Healthcare Content (Protest Instructions) >>>>>

[antelope19]

Fucking dick can't even apologize correctly.

:hereitisyousentimentalbastard

[mbw]

Oh by the way, this is a one-year extension which, shockingly, just happens to be a mid-term election year. What are the odds?!?

1 in 4

[runawayjimbo]

Fucking dick can't even apologize correctly.

Did he apologize? I must have missed that.

Oh by the way, this is a one-year extension which, shockingly, just happens to be a mid-term election year. What are the odds?!?

1 in 4

ZING!

[antelope19]

"An estimated 70% of doctors are boycotting Obamacare in California"

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/doctors-boycotting-californias-obamacare-exchange/article/2540272?utm_content=bufferd40a1&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

[antelope19]

Effective today

Employers with fewer than 100 workers won't have to provide health insurance until 2016 under Obamacare, as the administration said it would again delay a key requirement of the health law.

:shakehead:

[rowjimmy]

"An estimated 70% of doctors are boycotting Obamacare in California"

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/doctors-boycotting-californias-obamacare-exchange/article/2540272?utm_content=bufferd40a1&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

I'd click on your link but it goes to one of the most biased and least reputable sources of "news" in this town.

[antelope19]

"An estimated 70% of doctors are boycotting Obamacare in California"

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/doctors-boycotting-californias-obamacare-exchange/article/2540272?utm_content=bufferd40a1&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

I'd click on your link but it goes to one of the most biased and least reputable sources of "news" in this town.

That's from 2 months ago, but yes, I'd have to agree with you.  It's mostly garbage. 

The more recent info I posted today is really disheartening, IMO.

[sls.stormyrider]

from the New England Journal of Medicine

Beyond Repeal — A Republican Proposal for Health Care ReformTimothy Stoltzfus Jost, J.D.

By voting repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) over the past 4 years, Republicans have risked being identified as a party without a positive health policy agenda. On January 27, 2014, however, three Republican senators — Orrin Hatch (UT), Tom Coburn (OK), and Richard Burr (NC) — unveiled a proposal that would not only repeal the ACA, but also replace it with comprehensive legislation based on Republican health policy principles.1 Although the proposal recycles long-standing Republican prescriptions, it also offers new ideas.

The proposal would not entirely repeal the ACA. Republicans seem to be coming to terms with the fact that the ACA has permanently changed the health policy landscape. The proposal would, for example, retain the ACA's Medicare provisions in recognition, no doubt, of the difficulty of rolling back all the ACA's provider-payment changes or reopening the doughnut hole in Part D coverage of prescription drugs but also apparently in order to use the ACA's $700 billion in Medicare payment cuts to finance Republican initiatives. The proposed legislation would retain popular ACA insurance reforms, including the ban on lifetime insurance limits, required coverage for children up to 26 years of age on their parents' policies, mandated disclosure of insurance benefits and limitations, and a ban on canceling an enrollee's insurance policy except in the case of fraud. It would retain limits on age rating of insurance premiums, but insurers could charge five times as much for an older as for a younger enrollee, as opposed to the three-to-one ratio limit in the ACA.

The proposal would, like the ACA, use premium tax credits to make health coverage affordable for lower-income Americans. Unlike the ACA's tax credits, which are available to families with incomes of up to 400% of the federal poverty level ($95,400 for a family of four) and are based on the actual cost of health insurance in particular markets, the Republican proposal would help families with incomes of up to only 300% of the poverty level ($71,550), with phasing out beginning at 200%. The proposal would go beyond the ACA, however, by allowing employees of small businesses to use tax credits to purchase insurance through their employer, which would make small-group coverage more affordable.

The tax credits would be for flat dollar amounts, adjusted for age but not for regional cost variations. The amounts proposed would be adequate to purchase high-deductible coverage in some parts of the country but would fall far short of the actual cost of coverage in others.2 With the repeal of the ACA's cost-sharing reduction payments — which reduce deductibles and coinsurance — low-income families might find high-deductible insurance affordable but have trouble paying for actual health care services. Individuals would also still have to disclose personal information to the government to establish eligibility.

