency markets makes me wonder if we reached an inflection point where the ‘dam has broken’ so to speak and a flood of money is about to pour into this market (n.b., SEC has agreed to revisit the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF application as well as an application for an ETF that would invest in ETH).
The reasons behind the performance of the altcoins is something of a mystery to me. I get it that the likes of Microsoft and Chase-Morgan announced they would be backing ETH which would explain its increase in price, but I do not know why the other altcoins have done so well especially relative to BTC. BTC is about the only crypto-currency the vast majority of the investing ever has heard of and yet major amounts of money are flowing into the altcoins yet I have no idea how more than a handful of people with substantial amounts of money even know about these altcoins let alone why they would have invested in them.
FYI - I have begun diversifying into ETH. It’s now 13% of my crypto-currency position. I also am planning to take small positions in many of the other altcoins listed below over the next few months.
Pretty unbelievable"
WTF is happening?
Take a look at the Bitcoin market cap:
And this - all the altcoins combined market cap:
And Bitcoin's dominance wanes:
Ok... so this presents a host of questions.
-*Let's Start With What We Do Know...*-
Bitcoin, which I've written about extensively, got one helluva boost in the last week, rising to over US$1,400. Now, this was pretty easy to figure out. All it requires is curiosity, a stubby finger, and Google.
With those three things we can see that about 50% of trading volume in the 24 hours leading up to this record breaking rally came from the Bitcoin-JPY exchange rate.
We also know that our sake drinking friends recently deemed the cryptocurrency a legal form of payment. It seems that, given the option of holding yen and BTC, Mrs. Watanabe did some math.
Then, over in the land of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and rioting-latte-drinkers we had the stern-faced suits at the SEC suggest they'd be reviewing their decision for Zuckerberg's-old-buddies-proposed ETF, the Winklevii brothers (plural).
All obviously bullish for Bitcoin. No surprises there.
-*Altcoins*-
As my friend mentions in the article above, we've got the likes of Microsoft and the vampire squid's half brother JP Morgan backing Ethereum so it's easy to see why Ethereum got a shot of espresso.
-*What About the Others?*-
You tell me.
I suspect it's a momentum driven "who's next" game being played, though I profess I'm largely unencumbered by knowledge when it comes to the hundreds of altcoins out there.
Here I lean on a friend, entrepreneur, fellow investor, and super nice guy Rolf Versluis, who wrote an excellent piece on altcoins. Read it. You will be better of for it... and probably more attractive, too.
-*The Bigger Picture*-
Blockchain is here to stay.
Anyone that thinks bank issued fiat currency as we know it today is going to still be with us in the next 50 years or likely less simply isn't paying attention.
Central banks absolutely will begin to use a blockchain to create their own currencies.
The simplest way for any central bank to do this right now would be for them to fork the Bitcoin protocol into a new protocol that is unchanged, except that the central bank would set and adjust the block mining reward as they see fit - not unlike modern day paper currency.
In this way the central bank’s crypto-currency would be decentralized in transactions and centralized in supply.
The Bank of England are already working on this, as discussed in this article.
Now, any blockchain could be used. It doesn't have to be the Bitcoin protocol as India proved with Indiastack.
A hypothetical situation...
Central bank A creates its own crypto currency, forbids the use of any others. Not any different from the situation today, except that it's fiat currency which individuals are forbidden from creating.
What's stopping them?
They're broke.
The monetary system is held together by termites and desperately needs a fix. QE and negative rates haven't done the trick and instead have left us with unimaginable debt loads.
Like the chubby boy north of Seoul, they're running out of options.
This is not to mention the unprecedented level of transparency a government would have with a crypto-currency. Every single transaction that takes place is irrefutable, tracked, and registered on the blockchain. Taxation could take place at source. A few lines of code would solve that problem.
Forget about banning cash, which can be transacted hand to hand as well as via the banking system.
With a crypto-currency everything would go through the chosen protocol meaning that when you buy that "pleasure toy" for your wife or shell out for drug rehab for your wayward cousin, it's all recorded, registered, archived - ready to be mined by "algos" which will eventually preclude you from buying too much booze since your health insurance won't permit it.
TOTAL control.
Bliss to sociopaths from Washington to Beijing and everywhere in-between. Not only can taxation take place at source but try speak out against the establishment and watch them seize your entire net worth with a click of a button.
At a policy level: think of the immediacy of data provided to policy makers, who - though they have proven completely inept at managing an economy - will see a treasure trove of granular data and think to themselves, "whoah Janet, this is exactly what we've needed all along".
Undeterred by a wall of evidence suggesting they're buffoons incapable of walking your dog and with a new set of tools they'll gleefully set to work.
The blockchain, when compared to their existing toolbox, will appear to be what a chainsaw is to scissors. Whoopeee!
Can you feel the onrushing Orwellianism?
Fools will say, “If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” This is 100% true and completely plausible, if government were benevolent. It's not.
Right now we don't know whether governments will succeed or not.
We do know that the technology allowing for such a world exists. In a situation where things really come unglued it's possible their legitimacy comes into question and - combined with their inevitable incompetence - paves the way for something entirely different.
Remember, these discussions we're having here are based on technology which only a decade ago never even existed.
When gunpowder was created it would have been easy to extrapolate a view as dystopian as ever.
That never happened.
Maybe we get lucky and we find a world with more, not less freedom.
The jury's still out.
-*Question for the Week*-
Cast your vote here and also see what others think will happen
- Chris
"The entire human populace is now taking charge of the means of production and changing the rules of the game. They’re making their own freaking currencies, for God’s sake." ? Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
--------------------------------------
Liked this article? Don't miss our future missives and podcasts, and
get access to free subscriber-only content here.
-------------------------------------- Reported by Zero Hedge 6 hours ago.
↧
Republicans Got A Big Laugh Out Of Voting To Take Away People's Health Care
WASHINGTON — As millions came to grips with the fact they could soon be left without health insurance, President Donald Trump and House Republicans gathered in the Rose Garden of the White House to celebrate what they view as a victory for the American people.
On Thursday afternoon, the Republican-led House narrowly passed a bill to repeal and replace significant parts of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, a 2010 law that expanded coverage to about 20 million people.
And, as the pictures show, it was all fun and games for GOP leaders.
That deliberate spectacle — Republican lawmakers chuckling at the prospect of passing into law a measure that would uninsure millions and weaken protections for those with pre-existing conditions — did not go unnoticed.
And in the end, it could come back to bite them, as campaign cash has already begun to roll in for their Democratic opponents.
Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks. Think about that. pic.twitter.com/hbOp7k2TQe
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 4, 2017
I'll do what I can to make November 6, 2018 a dawn-to-dusk nightmare for the GOP. Fuck these smirking, entitled frauds. Tick tick tick.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 4, 2017
This celebratory atmosphere over stripping health care from the sick is one of the most obscene political spectacles I've witnessed. #AHCA
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) May 4, 2017
Before Thursday’s vote, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned House Republicans that if they supported the measure they will “have this vote tattooed on them.” And after the vote, Democrats taunted their GOP colleagues by singing, “Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey, hey, hey! Goodbye!”
Thursday’s public celebration was reminiscent of January 2016, when congressional Republicans passed an Obamacare repeal bill — legislation that President Barack Obama, obviously, vetoed two days later.
-- 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 7 hours ago.
On Thursday afternoon, the Republican-led House narrowly passed a bill to repeal and replace significant parts of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, a 2010 law that expanded coverage to about 20 million people.
And, as the pictures show, it was all fun and games for GOP leaders.
That deliberate spectacle — Republican lawmakers chuckling at the prospect of passing into law a measure that would uninsure millions and weaken protections for those with pre-existing conditions — did not go unnoticed.
And in the end, it could come back to bite them, as campaign cash has already begun to roll in for their Democratic opponents.
Donald Trump and Republicans just celebrated voting to let thousands of Americans die so that billionaires get tax breaks. Think about that. pic.twitter.com/hbOp7k2TQe
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 4, 2017
I'll do what I can to make November 6, 2018 a dawn-to-dusk nightmare for the GOP. Fuck these smirking, entitled frauds. Tick tick tick.
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 4, 2017
This celebratory atmosphere over stripping health care from the sick is one of the most obscene political spectacles I've witnessed. #AHCA
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) May 4, 2017
Before Thursday’s vote, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned House Republicans that if they supported the measure they will “have this vote tattooed on them.” And after the vote, Democrats taunted their GOP colleagues by singing, “Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey, hey, hey! Goodbye!”
Thursday’s public celebration was reminiscent of January 2016, when congressional Republicans passed an Obamacare repeal bill — legislation that President Barack Obama, obviously, vetoed two days later.
-- 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 7 hours ago.
↧
Sanders on Trumpcare: 'Take This Bill and Throw It in the Garbage'
Senator Bernie Sanders said in a CNN interview tonight that, in its present form, the Trumpcare bill was not going to pass through the Senate.
'This bill, in its current form is not getting through the Senate, said Sanders.
'You take this bill, and you, we don't want to clog up toilets or anything, but you just toss this into a garbage can and start again. This bill is a disaster.' Remember what he told you, "we are gonna provide healthcare for everybody and it's gonna be less expensive." Providing healthcare for everybody is not throwing 24 million people off health insurance."
'When you are dealing with legislation that dealing with 1/7th of the American economy, this is huge', said Sanders.
He added, *'Don't you think there might've been a hearing or two to discuss the implications of this legislation?* These guys put it together in a few weeks time, zero hearings, they didn't hear from the American medical association, who opposed this legislation. They didn't hear from the hospitals that opposed this legislation. They didn't hear from the AARP, the largest senior group in America, who opposed this legislation because it'll be a disaster for older workers.'
Sanders concluded,'We're gonna start from zero and hopefully, come up with a legislation that improves on Obamacare. Hopefully, we'll provide health insurance to all of our people and do it in a more cost effective way.'
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
Reported by Zero Hedge 5 hours ago.
'This bill, in its current form is not getting through the Senate, said Sanders.
'You take this bill, and you, we don't want to clog up toilets or anything, but you just toss this into a garbage can and start again. This bill is a disaster.' Remember what he told you, "we are gonna provide healthcare for everybody and it's gonna be less expensive." Providing healthcare for everybody is not throwing 24 million people off health insurance."
