Tag: obamacare

Texas Fold ‘Em | Take Care

Twenty states have filed another lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.  

Their complaint argues that 

  1. Congress has repealed the penalty for going without insurance 
  2. The ACA is still the law and still requires people to get insurance (there’s just no consequences anymore)
  3. A penalty-free mandate is unconstitutional (perhaps, but debatable) 
  4. And thus the court is required to invalidate the whole ACA.  

Bagely writes:  

What the case does, instead, is force the Trump administration to decide whether it will defend the ACA from constitutional attack. The Justice Department has an entrenched, longstanding, and bipartisan commitment to defending congressional statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense. It’s a bedrock convention of our constitutional structure, one that prevents the executive branch from using litigation strategy to undo Congress’s handiwork.

~*~

From Goldstein, A. (2018, June 7). Trump administration won’t defend ACA in case brought by GOP states. The Washington Post:

“In a brief filed in a Texas federal court and an accompanying letter to the House and Senate leaders of both parties, the Justice Department agrees in large part with the 20 Republican-led states that brought the suit. They contend that the ACA provision requiring most Americans to carry health insurance soon will no longer be constitutional and that, as a result, consumer insurance protections under the law will not be valid, either.

~*~

At this point it is important to remember that those consumer protections include

  • protection against refusal to provide insurance because of pre-existing conditions
  • control over premium increases
  • an end to lifetime and yearly limits on coverage
  • an end to insurance companies canceling your health insurance because you get sick
  • coverage of young adults under 25
  • guaranteed right to appeal your plan’s denial of payment
  • and end to denial of coverage for emergency care outside your health plan’s network
  • birth control coverage

~*~

Bagley writes,

But declining to defend the ACA could have implications for whether the Trump administration chooses to enforce it. That’s a question that has become urgent with Idaho’s decision to flout the law. Unless HHS intervenes, other states will likely follow its lead. It’d be much harder for HHS to step in if the Justice Department takes the position that the whole law is unconstitutional.

Texas Fold ‘Em | Take Care

justanotheridijiton:

justsomeantifas:

If you haven’t already heard, Donald Trump has slashed funding for advertising the Affordable Care Act enrollment period by 90%. He has also cut the funding for local organizations that help consumers navigate the buying process by 41%. The time period to enroll has also been cut in half, giving people only 6 weeks to sign up between: November 1, 2017 – December 15, 2017.

These cuts mean that less people will be aware of the enrollment period and less people will be insured. Less people uninsured will also mean a drive up in premiums, making insurance unaffordable for many more. This is an intentional move to make good on his promise to let the Affordable Care Act “implode,” but it will hurt many people in the process. Many people will unknowingly miss the enrollment period and we cannot let this happen. 

Since the president is unwilling to inform the citizens we must take action into our own hands. Spread awareness about open enrollment. I made the image above so you can save it and share it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever other forms of social media you might use. Tell your family and friends. Do whatever you can to make sure that people who need this information get this information. 

“Trump officials slash advertising, grants to help Americans get Affordable Care Act insurance” http://wapo.st/2wqOHHa?tid=ss_tw-bottom&utm_term=.cd0db9678aef

If you’re like me and do things last minute: be prepared before the deadline. To apply, you need things like:

  1. Who is in your family, their identifying info, including SSNs if they have them.
  2. Tax returns and other financial documents to estimate the household income from everyone on the house/family.
  3. If anyone in the family is enrolled in employer or state funded insurance plans like Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare, military or VA healthcare coverage, you’ll need that info and their policy numbers.
  4. If anyone in the family’s employers offer health insurance that they and your family are eligible to enroll in.
  5. If anyone in the family is covered by an employer based health plan, you will need to fill out a separate form and get information from their employer for it.

The specifics can be found here.

Sound overwhelming? Yeah, looking at this list makes me vaguely nauseous, too.

You can get help!

You can call here to get questions answered. 

You can look here for local people to help you through the process.

Source: justsomeantifas

Kasich, Pence spar over GOP Obamacare replacement bill

Gov. John Kasich’s statement on the Senate health care reform bill posted to his Twitter account on 7/14/17:

image

Vice President Mike Pence seemed to respond to Kasich’s criticism of the bill during a speech on Friday to the National Governors Association. Pence mentioned Kasich’s name….