'When you are dealing with legislation that dealing with 1/7th of the American economy, this is huge', said Sanders.
He added, *'Don't you think there might've been a hearing or two to discuss the implications of this legislation?* These guys put it together in a few weeks time, zero hearings, they didn't hear from the American medical association, who opposed this legislation. They didn't hear from the hospitals that opposed this legislation. They didn't hear from the AARP, the largest senior group in America, who opposed this legislation because it'll be a disaster for older workers.'
Sanders concluded,'We're gonna start from zero and hopefully, come up with a legislation that improves on Obamacare. Hopefully, we'll provide health insurance to all of our people and do it in a more cost effective way.'
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
Reported by Zero Hedge 5 hours ago.
↧
US House votes to repeal, replace Obamacare, but Senate battle looms
The US House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly approved a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, handing Republican President Donald Trump a victory that could prove short-lived as the healthcare legislation heads for a likely battle in the Senate.
The vote to undo major parts of former President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement, which enabled 20 million more Americans to get health insurance, was Trump's biggest legislative win since he took office in January, putting him on a path to fulfilling one of his key campaign promises as well as a seven-year quest by Republican lawmakers.
It marked a reversal of fortune for the Republican president who suffered a stunning defeat in late March when House Republican leaders pulled legislation to scrap Obamacare after they and the White House could not resolve the clashing interests of Republican moderates and the party's most conservative lawmakers.
Trump has called Obamacare a "disaster" and congressional Republicans have long targeted the 2010 law, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, calling it government overreach.
But despite holding the White House and controlling both houses of Congress, Republicans have found overturning Obamacare politically perilous, partly because of voter fears, loudly expressed at constituents' town-hall meetings, that many people would lose their health insurance as a result.
With Thursday's 217-213 vote, Republicans obtained just enough support to push the legislation through the House, sending it to the Senate for consideration. No Democratic House members voted for the bill. Democrats say it would make insurance unaffordable for those who need it most and leave millions more uninsured. They accuse Republicans of seeking tax cuts for the rich, partly paid for by cutting health benefits.
The legislation, called the American Health Care Act, is by no means a sure thing in the Senate, where the Republicans hold a slender 52-48 majority in the 100-seat chamber and where only a few Republican defections could sink it.
As Republicans crossed over the vote threshold to pass the bill, Democrats in the House began singing "Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye," a rowdy suggestion that Republicans will lose seats in the 2018 congressional elections because of their vote.
Within an hour of the vote, Trump celebrated with House lawmakers in the White House Rose Garden.
"I went through two years of campaigning and I'm telling you, no matter where I went, people were suffering so badly with the ravages of Obamacare," Trump said. "We are going to get this passed through the Senate. I am so confident."
Later, after traveling to New York, Trump told reporters there could be changes to ensure passage by senators.
"It could change a little bit. It could be maybe even better. It's a very good bill right now. Premiums are going to come down substantially. Deductibles are going to come down," he said.
*PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS*
The treatment of people with "pre-existing" conditions was one of the central issues in the House debate on the bill and is sure to resurface in the Senate.
Obamacare prevented insurers from charging those with pre-existing conditions higher rates, a common practice before its implementation. It also required them to cover 10 essential health benefits such as maternity care and prescription drugs.
The Republican bill passed on Thursday would allow states to opt out of those provisions. While insurers could not deny people insurance because of pre-existing conditions, they would be allowed to charge them as much as they want.
In an analysis released on Thursday, healthcare consultancy and research firm Avalere Health said the Republican bill would cover only 5 percent of enrollees with pre-existing conditions in the individual insurance markets.
Republicans have argued that their bill would give people more choice and reduce the role of government.
In a push to pass the bill before members leave on Friday for a week in their home districts, the House voted before the bill was assessed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimates its cost and effect on insurance rolls.
Republicans have said the bill will be scored by the CBO and other fixes will be made before the Senate votes.
Health insurers, such as Anthem Inc, UnitedHealth Group Inc, Aetna Inc and Cigna Corp, have faced months of uncertainty over healthcare's future. So have hospital companies, such as HCA Holdings Inc and Tenet Healthcare Corp.
On Thursday, Aetna shares closed up 0.8 percent, Humana shares rose 2.2 percent, and UnitedHealth Group shares were up 0.9 percent. Cigna shares fell 0.2 percent. HCA Holdings Inc shares rose 0.7 percent and Tenet Healthcare Corp shares closed up 1.8 percent.
Some analysts said the modest share moves reflected the fact that the final version of the bill had more funding in it that would help insurers and hospitals.
*CHALLENGES AHEAD*
Obamacare expanded Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, provided income-based tax credits to help the poor buy insurance on individual insurance markets set up by the law, and required everyone to buy insurance or pay a penalty.
The Republican bill would repeal most Obamacare taxes, which paid for the law, roll back the Medicaid expansion and slash the program's funding, repeal the penalty for not purchasing insurance and replace the law's tax credits with flat age-based credits.
In a sign of the challenges ahead for the legislation, nearly every major medical group, including the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association, and the AARP advocacy group for older Americans, strongly opposed the Republican bill. Many said last-minute amendments further eroded protection for the most vulnerable groups, including the sick and elderly.
"I've already made clear that I don't support the House bill as currently constructed because I continue to have concerns that this bill does not do enough to protect Ohio's Medicaid expansion population," said Republican Senator Rob Portman.
The previous failure to overhaul healthcare legislation had raised questions about how much Republicans could work together to help Trump fulfill his campaign pledges.
"Anything that they (the Republicans) get done, that they accomplish, popular or unpopular, will show that they have the ability to make progress and to get things done and work together," said Randy Frederick, vice president trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas.
ReportWorldReuters
· Donald Trump
· senate
· White House
· Barack Obama
· Congressional Budget Office
· AARP
· American Hospital Association
· American Medical Association
· Austin
· Humana
· New York
· Ohio
· Texas
· House Republican
· Obamacare
· Aetna Inc
· Cigna Corp
· Rob Portman
· UnitedHealth Group Inc
· Affordable Care Act
· American Health Care Act
· Anthem Inc
· Avalere Health
· Charles Schwab
· Randy Frederick
· U. S. House
· U. S. House of Representatives
· White House Rose Garden
Fri, 5 May 2017-08:45am
Date updated:
Friday, 5 May 2017 - 8:45am
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From Print Edition: Reported by DNA 4 hours ago.
The vote to undo major parts of former President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement, which enabled 20 million more Americans to get health insurance, was Trump's biggest legislative win since he took office in January, putting him on a path to fulfilling one of his key campaign promises as well as a seven-year quest by Republican lawmakers.
It marked a reversal of fortune for the Republican president who suffered a stunning defeat in late March when House Republican leaders pulled legislation to scrap Obamacare after they and the White House could not resolve the clashing interests of Republican moderates and the party's most conservative lawmakers.
Trump has called Obamacare a "disaster" and congressional Republicans have long targeted the 2010 law, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, calling it government overreach.
But despite holding the White House and controlling both houses of Congress, Republicans have found overturning Obamacare politically perilous, partly because of voter fears, loudly expressed at constituents' town-hall meetings, that many people would lose their health insurance as a result.
With Thursday's 217-213 vote, Republicans obtained just enough support to push the legislation through the House, sending it to the Senate for consideration. No Democratic House members voted for the bill. Democrats say it would make insurance unaffordable for those who need it most and leave millions more uninsured. They accuse Republicans of seeking tax cuts for the rich, partly paid for by cutting health benefits.
The legislation, called the American Health Care Act, is by no means a sure thing in the Senate, where the Republicans hold a slender 52-48 majority in the 100-seat chamber and where only a few Republican defections could sink it.
As Republicans crossed over the vote threshold to pass the bill, Democrats in the House began singing "Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye," a rowdy suggestion that Republicans will lose seats in the 2018 congressional elections because of their vote.
Within an hour of the vote, Trump celebrated with House lawmakers in the White House Rose Garden.
"I went through two years of campaigning and I'm telling you, no matter where I went, people were suffering so badly with the ravages of Obamacare," Trump said. "We are going to get this passed through the Senate. I am so confident."
Later, after traveling to New York, Trump told reporters there could be changes to ensure passage by senators.
"It could change a little bit. It could be maybe even better. It's a very good bill right now. Premiums are going to come down substantially. Deductibles are going to come down," he said.
*PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS*
The treatment of people with "pre-existing" conditions was one of the central issues in the House debate on the bill and is sure to resurface in the Senate.
Obamacare prevented insurers from charging those with pre-existing conditions higher rates, a common practice before its implementation. It also required them to cover 10 essential health benefits such as maternity care and prescription drugs.
The Republican bill passed on Thursday would allow states to opt out of those provisions. While insurers could not deny people insurance because of pre-existing conditions, they would be allowed to charge them as much as they want.
In an analysis released on Thursday, healthcare consultancy and research firm Avalere Health said the Republican bill would cover only 5 percent of enrollees with pre-existing conditions in the individual insurance markets.
Republicans have argued that their bill would give people more choice and reduce the role of government.
In a push to pass the bill before members leave on Friday for a week in their home districts, the House voted before the bill was assessed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimates its cost and effect on insurance rolls.
Republicans have said the bill will be scored by the CBO and other fixes will be made before the Senate votes.
Health insurers, such as Anthem Inc, UnitedHealth Group Inc, Aetna Inc and Cigna Corp, have faced months of uncertainty over healthcare's future. So have hospital companies, such as HCA Holdings Inc and Tenet Healthcare Corp.
On Thursday, Aetna shares closed up 0.8 percent, Humana shares rose 2.2 percent, and UnitedHealth Group shares were up 0.9 percent. Cigna shares fell 0.2 percent. HCA Holdings Inc shares rose 0.7 percent and Tenet Healthcare Corp shares closed up 1.8 percent.
Some analysts said the modest share moves reflected the fact that the final version of the bill had more funding in it that would help insurers and hospitals.
*CHALLENGES AHEAD*
Obamacare expanded Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, provided income-based tax credits to help the poor buy insurance on individual insurance markets set up by the law, and required everyone to buy insurance or pay a penalty.
The Republican bill would repeal most Obamacare taxes, which paid for the law, roll back the Medicaid expansion and slash the program's funding, repeal the penalty for not purchasing insurance and replace the law's tax credits with flat age-based credits.
In a sign of the challenges ahead for the legislation, nearly every major medical group, including the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association, and the AARP advocacy group for older Americans, strongly opposed the Republican bill. Many said last-minute amendments further eroded protection for the most vulnerable groups, including the sick and elderly.
"I've already made clear that I don't support the House bill as currently constructed because I continue to have concerns that this bill does not do enough to protect Ohio's Medicaid expansion population," said Republican Senator Rob Portman.
The previous failure to overhaul healthcare legislation had raised questions about how much Republicans could work together to help Trump fulfill his campaign pledges.
"Anything that they (the Republicans) get done, that they accomplish, popular or unpopular, will show that they have the ability to make progress and to get things done and work together," said Randy Frederick, vice president trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas.
ReportWorldReuters
· Donald Trump
· senate
· White House
· Barack Obama
· Congressional Budget Office
· AARP
· American Hospital Association
· American Medical Association
· Austin
· Humana
· New York
· Ohio
· Texas
· House Republican
· Obamacare
· Aetna Inc
· Cigna Corp
· Rob Portman
· UnitedHealth Group Inc
· Affordable Care Act
· American Health Care Act
· Anthem Inc
· Avalere Health
· Charles Schwab
· Randy Frederick
· U. S. House
· U. S. House of Representatives
· White House Rose Garden
Fri, 5 May 2017-08:45am
Date updated:
Friday, 5 May 2017 - 8:45am
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From Print Edition: Reported by DNA 4 hours ago.
↧
↧
As Republicans Cheered Obamacare's Repeal, The Law's Beneficiaries Worried About Survival
On Thursday afternoon, by the narrowest of margins, Republican lawmakers passed a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. Pleased with their victory, they popped Bud Lights and abruptly took buses to the White House to celebrate with President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden.Meanwhile, those actually dependent on Obamacare were anxiously wondering what happens next. Some of them were following the action on the House floor while in their doctor’s offices receiving treatment.
The House bill will almost certainly not become law in its current form. But its passage portends a sharp turn away from the patient protections and coverage subsidies that they have come to rely on in Obamacare’s brief existence. The bill dramatically cuts Medicaid coverage, to the tune of $840 billion less. It also undermines the provisions that prevent insurers from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions by allowing states to seek waivers that would eliminate rules prohibiting higher premiums for people with serious medical problems.
For those who stand to be hurt by these reforms, Thursday left them both fearful about their own medical futures and motivated to act politically.
These are their stories.
*Coverage After The Loss Of A Spouse: Marianthe Poulianos, Florida*
A self-employed attorney, Poulianos and her two children relied on her husband’s health insurance plan until he died unexpectedly at the age of 41. Her kids were 7 and 10 years old. They all relied on COBRA to get by. When that ended, so did their insurance.
“Obamacare came along at just the right time,” she said. Without it, she would either have had to take a job in a law firm or change careers. But finding a new job with less flexibility would have been tough, since her kids “really needed me.”
Poulianos says her current insurance coverage is reasonably priced with quality care provided. As she watched the House vote, she felt “demonized.”
I’m not sure why I should. I went to school, got married, had kids, worked, employed people, made my children my priority. My husband died and today I feel as if my family is being punished for that. I hear more tragic stories than ours ― people with sick children, pre-existing conditions etc. But I believe that my type of story is part of what’s really devastating and wrong about today as well.
*‘I Keep Wondering Why They Want To Kill Me’: Jacqueline Church Simonds, Nevada*
In 2010, Simonds began having bizarre, scary health episodes. She was hospitalized for five days but lacked insurance; she and her husband ran their own business, and his pre-existing conditions made him uninsurable. She was able to negotiate down the $42,000 bill, but she still needed her parents’ help to pay the remaining $18,900.
The following year, she became sick again. Her surgeon told her she needed a couple of feet of her colon removed or she would die. When she told the medical staff she simply wasn’t able to pay for such an operation, they informed her about the Affordable Care Act. She signed up for coverage and had the operation. To this day, she remains sick, recently receiving the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. And she suspects she will need more operations.
I keep wondering why they want to kill me.
Why are rich people so much more important than I am that their tax cuts are more important than my health? How can people vote to “improve” healthcare, but make themselves immune from the effects? So, you want to know how I feel about AHCA? I am thoroughly, implacably angry.
I would be out in the streets with a pitchfork and torch, if I felt well enough to leave the house (but I don’t). So I will sit here at my computer and figure out ways to get out the vote.
*How Could Christians Do This?: Stacy Jarrell, Florida*
“I’m somewhere between totally pissed off and sick to my stomach right now. And I’m scared,” Jarrell told HuffPost shortly after Thursday’s vote. She’s 54 and widowed and petrified about losing her health care. Years ago, she said a doctor misread a mammogram that allowed insurers to label her as having a pre-existing condition. Obamacare came along and gave her solace. She makes under $40,000 a year and gets a subsidy to help purchase insurance on the Obamacare exchange in her state.
As a Christian I can’t understand how these people that claim to follow Christ could support, let alone pass, a law that will kill people. While I believe in a separation of church and state, I also believe that as human beings, moral and ethical people need to take care of those that can’t take care of themselves.
The last thing I’m feeling is resolve. If they think there was a resistance before... they have absolutely no idea how this vote has motivated us.
*‘I’m Fucking Terrified’: Bill Petrich, New York*
At 21, Petrich was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Treatment was in 2010 and 2011, and Obamacare allowed him to stay on his mother’s private plan. Now 28, he lives in New York and must fend for himself. He has a job as a contractor with no benefits and pays $600 a month for his insurance coverage. It’s a hefty price tag. But it’s a good plan.
Petrich hopes the bill stalls in the Senate. But he’s afraid that Republicans won’t deny the president an accomplishment.
I’m fucking terrified. I can feel the foreboding in my stomach. I’m literally shaking a little bit right now, I was really hoping this wouldn’t pass. I know that, for the rest of my life, I will be seen not as a human being but as a pre-existing condition by private healthcare providers. ...
I already live with a baseline of fear about getting cancer again. Now, it’s terror. Financial ruin at best, death at worst. I’m already imagining a world where I’m starting a crowdfunding campaign to pay for my imagined future treatment.
*Medication That Wasn’t Available Without Obamacare: Annie Agle, Utah*
Agle, 28, has a rare disease called mastocytosis. She actually receives insurance through her employer, but she’s benefited from the provision under the Affordable Care Act that increased funding for research into diseases. Agle ― who was in treatment Thursday while following the GOP repeal effort in the House ― said that there were several promising medications that weren’t brought to market until the health care law passed because they weren’t considered profitable by the insurance companies.
Under Obamacare, a lot of insurance carriers were forced to present packages and coverage for medications that wouldn’t have even been available to us in the first place. I owe my life now four times over to an immunotherapy drug that didn’t exist before Obamacare and probably wouldn’t have existed without that piece of funding. ...
It’s very disheartening. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that 50 percent of my country doesn’t feel like that I matter or don’t have a right to live. The difference between treatment and no treatment for me is fatality. It’s not a grey area.
*Putting Her Children First: Jill Thompsett, New York*
In 2004, Thompsett delivered twins at 31 weeks into her pregnancy. Her son and daughter were in the neonatal intensive care unit for six weeks. Her daughter came home with an apnea monitor because of complications with breathing, while her son underwent three surgeries over the next 18 months. Thompsett’s health insurance plan, which she paid for out of pocket, spiked from $600 to $1,200 a month. She had to drop it.
New York state’s child health care plan allowed her to get coverage for her kids. But it wouldn’t be until 2008, when she took a job at the YMCA, that she was able to buy coverage again for herself. When Obamacare became law, the eligibility for Medicaid expanded to higher income levels. Thompsett, earning $23,000 a year and spending nearly every penny on health insurance and child care, qualified.
That the expansion is suddenly endangered enrages her. For now, Thompsett is making doctor’s appointments to take advantage of Obamacare while it’s in place. Down the road, she wonders what will happen to her family if there aren’t protections for pre-existing conditions.
My twins had a very rough start to life, but I am pleased to say they are smart, funny, honor roll 7th graders. ... I now feel like I am living in a nightmare that gets worse with each passing day of this administration. Somebody please wake me.
*Chemotherapy During Repeal Vote: Laura Packard, Nevada*
Packard, 40, recently moved to Las Vegas and noticed she had a cough. She didn’t have a doctor in the city yet, so she searched around and found someone. After additional trials and visits with specialists, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Self-employed, she gets insurance on the exchanges and had her first round of chemotherapy on Thursday, as Republicans voted to repeal and replace the health care law.
My treatment schedule is eight months of chemotherapy, which will take me right through the end of 2017. If there is still cancer in my lungs, I will need radiation. If the chemotherapy doesn’t take at all, I may need immunotherapy. So there are all kinds of good options in my health, but I may need them in 2018. ...
If Republicans truly believe that Obamacare is some horrible blight on our country, then the thing to do is to work with Democrats to make health insurance better, rather than start with the premise that you need to give the ultra-rich a tax cut and try to figure out how to fudge it for people who need health care to make it the least terrible on them.
*‘This Sucks’: Sam Alcabes, California *
Alcabes had health care coverage after college through his job in Los Angeles. During that time, he had surgery to repair a herniated disc. When he left his job to attend law school, he was denied health care insurance because of his pre-existing condition. So he entered a high-risk pool run by the state of California, which was expensive and limited in its coverage. After the Affordable Care Act, he got insurance through Kaiser and continues to receive it now through his employer.
I recently gave notice at my job to move on to other things. Now I am concerned that I will lose my ability to obtain insurance from Kaiser or anywhere else for that matter.
I feel like I’ve played the game the right way my whole life. Luck of the draw on having a bad back.
This sucks.
*What Happens When You Lose Your Parents’ Coverage?: Kathryn Poe, Ohio*
For the past two years, Poe, 20, has been in the hospital on a regular basis, fighting for her life after being diagnosed with three autoimmune conditions. She’s lucky enough to be able to stay on her parents’ health care plan for now but worries what will happen if she turns 26 and the protections for pre-existing conditions currently under the Affordable Care Act are weakened.