“In Ohio alone,” Pence said, “nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck in waiting lists (for Medicaid), leaving them without the care they need for months or even years.” Although the transcript is not clear, Pence seemed to suggest that Kasich must be “very troubled” by that wait list.

But:

From: Republican governor calls VP Pence’s health care claims ‘false’ Ohio Gov. John Kasich called the plan “still unacceptable” because of its Medicaid cuts.Updated: JULY 15, 2017 — 9:08 AM EDT

The waiting lists Pence referred to apply to Medicaid’s home and community-based services, and have not been affected by the program’s expansion under the ACA. States have long had waiting lists for these services, and the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation’s executive vice president, Diane Rowland, noted that waiting lists in non-expansion states are often longer than in expansion states, which currently receive a 95 percent federal match for their newly covered beneficiaries.

Kasich spokesman Jon Keeling said in an interview that Pence’s suggestion that 60,000 disabled Ohioans remain on waiting lists “is not accurate,” adding that to suggest Medicaid expansion hurt the state’s developmentally disabled “system is false, as it is just the opposite of what actually happened.”

In fact, once they got through the transition, expanding Medicaid has been better for people with disabilities in Ohio:  (From Here’s how a bogus claim on Medicaid made it onto CBS, with no pushback by Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times)

In raw figures, Ohio raised the ceiling income for Medicaid eligibility for the aged, blind and disabled from $7,603 to $8,910. At the same time, the state liberalized the asset limit — that is, how much an enrollee could own outside of a car and house — to $2,000 from $1,500.

Kasich, Pence spar over GOP Obamacare replacement bill

Obamacare is only ‘exploding’ in red states

Want some points to argue against “Obamacare is imploding!” rhetoric?  The LA Times has an interesting article for you.

Basically, the probability of being in a county with only one insurance option for the exchanges increases significantly if you have a Republican governor. Not including North Carolina that has only had a Democratic governor since January, if you live in a state with a Democratic governor you have a “1.8% probability of only having a singer insurer” in the exchange.  If you live in a state with a Republican governor, “there is a 20.7%” chance.  

There “two main ways in which Republic governors have been effective in sabotaging Obamacare”:

Refusing to expand Medicaid:

  • which pulls many lower-income people out of the exchanges – “people who tend to be less healthy and have higher medical bills on average.”  
  • It reduces the risk to exchange insurers to have “this higher-cost population” out of the exchanges.

Neglecting to promote Obamacare:

  • less health people don’t need to be advertised to, they know they need insurance
  • more healthy people need the advertisement to buy into the system and balance out the risk.
  • fewer healthy people in the exchanges increases risk and decreases profitability for the insurers.

And thirdly, being a pain to work with doesn’t help:

  • Republican governors and insurance commissioners “were often less cooperative with insurance companies”
  • Democratic governors cajoled insurers to enter and stay and meet “reasonable regulatory concerns”

Obamacare is only ‘exploding’ in red states

Rep. Joe Kennedy III on Twitter

3/8/17

Rep Joe Kennedy III, partial transcript:

…it was the combination of mental health parity and the ACA that included mental health benefits as part of the essential health benefits package.  Parity just says that if you offer mental health benefits they have to be offered at the same way that physical health benefits are.  It doesn’t mandate the offering of mental health benefits.  With a combination of the repeal language that we see on page  8, means that mental health benefits are not required now by federal law.  They’re up to the states to actually impose.  

Rep. Joe Kennedy III on Twitter

Compare Key Elements of ACA Repeal and Replace Proposals with New Interactive Tool

catbirdseat4u:

autisticadvocacy:

A new interactive tool from the KFF enables users to create side-by-side comparisons of major ACA alternative plans

According to the Kaiser site, their tool also allows for comparisons with Ryancare-less (trademark to be registered just as soon as they decide about that hyphen).

So, click on the link to get this tool and educate yourself. It’s time to prepare for MAXIMUM PUSHBACK against the INFERIOR plans being proposed by all those TOOLS in Congress.

Go here:  http://kff.org/interactive/proposals-to-replace-the-affordable-care-act/

Traction, please.