It’s incredibly hard to be positive...when you know that the health care legislation that’s passing is just not in your favor. ... At least in my experience in college, people will talk about it and really will have no idea what the essence of the bill means. Oftentimes [people don’t realize] what the real world ramifications are. People are so focused on this Republican dream of Obamacare being repealed that they forget what the real-life implications are for people like me.
-- 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 3 hours ago.
The House bill will almost certainly not become law in its current form. But its passage portends a sharp turn away from the patient protections and coverage subsidies that they have come to rely on in Obamacare’s brief existence. The bill dramatically cuts Medicaid coverage, to the tune of $840 billion less. It also undermines the provisions that prevent insurers from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions by allowing states to seek waivers that would eliminate rules prohibiting higher premiums for people with serious medical problems.
For those who stand to be hurt by these reforms, Thursday left them both fearful about their own medical futures and motivated to act politically.
These are their stories.
*Coverage After The Loss Of A Spouse: Marianthe Poulianos, Florida*
A self-employed attorney, Poulianos and her two children relied on her husband’s health insurance plan until he died unexpectedly at the age of 41. Her kids were 7 and 10 years old. They all relied on COBRA to get by. When that ended, so did their insurance.
“Obamacare came along at just the right time,” she said. Without it, she would either have had to take a job in a law firm or change careers. But finding a new job with less flexibility would have been tough, since her kids “really needed me.”
Poulianos says her current insurance coverage is reasonably priced with quality care provided. As she watched the House vote, she felt “demonized.”
I’m not sure why I should. I went to school, got married, had kids, worked, employed people, made my children my priority. My husband died and today I feel as if my family is being punished for that. I hear more tragic stories than ours ― people with sick children, pre-existing conditions etc. But I believe that my type of story is part of what’s really devastating and wrong about today as well.
*‘I Keep Wondering Why They Want To Kill Me’: Jacqueline Church Simonds, Nevada*
In 2010, Simonds began having bizarre, scary health episodes. She was hospitalized for five days but lacked insurance; she and her husband ran their own business, and his pre-existing conditions made him uninsurable. She was able to negotiate down the $42,000 bill, but she still needed her parents’ help to pay the remaining $18,900.
The following year, she became sick again. Her surgeon told her she needed a couple of feet of her colon removed or she would die. When she told the medical staff she simply wasn’t able to pay for such an operation, they informed her about the Affordable Care Act. She signed up for coverage and had the operation. To this day, she remains sick, recently receiving the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. And she suspects she will need more operations.
I keep wondering why they want to kill me.
Why are rich people so much more important than I am that their tax cuts are more important than my health? How can people vote to “improve” healthcare, but make themselves immune from the effects? So, you want to know how I feel about AHCA? I am thoroughly, implacably angry.
I would be out in the streets with a pitchfork and torch, if I felt well enough to leave the house (but I don’t). So I will sit here at my computer and figure out ways to get out the vote.
*How Could Christians Do This?: Stacy Jarrell, Florida*
“I’m somewhere between totally pissed off and sick to my stomach right now. And I’m scared,” Jarrell told HuffPost shortly after Thursday’s vote. She’s 54 and widowed and petrified about losing her health care. Years ago, she said a doctor misread a mammogram that allowed insurers to label her as having a pre-existing condition. Obamacare came along and gave her solace. She makes under $40,000 a year and gets a subsidy to help purchase insurance on the Obamacare exchange in her state.
As a Christian I can’t understand how these people that claim to follow Christ could support, let alone pass, a law that will kill people. While I believe in a separation of church and state, I also believe that as human beings, moral and ethical people need to take care of those that can’t take care of themselves.
The last thing I’m feeling is resolve. If they think there was a resistance before... they have absolutely no idea how this vote has motivated us.
*‘I’m Fucking Terrified’: Bill Petrich, New York*
At 21, Petrich was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Treatment was in 2010 and 2011, and Obamacare allowed him to stay on his mother’s private plan. Now 28, he lives in New York and must fend for himself. He has a job as a contractor with no benefits and pays $600 a month for his insurance coverage. It’s a hefty price tag. But it’s a good plan.
Petrich hopes the bill stalls in the Senate. But he’s afraid that Republicans won’t deny the president an accomplishment.
I’m fucking terrified. I can feel the foreboding in my stomach. I’m literally shaking a little bit right now, I was really hoping this wouldn’t pass. I know that, for the rest of my life, I will be seen not as a human being but as a pre-existing condition by private healthcare providers. ...
I already live with a baseline of fear about getting cancer again. Now, it’s terror. Financial ruin at best, death at worst. I’m already imagining a world where I’m starting a crowdfunding campaign to pay for my imagined future treatment.
*Medication That Wasn’t Available Without Obamacare: Annie Agle, Utah*
Agle, 28, has a rare disease called mastocytosis. She actually receives insurance through her employer, but she’s benefited from the provision under the Affordable Care Act that increased funding for research into diseases. Agle ― who was in treatment Thursday while following the GOP repeal effort in the House ― said that there were several promising medications that weren’t brought to market until the health care law passed because they weren’t considered profitable by the insurance companies.
Under Obamacare, a lot of insurance carriers were forced to present packages and coverage for medications that wouldn’t have even been available to us in the first place. I owe my life now four times over to an immunotherapy drug that didn’t exist before Obamacare and probably wouldn’t have existed without that piece of funding. ...
It’s very disheartening. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that 50 percent of my country doesn’t feel like that I matter or don’t have a right to live. The difference between treatment and no treatment for me is fatality. It’s not a grey area.
*Putting Her Children First: Jill Thompsett, New York*
In 2004, Thompsett delivered twins at 31 weeks into her pregnancy. Her son and daughter were in the neonatal intensive care unit for six weeks. Her daughter came home with an apnea monitor because of complications with breathing, while her son underwent three surgeries over the next 18 months. Thompsett’s health insurance plan, which she paid for out of pocket, spiked from $600 to $1,200 a month. She had to drop it.
New York state’s child health care plan allowed her to get coverage for her kids. But it wouldn’t be until 2008, when she took a job at the YMCA, that she was able to buy coverage again for herself. When Obamacare became law, the eligibility for Medicaid expanded to higher income levels. Thompsett, earning $23,000 a year and spending nearly every penny on health insurance and child care, qualified.
That the expansion is suddenly endangered enrages her. For now, Thompsett is making doctor’s appointments to take advantage of Obamacare while it’s in place. Down the road, she wonders what will happen to her family if there aren’t protections for pre-existing conditions.
My twins had a very rough start to life, but I am pleased to say they are smart, funny, honor roll 7th graders. ... I now feel like I am living in a nightmare that gets worse with each passing day of this administration. Somebody please wake me.
*Chemotherapy During Repeal Vote: Laura Packard, Nevada*
Packard, 40, recently moved to Las Vegas and noticed she had a cough. She didn’t have a doctor in the city yet, so she searched around and found someone. After additional trials and visits with specialists, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Self-employed, she gets insurance on the exchanges and had her first round of chemotherapy on Thursday, as Republicans voted to repeal and replace the health care law.
My treatment schedule is eight months of chemotherapy, which will take me right through the end of 2017. If there is still cancer in my lungs, I will need radiation. If the chemotherapy doesn’t take at all, I may need immunotherapy. So there are all kinds of good options in my health, but I may need them in 2018. ...
If Republicans truly believe that Obamacare is some horrible blight on our country, then the thing to do is to work with Democrats to make health insurance better, rather than start with the premise that you need to give the ultra-rich a tax cut and try to figure out how to fudge it for people who need health care to make it the least terrible on them.
*‘This Sucks’: Sam Alcabes, California *
Alcabes had health care coverage after college through his job in Los Angeles. During that time, he had surgery to repair a herniated disc. When he left his job to attend law school, he was denied health care insurance because of his pre-existing condition. So he entered a high-risk pool run by the state of California, which was expensive and limited in its coverage. After the Affordable Care Act, he got insurance through Kaiser and continues to receive it now through his employer.
I recently gave notice at my job to move on to other things. Now I am concerned that I will lose my ability to obtain insurance from Kaiser or anywhere else for that matter.
I feel like I’ve played the game the right way my whole life. Luck of the draw on having a bad back.
This sucks.
*What Happens When You Lose Your Parents’ Coverage?: Kathryn Poe, Ohio*
For the past two years, Poe, 20, has been in the hospital on a regular basis, fighting for her life after being diagnosed with three autoimmune conditions. She’s lucky enough to be able to stay on her parents’ health care plan for now but worries what will happen if she turns 26 and the protections for pre-existing conditions currently under the Affordable Care Act are weakened.
It’s incredibly hard to be positive...when you know that the health care legislation that’s passing is just not in your favor. ... At least in my experience in college, people will talk about it and really will have no idea what the essence of the bill means. Oftentimes [people don’t realize] what the real world ramifications are. People are so focused on this Republican dream of Obamacare being repealed that they forget what the real-life implications are for people like me.
-- 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 3 hours ago.
↧
One-Third Of Americans Are On Government Healthcare
By Ryan McMaken*The US House of Representatives voted to day to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Unfortunately, those who use the phrase “repeal and replace” are greatly exaggerating the extent to which the Affordable Care Act is actually repealed.
While perhaps a tiny step in the right direction, the new legislation signals no departure whatsoever from the long-established trend of expanding the role of government programs in subsidizing the regulating the health care industry.
Perhaps worst of all, since this is being called a “repeal,” many may be prompted to think that the US health care system is a “free market” system, or that government spending has only a very small role in the industry.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, the US is fourth in the world in terms of per capita government spending on health care, behind only Norway, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. That’s government spending, not overall spending:
In fact, those numbers from the World Health Organization (WHO) are from 2014, and with the expansion in Medicaid spending under Obamacare, it’s entirely plausible that the US has moved into third place in the past two years.
But how does this translate into actual persons on government programs? Viewed this this angle, we find that full one-third of all Americans are either currently enrolled in a government health program, or have recently been enrolled in one.
There are approximately 55,504,000 Americans on Medicare, which covers the elderly. But there is also an additional 74,506,000 Americans on Medicaid or CHIP. About 11 million of those are dual-enrolled, which means they’re on both Medicare and Medicaid. If we pull the 11 million out of the Medicaid count to avoid double counting, we find that there is a total of 119 million Americans on government programs — or about one-third.1
“But, wait!” you might say. “Obamacare expanded the number of people on Medicare, so maybe if we remove all of those people, the numbers will be smaller.”
Yes, it’s true, the numbers will be smaller, but as the Kaiser Family Foundation’s research shows, the pre-Obamacare average for Medicaid/CHIP enrollment was 56.8 million. So, if we go back to that pre-Obamacare number, we end up with about 31 percent of Americans on government healthcare — still a hefty number.2
Moreover, given the way the Obamacare “repeal” is written, we shouldn’t expect any sizable long-term decline in Medicaid enrollment. That upward trend is going to continue unless major reforms takes place.
As an additional illustration of the outsized role of government agencies in the industry, we might also look to the fact that government programs are starting to eclipse private sector insurance within the health insurance industry:
Here’s a nugget that encapsulates the health insurance industry, despite all the noise surrounding the future of the Affordable Care Act: In the first quarter of this year, Aetna collected more premium revenue from government programs (namely Medicare and Medicaid) than it did from commercial insurance for the first time ever.
Why this matters: Most people get their health coverage from their employer, and that historically has been the bread and butter of the insurance industry. But the aging population and expansion of Medicaid managed care means insurers are investing more time and money in the lower-margin (but still lucrative) government programs. Aetna, in particular, has invested heavily in Medicare Advantage.
This “free-market” health care system of our doesn’t seem to have much in the way of freedom or markets.
And finally, let’s take a look at growth in federal government spending on health care over time. This is only federal spending and doesn’t include state spending, such as the state-funded portion of Medicaid.
Between 1980 and 2014 — that is, before Obamacare — health care spending by the federal government increased many times over.. Yes, there has been a surge in spending thanks to Obamacare, but it’s a surge above what was already an immense amount of spending growth that already took place during the George W. Bush years and before. It was Bush, after all, who gave us an immense expansion of Medicare coverage into prescription drugs ten years before Obamacare.3
If we look at federal health care spending in terms of growth compared to GDP, we find that health care spending has been outpacing GDP for many years4:
If the GOP plan passed in by the House today ends up doing anything to restrain these costs, then we might say it’s a small victory. But let’s not pretend that government programs are not the single biggest driver of spending in the health care industry. Indeed, when it comes to spending on welfare programs, the US is a typical Western welfare state. Even with the “repeal” of Obamacare, the myth of the “free-market” American economic system will remain exactly that: a myth.
*About the author:*
* *Ryan McMaken* is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. (Contact: email; twitter.) Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
*Source:*
This article was published by the MISES Institute
· 1. The enrollment and benefiary estimates come from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Medicaid numbers can be found here: http://kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/total-monthly-medicaid-and-chip-enrollment/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
The Medicare numbers are here: http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/total-medicare-beneficiaries/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Total%20Medicare%20Beneficiaries%22,%22sort%22:%22desc%22%7D
Stats on dual-enrollment are here: https://www.cms.gov/Medicare-Medicaid-Coordination/Medicare-and-Medicaid-Coordination/Medicare-Medicaid-Coordination-Office/Downloads/DualEnrollment20062013.pdf.
Total US population numbers from February 2017 are here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POP
· 2. For some similar comparisons, see here: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/medicaid-and-medicare-enrollees-now-outnumber-full-time-private-sector-workers
· 3. This graph uses data from Table 3.2 of the historical OMB tables: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
· 4. This graph combines Table 3.2 OMB data (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals) with GDP totals (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPA) Reported by Eurasia Review 2 hours ago.
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Anxiety over GOP health plan for those with severe illnesses
The GOP health care bill pushed through the House on Thursday leaves those with pre-existing conditions fearful of higher premiums and losing coverage altogether if the Affordable Care Act is replaced. The bill sets aside billions of dollars more to help people afford coverage, but experts say that money is unlikely to guarantee an affordable alternative for people now covered under a popular provision of the existing law that prevents insurers from rejecting them or charging higher rates based on their health. Jake Martinez said he's worried about getting health insurance in the future because he has epilepsy, considered a pre-existing condition by insurers. The new Republican plan would let some states allow insurers to charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions, but only if those people had a lapse in insurance coverage. Supporters say those states would need to have programs in place to help people pay for expensive medical treatments, including high risk pools. Will it come down to me paying my mortgage payment or paying my health insurance so I don't have a lapse in coverage? said Perkins, an attorney for a small firm in Lexington, Kentucky. If the House proposal allowing insurers to make coverage for pre-existing conditions unaffordable takes hold, he fears his cancer history will make him uninsurable if he would lose his current job as a retirement financial adviser. "Like many of us here, whether you have asthma or a heart condition or diabetes or like me, cancer, any type of pre-existing condition, you go back to the way it was before, you give insurance companies carte blanche to do their underwriting and to exclude you," Thompson said. John S. Williams says he'll be forced to close his practice and find a job with a group insurance plan if he's no longer covered under the government's health care plan Because of the ACA I am able to employ people and help the economy grow.
Reported by SeattlePI.com 2 hours ago.
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Obamacare repealed, Trump's victory could be short-lived
The US House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly approved a bill to repeal Obamacare, handing Republican President Donald Trump a victory that could prove short-lived as the healthcare legislation heads into a likely tough battle in the Senate. The vote to repeal former President Barack Obama's signature domestic achievement, which enabled 20 million more Americans to get health insurance, was Trump's biggest legislative win since he took office in January, putting him on a path to fulfilling one of his key campaign promises as well as a seven-year quest by Republican lawmakers. It marked a reversal of fortune for the Republican president who suffered a stunning defeat in late March when...
Reported by WorldNews 27 minutes ago.
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Trevor Noah On Trumpcare's Passage In The House: F**king Unbelievable
Ah, the good old days.
During the campaign, Donald Trump promised that every American would be covered under his health care plan.
“Everybody’s going to be taken care of,” he said. “Much better than they’re taken care of today.”
And: “Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. I mandated it. I said it has to be,” Trump explained in a video clip that aired Thursday night on “The Daily Show.” “It will be unbelievable.”
At least he got that last part right.
“What happened today was fucking unbelievable,” Trevor Noah said in describing the House vote to repeal Obamacare.
“Today was crazy, no doubt about it,” Noah said. The Obamacare repeal could mean “more than 20 million Americans would no longer have health insurance ... Although the truth is, we don’t know any of this for sure because the Republicans passed this bill without an official scoring of its costs. Hell, your baby could have to do its own C-section from the inside.”
*Watch Noah unload on the president and the GOP in the clip above. *type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=590b4c5ee4b0e7021e953742
-- 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 16 minutes ago.
During the campaign, Donald Trump promised that every American would be covered under his health care plan.
“Everybody’s going to be taken care of,” he said. “Much better than they’re taken care of today.”
And: “Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. I mandated it. I said it has to be,” Trump explained in a video clip that aired Thursday night on “The Daily Show.” “It will be unbelievable.”
At least he got that last part right.
“What happened today was fucking unbelievable,” Trevor Noah said in describing the House vote to repeal Obamacare.
“Today was crazy, no doubt about it,” Noah said. The Obamacare repeal could mean “more than 20 million Americans would no longer have health insurance ... Although the truth is, we don’t know any of this for sure because the Republicans passed this bill without an official scoring of its costs. Hell, your baby could have to do its own C-section from the inside.”
*Watch Noah unload on the president and the GOP in the clip above. *type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=590b4c5ee4b0e7021e953742
-- 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 16 minutes ago.
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Medicare and Health Insurance Brokerage Plans Massive Consumer Outreach at Walmart Locations in Fall 2017
Texas-based insurance FMO, Empower Brokerage, is undertaking the monumental task of training independent insurance agents for upcoming, heavily government regulated, Medicare and Health Insurance sales seasons.
Southlake, Texas (PRWEB) May 05, 2017
Texas-based insurance FMO, Empower Brokerage, boasted more than 100 insurance agents, stationed in 54 Walmart stores across the country, in last year’s Walmart Retail Program for the 2016-2017 Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) and Open Enrollment Period (OEP).
Agents represented the top-rated insurance carriers for both the senior Medicare market, as well as the individual health market under the Affordable Care Act. Carriers such as Humana, Aetna, United Healthcare, Cigna and others were represented. This year they expect an even bigger and better turnout, as people begin to explore their updated options.
To prepare for the program, Empower Brokerage is ensuring they provide agents with contracts from the best carriers for both the under and over 65 age market. With so many changes circulating in the healthcare industry, insurance plans, specifically on the individual market, intend to offer more choices. A recent ruling by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) now enables insurers to develop more choices with lower premium options for consumers. In response to this ruling, Empower Brokerage is stepping up their outreach and training programs, to make sure agents know exactly what is available to consumers.
“Our Marketing Department is hard at work to make sure everyone knows the latest updates in both the Medicare and Health Insurance product areas. This year promises to be our biggest year yet,” said William Bronson, Empower Brokerage Marketing Director. The Empower Brokerage consumer information for Individual Health Insurance can be found at https://empowerhealthinsuranceusa.com
As for the senior market, Empower Brokerage continues to offer the top carriers in the Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicare Supplement market. Since Medicare Advantage is heavily regulated, Empower Brokerage also provides extended agent support, during AEP. Sherri Miller, MA specialist and compliance officer for Empower Brokerage, assists agents prepare for AEP by ensuring agents are properly certified with AHIP and the necessary carriers. Medicare Supplement consumer information can be found at https://empowermedicaresupplement.com
Sherry says, “We are extremely vigilant about compliance, and we strive to teach agents how to understand and comply with the latest regulations.”
Though contracting and certifying is paramount to an agent’s success in the Walmart retail kiosk program, it’s equally important agents are equipped to market their products. This entails extensive training and compelling marketing materials. Empower Brokerage offers extensive training in their online University, as well as customized individual training. Agents have access to product specialists, sales trainers, carrier reps, and marketing experts to fully learn about compliance, sales, and prospecting strategies.