Compare Key Elements of ACA Repeal and Replace Proposals with New Interactive Tool

Rep Tom Price – plans for medicaid as nominee for secretary of DHHS

What many people don’t yet know is that Price, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Trump have proposed making significant changes to Medicaid, the health insurance program that covers low-income people, including those with disabilities. These changes are not to make the program more efficient. Medicaid is significantly more efficient than private insurance; these changes are to finance tax cuts. The plan is to slowly reduce the dollars available, so that at the end of ten years, $1 trillion will have been cut from healthcare for poor people and people with disabilities.

Not surprisingly,  these cuts would be devastating.  What is more, the changes in how the system is run would  risk the fundamental right to freedom for people with significant disabilities.

…

But Price and many other members of Congress want to turn back the clock and undo all of our hard-fought gains. They seek a radical restructuring of Medicaid that will allow them to significantly cut funding to the program. They propose turning the program into a “block grant” or by instituting a “per capita cap,” meaning that states would receive a fixed amount of dollars, and the federal government would no longer provide oversight or incentives. The federal oversight and incentive programs are what have reformed state systems to move from institutional care to community-based services. The result would be dangerously reduced benefits that support the autonomy of people with disabilities.  

Here’s my two cents from working in health care:

This comes at the same time as repealing but not replacing the ACA.  The ACA has provisions to help fund rural and underserved area hospitals. The ACA expands the number of hospitals that qualify for Medicare Dependent Hospital (MDH) support – read rural poor hospitals here.  (The ACA mandate to expand Medicaid coverage in every state was supposed to help them out even further – but the Supreme Court blocked the mandate and the states got to choose.)  

Together cuts to Medicaid and repeal of the ACA leave people with disabling conditions even more underserved and at risk.  With these deep cuts, people will no longer be able to pay for care and care that is local to them is either likely to disappear or, if it’s still there, will be even less able to absorb the cost involved in providing services to people who can’t pay.    

And don’t forget, an average of half of enrollees in Medicaid are children.  Medicaid (along with CHIP and TEFRA) allows children with disabilities and chronic medical conditions to receive medical and therapeutic care that makes a huge difference in their lives.  It’s the great societal leveler that allows families who couldn’t afford it otherwise to access the kind of care that can make a huge difference in the child and family’s health and autonomy. Or just… continuance of life, to be honest.  If you want to know what the states are inclined to do with block grants without federal oversight, you have to look no further than Texas, that made $350 million in cuts in reimbursement to early childhood therapists just this December. 

Without decently funded Medicaid, it creates greater dependence on the school system to provide therapies – whose mandate is to only address those things that help the child benefit from instruction.  This comes at the same time as Betsy DeVos and her platform of vouchers and charter school, freeing up public funds for private schools.  Don’t forget, private schools are not mandated to serve children with disabilities.  The IDEA doesn’t cover private institutions.  Private schools can reject whatever student they want to.  Even public charter schools tend to discriminate against children with special education needs.  

And it’s all going to hit the rural poor first. 

Aetna claimed this summer that it was pulling out of all but four of the 15 states where it was providing Obamacare individual insurance because of a business decision — it was simply losing too much money on the Obamacare exchanges. Now a federal judge has ruled that that was a rank falsehood. In fact, says Judge John D. Bates, Aetna made its decision at least partially in response to a federal antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $37-billion merger with Humana. Aetna threatened federal officials with the pullout before the lawsuit was filed, and followed through on its threat once it was filed. Bates made the observations in the course of a ruling he issued Monday blocking the merger. Aetna executives had moved heaven and earth to conceal their decision-making process from the court, in part by discussing the matter on the phone rather than in emails, and by shielding what did get put in writing with the cloak of attorney-client privilege, a practice Bates found came close to “malfeasance.” The judge’s conclusions about Aetna’s real reasons for pulling out of Obamacare — as opposed to the rationalization the company made in public — are crucial for the debate over the fate of the Affordable Care Act. That’s because the company’s withdrawal has been exploited by Republicans to justify repealing the act. Just last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) cited Aetna’s action on the “Charlie Rose” show, saying that it proved how shaky the exchanges were. Bates found that this rationalization was largely untrue. In fact, he noted, Aetna pulled out of some states and counties that were actually profitable to make a point in its lawsuit defense — and then misled the public about its motivations.

U.S. judge finds that Aetna misled the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare – LA Times
(via shayera-librarian)

Guys, spread this far and fucking wide. They lied about losing money. The Republicans seized on that for their “failing Obamacare” fairy tale, and a judge just ruled that was bullshit.

(via drst)

Source: dendroica