Bronson says, “There’s really not much we won’t do to help our agents become successful. Empower Brokerage is the most helpful and active FMO I’ve ever seen. We all work very hard to help agents and to make sure consumers have the best, most informative, experience possible.”
In tandem with training and marketing, Empower also keeps agents up-to-date on the program’s requirements. Not only must agents manage carrier requirements and government regulations, but they must also maintain compliance throughout the entire program. To help them do so, Empower Brokerage conducts a two-part outreach through call campaigns, as well as email. Before the program even begins in October, Empower guides agents step-by-step through the registration process. Andrea Hektner, Marketing Specialist and Communication Liaison for the program, says communication between the FMO and agent is the key to success. She adds, “With carrier certifications, CMS regulation overlays, AHIP, program training, mandatory hours, reporting, compliance, relationships with Walmart management… Agents have to manage so much. We help them manage it all so that they can direct their attention to what’s important – helping clients.”
According to program veterans, Empower Brokerage has certainly succeeded in creating a productive experience in the Walmart Retail Program.
Agents anticipate the AEP all year long. When it comes, the successful agents are ready. They enjoy year-round business and referrals from their happy customers. The Walmart retail kiosk program helps agents meet people. And, developing a rapport with people is the key to success in the insurance business. Empower Brokerage helps independent life & health insurance agents learn, earn, and succeed.
For more information about working with Empower Brokerage, contact us through our website, at https://www.empowerbrokerage.com/company/contact/ Reported by PRWeb 6 minutes ago.
Southlake, Texas (PRWEB) May 05, 2017
Texas-based insurance FMO, Empower Brokerage, boasted more than 100 insurance agents, stationed in 54 Walmart stores across the country, in last year’s Walmart Retail Program for the 2016-2017 Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) and Open Enrollment Period (OEP).
Agents represented the top-rated insurance carriers for both the senior Medicare market, as well as the individual health market under the Affordable Care Act. Carriers such as Humana, Aetna, United Healthcare, Cigna and others were represented. This year they expect an even bigger and better turnout, as people begin to explore their updated options.
To prepare for the program, Empower Brokerage is ensuring they provide agents with contracts from the best carriers for both the under and over 65 age market. With so many changes circulating in the healthcare industry, insurance plans, specifically on the individual market, intend to offer more choices. A recent ruling by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) now enables insurers to develop more choices with lower premium options for consumers. In response to this ruling, Empower Brokerage is stepping up their outreach and training programs, to make sure agents know exactly what is available to consumers.
“Our Marketing Department is hard at work to make sure everyone knows the latest updates in both the Medicare and Health Insurance product areas. This year promises to be our biggest year yet,” said William Bronson, Empower Brokerage Marketing Director. The Empower Brokerage consumer information for Individual Health Insurance can be found at https://empowerhealthinsuranceusa.com
As for the senior market, Empower Brokerage continues to offer the top carriers in the Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicare Supplement market. Since Medicare Advantage is heavily regulated, Empower Brokerage also provides extended agent support, during AEP. Sherri Miller, MA specialist and compliance officer for Empower Brokerage, assists agents prepare for AEP by ensuring agents are properly certified with AHIP and the necessary carriers. Medicare Supplement consumer information can be found at https://empowermedicaresupplement.com
Sherry says, “We are extremely vigilant about compliance, and we strive to teach agents how to understand and comply with the latest regulations.”
Though contracting and certifying is paramount to an agent’s success in the Walmart retail kiosk program, it’s equally important agents are equipped to market their products. This entails extensive training and compelling marketing materials. Empower Brokerage offers extensive training in their online University, as well as customized individual training. Agents have access to product specialists, sales trainers, carrier reps, and marketing experts to fully learn about compliance, sales, and prospecting strategies.
Bronson says, “There’s really not much we won’t do to help our agents become successful. Empower Brokerage is the most helpful and active FMO I’ve ever seen. We all work very hard to help agents and to make sure consumers have the best, most informative, experience possible.”
In tandem with training and marketing, Empower also keeps agents up-to-date on the program’s requirements. Not only must agents manage carrier requirements and government regulations, but they must also maintain compliance throughout the entire program. To help them do so, Empower Brokerage conducts a two-part outreach through call campaigns, as well as email. Before the program even begins in October, Empower guides agents step-by-step through the registration process. Andrea Hektner, Marketing Specialist and Communication Liaison for the program, says communication between the FMO and agent is the key to success. She adds, “With carrier certifications, CMS regulation overlays, AHIP, program training, mandatory hours, reporting, compliance, relationships with Walmart management… Agents have to manage so much. We help them manage it all so that they can direct their attention to what’s important – helping clients.”
According to program veterans, Empower Brokerage has certainly succeeded in creating a productive experience in the Walmart Retail Program.
Agents anticipate the AEP all year long. When it comes, the successful agents are ready. They enjoy year-round business and referrals from their happy customers. The Walmart retail kiosk program helps agents meet people. And, developing a rapport with people is the key to success in the insurance business. Empower Brokerage helps independent life & health insurance agents learn, earn, and succeed.
For more information about working with Empower Brokerage, contact us through our website, at https://www.empowerbrokerage.com/company/contact/ Reported by PRWeb 6 minutes ago.
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The Problem For Problem Gamblers In The GOP Health Care Bill
WASHINGTON ― The Republican Obamacare repeal bill that passed in the House on Thursday contains a little-noticed provision that would kick lottery winners off Medicaid.
Though there’s little reason to think lottery winners are sapping Medicaid, the logic of the measure is that anyone with significant winnings should be able to take care of himself without help from the government’s health insurance program for the poor. But groups that follow gambling policy say lottery winners might especially need that help.
Keith Whyte, director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said people with gambling disorders are likely to play the lottery, and if they win they’re likely to lose the money in a short time.
“So a problem gambler who wins the lottery then loses her access to care, even though they will blow through those winnings, leaving them broke and with nowhere to get help,” Whyte told HuffPost.
Another part of the American Health Care Act that could affect gambling addicts is a provision that potentially allows states to disregard Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” standards, which require insurers to cover a range of benefits in any plans sold in state marketplaces.
The standard includes treatments for mental health and substance abuse disorders, which could include gambling disorders, though state laws vary considerably. (Gambling disorders have only recently been listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.)
“We would be concerned with any paring back of essential health benefits that eliminates ‘gambling disorders,’” Whyte’s group said in a letter to congressional leaders that was also signed by gambling industry associations.
Whyte said lawmakers haven’t been receptive to his group’s concerns. A spokesperson for Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who sponsored the gambling provision, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
People with high incomes are ineligible for Medicaid, but Republicans said current law only makes lottery winners ineligible in the single month in which they received their jackpots. The legislation, which was inspired by local news reports, would require Medicaid to count lump-sum payments over the course of many months.
The measure is a part of other Republican efforts targeting alleged malfeasance by welfare recipients, such as efforts to drug test people on food stamps. Some House Democrats have previously said this campaign is little more than a distraction.
Though Republicans rushed to pass their health care bill after cobbling it together with an ad hoc series of deals, they honed the lottery provision for years, making several adjustments in response to input from experts outside of Congress. It’s one of the only parts of the bill that actually got a hearing this year.
The House bill stands little chance of making it through the Senate.
-- 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 2 days ago.
Though there’s little reason to think lottery winners are sapping Medicaid, the logic of the measure is that anyone with significant winnings should be able to take care of himself without help from the government’s health insurance program for the poor. But groups that follow gambling policy say lottery winners might especially need that help.
Keith Whyte, director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said people with gambling disorders are likely to play the lottery, and if they win they’re likely to lose the money in a short time.
“So a problem gambler who wins the lottery then loses her access to care, even though they will blow through those winnings, leaving them broke and with nowhere to get help,” Whyte told HuffPost.
Another part of the American Health Care Act that could affect gambling addicts is a provision that potentially allows states to disregard Obamacare’s “essential health benefits” standards, which require insurers to cover a range of benefits in any plans sold in state marketplaces.
The standard includes treatments for mental health and substance abuse disorders, which could include gambling disorders, though state laws vary considerably. (Gambling disorders have only recently been listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.)
“We would be concerned with any paring back of essential health benefits that eliminates ‘gambling disorders,’” Whyte’s group said in a letter to congressional leaders that was also signed by gambling industry associations.
Whyte said lawmakers haven’t been receptive to his group’s concerns. A spokesperson for Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who sponsored the gambling provision, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
People with high incomes are ineligible for Medicaid, but Republicans said current law only makes lottery winners ineligible in the single month in which they received their jackpots. The legislation, which was inspired by local news reports, would require Medicaid to count lump-sum payments over the course of many months.
The measure is a part of other Republican efforts targeting alleged malfeasance by welfare recipients, such as efforts to drug test people on food stamps. Some House Democrats have previously said this campaign is little more than a distraction.
Though Republicans rushed to pass their health care bill after cobbling it together with an ad hoc series of deals, they honed the lottery provision for years, making several adjustments in response to input from experts outside of Congress. It’s one of the only parts of the bill that actually got a hearing this year.
The House bill stands little chance of making it through the Senate.
-- 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 2 days ago.
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One-Third Of Americans Are On Government Healthcare
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,The US House of Representatives voted today to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Unfortunately, those who use the phrase "repeal and replace" are *greatly exaggerating the extent to which the Affordable Care Act is actually repealed*.
While perhaps a tiny step in the right direction, the new legislation *signals no departure whatsoever from the long-established trend of expanding the role of government* programs in subsidizing and regulating the healthcare industry.
Perhaps worst of all, since this is being called a "repeal," many may be prompted to think that the US health care system is a "free market" system, or that government spending has only a very small role in the industry.
*This couldn't be further from the truth. *
In fact, the *US is fourth in the world in terms of per capita government spending on health care*, behind only Norway, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. That's* government spending, not overall spending*:
In fact, those numbers from the World Health Organization (WHO) are from 2014, and with the expansion in Medicaid spending under Obamacare, it's entirely plausible that the US has moved into third place in the past two years.
*But how does this translate into actual persons on government programs? *Viewed from this angle, we find that a full one-third of all Americans are either currently enrolled in a government health program, or have recently been enrolled in one.
There are *approximately 55,504,000 Americans on Medicare,* which covers the elderly. But there is also an* additional 74,506,000 Americans on Medicaid or CHIP*. About 11 million of those are dual-enrolled, which means they're on both Medicare and Medicaid. If we pull the 11 million out of the Medicaid count to avoid double counting, we find that *there is a total of 119 million Americans on government programs — or about one-third*.
*"But, wait!" you might say. "Obamacare expanded the number of people on Medicare, so maybe if we remove all of those people, the numbers will be smaller." *
Yes, it's true, the numbers will be smaller, but as the Kaiser Family Foundation's research shows, the pre-Obamacare average for Medicaid/CHIP enrollment was 56.8 million. So, if we go back to that pre-Obamacare number, we end up with about 31 percent of Americans on government healthcare — still a hefty number.
*Moreover, given the way the Obamacare "repeal" is written, we shouldn't expect any sizable long-term decline in Medicaid enrollment. *That upward trend is going to continue unless major reforms take place.
As an additional illustration of the outsized role of government agencies in the industry, we might also look to the fact that government programs are starting to eclipse private sector insurance within the health insurance industry:
Here's a nugget that encapsulates the health insurance industry, despite all the noise surrounding the future of the Affordable Care Act: In the first quarter of this year, Aetna collected more premium revenue from government programs (namely Medicare and Medicaid) than it did from commercial insurance for the first time ever.
Why this matters: Most people get their health coverage from their employer, and that historically has been the bread and butter of the insurance industry. But the aging population and expansion of Medicaid managed care means insurers are investing more time and money in the lower-margin (but still lucrative) government programs. Aetna, in particular, has invested heavily in Medicare Advantage.
This "free-market" health care system of ours *doesn't seem to have much in the way of freedom or markets. *
*And finally, let's take a look at growth in federal government spending on health care over time. *This is only federal spending and doesn't include state spending, such as the state-funded portion of Medicaid.
Between 1980 and 2014 — that is, before Obamacare — health care spending by the federal government increased many times over. Yes, there has been a surge in spending thanks to Obamacare, but it's a surge above what was already an immense amount of spending growth that already took place during the George W. Bush years and before. *It was Bush, after all, who gave us an immense expansion of Medicare coverage into prescription drugs ten years before Obamacare.*
If we look at federal health care spending in terms of growth compared to GDP, we find that *health care spending has been outpacing GDP for many years*:
If the GOP plan passed by the House today ends up doing anything to restrain these costs, then we might say it's a small victory. But let's not pretend that government programs are not the single biggest driver of spending in the health care industry.* Indeed, when it comes to spending on welfare programs, the US is a typical Western welfare state. Even with the "repeal" of Obamacare, the myth of the free-market American economic system will remain exactly that: a myth.* Reported by Zero Hedge 3 days ago.
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For Parents Of Kids With Preexisting Conditions, Trumpcare Is Terrifying
Megan, 36, still had 14 weeks left in her pregnancy when she gave birth to her second child four years ago. Her daughter, Ellie, teetered on the edge of survival and weighed less than a pound. She spent the first four months hooked up to tiny tubes in the NICU.
At the time, Megan—who asked that only her first name be used—had health insurance though a plan she and her husband bought via Obamacare, and also qualified for secondary Medicaid coverage. The couple still relies on that combination to cover Ellie’s ongoing health complications: Chronic lung disease, which requires her to be on oxygen; intestinal complications that require a special feeding tube; chronic kidney disease; epilepsy; growth hormone deficiency and low muscle tone. Between January and March 2017 alone, the family’s insurance plan paid roughly $100,000 for some 1,200 claims.
So a day after the Republican-led House narrowly passed a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, Megan said she is trying not to panic, but it’s not easy. Trumpcare would roll back protections for people with pre-existing conditions and slash federal funding for Medicaid—both changes that put her daughter at risk.
“It seems like these kids are going to fall through the cracks, and it’s just really unfair,” Megan told HuffPost, before pausing to collect herself. “She didn’t do anything wrong to deserve any of this. I had a healthy pregnancy. I’m a healthy person. We didn’t ask for this. And it just feels like we’re being forgotten.”Megan’s husband already puts in 60- to 70-hour weeks managing a car sales department, and she has quit her job to manage Ellie’s care full-time, while also watching the couple’s 7-year-old son. They simply cannot afford their health care costs to soar.
Other families are particularly concerned about potential cuts to programs and services supported by Medicaid.
Erin Raffety, a 35-year-old professor from New Jersey, told HuffPost she feels “betrayed” by Thursday’s vote. Her 3-year-old daughter, Lucia, has a progressive genetic disease of the brain and has been in early intervention programs in New Jersey for much of her young life. Lucia is also bussed to a local school that is equipped to handle her speech, physical and occupational therapy in-house.
Raffety said that since President Donald Trump’s election, she has learned to live with the feeling that her daughter’s life hangs in the balance, but after yesterday’s House vote she feels particularly upset.
“She’s been on Medicaid since she was probably a year old,” Raffety said. “We try and be really outspoken about the amazing benefits the state of New Jersey, and also the federal government, provides families like ours. There’s no way anyone could afford the level of care Lucia needs, and not just the medical services, but the services she needs for life to be full.”
I'm feeling a combination of angry, scared and really sad. I don't know what's going to happen.
The possibility that the new health care bill could bring back annual and lifetime caps on coverage—even for individuals with employer plans—is also worrisome for mothers and fathers managing sick children with serious, life-time needs. When a child needs millions of dollars in care, these limits can be life-destroying.
“I’m feeling a combination of angry, scared and really sad. I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Lisa, 30, who lives in California and who also asked that only her first name be used. She has a 4-year-old with cerebral palsy and a nearly 2-year-old with chronic lung disease.
“My pregnancy with my daughter alone was really complicated, and cost something like $500,000. If they bring back the maximums, that’s really close, you know?” she said.
But while Trump boasted on Thursday that the American Health Care Act is “a great plan,” doctors who treat children have widely condemned the bill. The American Academy of Pediatrics said in a press release on Thursday that it is “bad policy for children and dangerous policy for our country.”
Parents like Megan—including those who took to social media this week to express their outrage using hashtags like #IAmAPreexistingCondition and #preexistingcondition—say they simply want some reassurance that legislators are doing everything they can to help protect their kids.
“Ellie’s great,” Megan said. “She thinks she’s a typical 4-year-old and handles everything so well. She’s a complete joy.”
“I don’t think these legislators could look at us face-to-face and tell us, ‘Your kids aren’t important enough for us to make sure they stay safe,’” she said. “I don’t think they could look at my daughter and tell her she’s not worth it.”
-- 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 3 days ago.
At the time, Megan—who asked that only her first name be used—had health insurance though a plan she and her husband bought via Obamacare, and also qualified for secondary Medicaid coverage. The couple still relies on that combination to cover Ellie’s ongoing health complications: Chronic lung disease, which requires her to be on oxygen; intestinal complications that require a special feeding tube; chronic kidney disease; epilepsy; growth hormone deficiency and low muscle tone. Between January and March 2017 alone, the family’s insurance plan paid roughly $100,000 for some 1,200 claims.
So a day after the Republican-led House narrowly passed a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, Megan said she is trying not to panic, but it’s not easy. Trumpcare would roll back protections for people with pre-existing conditions and slash federal funding for Medicaid—both changes that put her daughter at risk.
“It seems like these kids are going to fall through the cracks, and it’s just really unfair,” Megan told HuffPost, before pausing to collect herself. “She didn’t do anything wrong to deserve any of this. I had a healthy pregnancy. I’m a healthy person. We didn’t ask for this. And it just feels like we’re being forgotten.”Megan’s husband already puts in 60- to 70-hour weeks managing a car sales department, and she has quit her job to manage Ellie’s care full-time, while also watching the couple’s 7-year-old son. They simply cannot afford their health care costs to soar.
Other families are particularly concerned about potential cuts to programs and services supported by Medicaid.
Erin Raffety, a 35-year-old professor from New Jersey, told HuffPost she feels “betrayed” by Thursday’s vote. Her 3-year-old daughter, Lucia, has a progressive genetic disease of the brain and has been in early intervention programs in New Jersey for much of her young life. Lucia is also bussed to a local school that is equipped to handle her speech, physical and occupational therapy in-house.
Raffety said that since President Donald Trump’s election, she has learned to live with the feeling that her daughter’s life hangs in the balance, but after yesterday’s House vote she feels particularly upset.
“She’s been on Medicaid since she was probably a year old,” Raffety said. “We try and be really outspoken about the amazing benefits the state of New Jersey, and also the federal government, provides families like ours. There’s no way anyone could afford the level of care Lucia needs, and not just the medical services, but the services she needs for life to be full.”
I'm feeling a combination of angry, scared and really sad. I don't know what's going to happen.
The possibility that the new health care bill could bring back annual and lifetime caps on coverage—even for individuals with employer plans—is also worrisome for mothers and fathers managing sick children with serious, life-time needs. When a child needs millions of dollars in care, these limits can be life-destroying.
“I’m feeling a combination of angry, scared and really sad. I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Lisa, 30, who lives in California and who also asked that only her first name be used. She has a 4-year-old with cerebral palsy and a nearly 2-year-old with chronic lung disease.
“My pregnancy with my daughter alone was really complicated, and cost something like $500,000. If they bring back the maximums, that’s really close, you know?” she said.
But while Trump boasted on Thursday that the American Health Care Act is “a great plan,” doctors who treat children have widely condemned the bill. The American Academy of Pediatrics said in a press release on Thursday that it is “bad policy for children and dangerous policy for our country.”
Parents like Megan—including those who took to social media this week to express their outrage using hashtags like #IAmAPreexistingCondition and #preexistingcondition—say they simply want some reassurance that legislators are doing everything they can to help protect their kids.
“Ellie’s great,” Megan said. “She thinks she’s a typical 4-year-old and handles everything so well. She’s a complete joy.”
“I don’t think these legislators could look at us face-to-face and tell us, ‘Your kids aren’t important enough for us to make sure they stay safe,’” she said. “I don’t think they could look at my daughter and tell her she’s not worth it.”
-- 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 3 days ago.
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JOBS BOUNCE BACK: Here's what you need to know
Stocks saw yet another quiet day following the release of a strong April jobs report.All three major indices finished slightly up.
First up, the scoreboard:
· *Dow:* 20,993.31, +41.84, (+0.20%)
· *S&P 500:* 2,397.88, +8.32, (+0.35%)
· *Nasdaq:* 6,096.76, +21.24, (+0.35%)
· *US 10-year yield:* 2.349%, -0.007
· *WTI crude:* $46.36, +0.84, +1.82%
1. US jobs made a comeback in April, and the unemployment rate dropped to the lowest in a decade. The US economy added 211,000 jobs following an expectedly weak March, and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4%. "Businesses are certainly hiring and there's no sign that we see of any bump in the road in hiring trends," Tony Bedikian, head of global markets for Citizens Bank, told Business Insider.
2. However, wage growth slowed down and the labor force participation rate ticked down. Wages grew 2.5% from the previous year, falling below economists' expectations of 2.7% and below the 2.7% rate in March. The labor force participation ticked down slightly to 62.9% from 63.0% in March.
3. Canada's jobs report disappointed, snapping a multi-month long streak of solid gains. The economy added 3,200 jobs in April, below expectations of 10,000. Worse, full-time employment fell by 31,200. Most of the job gains were in part-time positions, which rose by 34,300.
4. Senate Republicans signaled they plan to gut the American Health Care Act and rewrite their own version of the bill. A group of Republican senators from across the ideological spectrum of the party has been meeting as a working group for weeks to formulate a bill that could get majority support in the Senate.
5. The US oil-rig count rose by six to 703, marking the 16th consecutive week of increases. That's the highest level since the week of April 24, 2015. The data come at the end of an eventful week for commodities in which oil prices fell to the lowest level since November.
6. Traders are losing billions betting against the FANGs. Short sellers targeting Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (aka Alphabet) have absorbed a whopping $3.3 billion loss in 2017, according to data compiled by financial analytics firm S3 Partners.
*ADDITIONALLY:*
Acne, pregnancy, and sleep apnea — here's every condition that could get you denied health insurance under "Trumpcare."
Warren Buffett explains why a good business is one "your idiot nephew" could run.
A bunch of House Republicans admitted they didn't read the GOP healthcare bill.
"Cracks are emerging" in one of the riskiest parts of the market.
*SEE ALSO: An Ivy League professor explains chaos theory, the prisoner's dilemma, and why math isn't really boring*
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: People on Twitter are roasting United Airlines after a passenger was forcibly dragged off a plane Reported by Business Insider 3 days ago.
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We Have No Idea How States Will Treat Pre-Existing Conditions
Like most things in life and certainly in health care, the devil is in the details of Republicans’ American Health Care Act.
So when Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post explaining that her son Cole, born with Down syndrome, was at the heart of her support for the bill, the devil probably did a little happy dance.
Though McMorris Rodgers wrote that the GOP bill would still protect people with pre-existing conditions like her son, the reality is that she doesn’t really know how they’ll be affected. None of us do.
But one glimpse at recent history might indicate which way things will go.
The Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, shifts decision-making to the states. Without a sense of what individual states intend to do, we can’t really make any declarations.
Obamacare mandated that everyone have health insurance or pay a penalty. This pushed the young and healthy into purchasing plans, which in turn helped offset insurance costs for the not-so-young and not-so-healthy. Obamacare also forbids insurers from charging those with expensive medical conditions more than they charge other consumers in the general insurance pool.
Before the Affordable Care Act became law, people with chronic diseases paid several times as much for health insurance — if they could even find an insurer to cover them. Can you imagine facing cancer treatment without health insurance?
The GOP plan isn’t quite dropping the mandate that everyone have health insurance. Republican leaders just settled on getting rid of the penalty for not doing so, instead letting insurers tack on a one-year 30 percent surcharge for any coverage gaps.
Power shifts to the states.
But here’s where the wicket gets sticky: An amendment added last week by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) says individual states can obtain a waiver from the Health and Human Services Department. With that waiver in place, people who allow their coverage to lapse would be subject to higher premiums for pre-existing conditions.
Health experts say that would lead to a sharp rise in premiums for those with medical problems. Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, predicts that people with pre-existing conditions would likely be priced out of coverage.
“To actually protect someone with a pre-existing condition,” she told ABC News, “they need full protection. Otherwise, it’s like giving someone half a bulletproof vest.”
Rodgers’ colleagues ― Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Billy Long (R-Mo.) ― tried to sweeten the pot and mitigate some of the effects the MacArthur amendment would have on those with long-standing medical conditions. They threw in a measure to provide $8 billion to help these patients pay for increased premiums and out-of-pocket costs. The money would be spread among the states that decide to let insurers return to the practice of charging higher rates to certain customers.
High-risk pools didn’t work before.
As part of a waiver application to HHS, a state would be required to include a “risk-sharing plan” or to design a subsidy program for residents with pre-existing conditions.
Rodgers thinks this will be enough to protect people like her son. But that simply ignores history and the fact that the “high-risk pools” people with pre-existing conditions will be placed in under the GOP plan were uniformly considered disasters before Obamacare came along.
Even the high-risk pool in California, a state that would seem perfectly situated for success because of its huge economy, extensive medical care system and powerful advocates, failed. Before Obamacare kicked in, nearly 20 percent of Californians ― 6 million people ― lacked health coverage. Today, the state’s uninsured rate is under 9 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
High-risk pools just didn’t work, Richard Figueroa, who was the enrollment director of California’s high-risk pool, told the Los Angeles Times. He said he still shudders remembering some of the calls he had to field.
There were desperate callers pleading to get off the waiting list as cancer or other illnesses worsened, he told the Times. The most heart-wrenching were the quiet, polite calls from those who’d received a letter that a sick relative could finally get on the plan. “They would say, ‘Thank you, but you can give our slot to someone else, because my brother or my wife or my daughter has died,’” Figueroa recalled.
Things were no better in McMorris Rodgers’ home state of Washington, where more than 80 percent of the people referred to the state’s high-risk pool never got health insurance, according to Mike Kreidler, the state’s insurance commissioner, speaking to The New York Times.
California’s high-risk pool — like similar overstretched state plans around the country — became obsolete when the Affordable Care Act established the current federal system to guarantee coverage to Americans even if they’re sick.
So when McMorris Rodgers says, “States know better than the federal government how to allocate and manage resources to address the needs of their people. Our plan allows states to serve and provide financial support directly to vulnerable populations, including people with preexisting conditions” ― we just wonder which state she plans on moving to.
-- 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 2 days ago.
So when Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post explaining that her son Cole, born with Down syndrome, was at the heart of her support for the bill, the devil probably did a little happy dance.
Though McMorris Rodgers wrote that the GOP bill would still protect people with pre-existing conditions like her son, the reality is that she doesn’t really know how they’ll be affected. None of us do.
But one glimpse at recent history might indicate which way things will go.
The Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, shifts decision-making to the states. Without a sense of what individual states intend to do, we can’t really make any declarations.
Obamacare mandated that everyone have health insurance or pay a penalty. This pushed the young and healthy into purchasing plans, which in turn helped offset insurance costs for the not-so-young and not-so-healthy. Obamacare also forbids insurers from charging those with expensive medical conditions more than they charge other consumers in the general insurance pool.
Before the Affordable Care Act became law, people with chronic diseases paid several times as much for health insurance — if they could even find an insurer to cover them. Can you imagine facing cancer treatment without health insurance?
The GOP plan isn’t quite dropping the mandate that everyone have health insurance. Republican leaders just settled on getting rid of the penalty for not doing so, instead letting insurers tack on a one-year 30 percent surcharge for any coverage gaps.
Power shifts to the states.
But here’s where the wicket gets sticky: An amendment added last week by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) says individual states can obtain a waiver from the Health and Human Services Department. With that waiver in place, people who allow their coverage to lapse would be subject to higher premiums for pre-existing conditions.
Health experts say that would lead to a sharp rise in premiums for those with medical problems. Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, predicts that people with pre-existing conditions would likely be priced out of coverage.
“To actually protect someone with a pre-existing condition,” she told ABC News, “they need full protection. Otherwise, it’s like giving someone half a bulletproof vest.”
Rodgers’ colleagues ― Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Billy Long (R-Mo.) ― tried to sweeten the pot and mitigate some of the effects the MacArthur amendment would have on those with long-standing medical conditions. They threw in a measure to provide $8 billion to help these patients pay for increased premiums and out-of-pocket costs. The money would be spread among the states that decide to let insurers return to the practice of charging higher rates to certain customers.
High-risk pools didn’t work before.
As part of a waiver application to HHS, a state would be required to include a “risk-sharing plan” or to design a subsidy program for residents with pre-existing conditions.
Rodgers thinks this will be enough to protect people like her son. But that simply ignores history and the fact that the “high-risk pools” people with pre-existing conditions will be placed in under the GOP plan were uniformly considered disasters before Obamacare came along.
Even the high-risk pool in California, a state that would seem perfectly situated for success because of its huge economy, extensive medical care system and powerful advocates, failed. Before Obamacare kicked in, nearly 20 percent of Californians ― 6 million people ― lacked health coverage. Today, the state’s uninsured rate is under 9 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
High-risk pools just didn’t work, Richard Figueroa, who was the enrollment director of California’s high-risk pool, told the Los Angeles Times. He said he still shudders remembering some of the calls he had to field.
There were desperate callers pleading to get off the waiting list as cancer or other illnesses worsened, he told the Times. The most heart-wrenching were the quiet, polite calls from those who’d received a letter that a sick relative could finally get on the plan. “They would say, ‘Thank you, but you can give our slot to someone else, because my brother or my wife or my daughter has died,’” Figueroa recalled.
Things were no better in McMorris Rodgers’ home state of Washington, where more than 80 percent of the people referred to the state’s high-risk pool never got health insurance, according to Mike Kreidler, the state’s insurance commissioner, speaking to The New York Times.
California’s high-risk pool — like similar overstretched state plans around the country — became obsolete when the Affordable Care Act established the current federal system to guarantee coverage to Americans even if they’re sick.
So when McMorris Rodgers says, “States know better than the federal government how to allocate and manage resources to address the needs of their people. Our plan allows states to serve and provide financial support directly to vulnerable populations, including people with preexisting conditions” ― we just wonder which state she plans on moving to.
-- 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 2 days ago.
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