The proposal would reinstate premiums based on health status, with an important limit: such "medical underwriting" would not be permitted for any individual who maintained "continuous coverage" when moving from group to individual coverage or between individual or group plans. Americans who are currently uninsured would be given only a one-time opportunity to purchase coverage at a rate not based on their health status. The proposal would also provide federal support for state high-risk pools, although it would not ensure that premiums for those pools were affordable. Insurers could once again charge women more than men.

The proposal would repeal the unpopular individual mandate to obtain insurance coverage. The continuous-coverage requirement, however, would effectively impose another penalty for remaining uninsured: instead of paying a tax, individuals who failed to remain insured would risk facing increased — perhaps unaffordable — insurance premiums for the rest of their lives. There would be no exemption from this penalty for people who couldn't afford coverage, as there is from the ACA mandate.

The proposal would also allow states to "auto-enroll" individuals who were eligible for premium tax credits in health insurance plans, effectively signing them up for coverage without their consent, though allowing them subsequently to opt out. States would be responsible for working with insurers to create auto-enrollment plans that could be purchased for the value of the premium tax credit. The proposal also assumes that the states could auto-enroll people in Medicaid.

Auto-enrollment is an interesting idea. Although it would be technically challenging, it could result in significant coverage expansion. It is likely, however, that in many areas people would be auto-enrolled in very-high-deductible plans with limited benefits.

The proposal would eliminate the ACA's benefit mandates, including its limit on out-of-pocket costs. Eliminating mandates could make coverage more affordable but would also probably reduce the availability of some forms of coverage (e.g., coverage for maternity care, habilitation care, or mental health and substance-use-disorder care and, of course, for preventive services). Getting rid of out-of-pocket caps would increase Americans' financial insecurity and providers' uncompensated-care costs, although the ACA, with its high-cost-sharing plans, has not eliminated these problems.

The proposal would turn Medicaid into a block-grant program, refocusing it on "the low-income mother with children, or the elderly blind person — the kinds of individuals who Medicaid was originally designed to help."1 States would continue to receive federal matching funds for acute care coverage for the aged, blind, and disabled, but funding for pregnant women, children in low-income families, and long-term care would be capped, as would increases in future federal contributions. Medicaid for the working poor would be canceled. The proposal also calls for resurrecting Medicaid "health opportunity accounts" (which resemble health savings accounts), despite the fact that the 2005 demonstration project meant to test them was implemented only by South Carolina, which succeeded in signing up only two adults and three children.3

States would probably welcome greater flexibility for Medicaid programs but not decreased federal funding, which, unlike current funding, will not increase in economic downturns. Many current Medicaid recipients would be dropped from coverage (although they would most likely be eligible for premium tax credits), and those who remained would most likely face higher cost sharing.

The Republican proposal contains many long-standing Republican health care reform projects — more health savings accounts, association health plans for small businesses, interstate insurance sales, and malpractice reform. The proposal's estimate of the cost of "excessive tort litigation," at $589 billion, is more than 40 times the 0.5% of health care costs that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates could be saved by malpractice reform, but the proposal does focus on providing compensation to victims and not just liability protections for providers.4

The most controversial element of the proposal is its cap on the currently unlimited exclusion from an employee's taxes of the cost of employer-sponsored coverage. The proposal would cap the tax exclusion at 65% of the cost of an average health plan. The employer-sponsored coverage exclusion is currently the largest tax expenditure in the federal budget, and economists have long argued that it distorts the market for health insurance coverage and is more beneficial for higher-income than lower-income taxpayers.

Capping the exclusion would result in a reduction in employer coverage and a substantial tax increase for individuals who retained such coverage. The CBO estimates, for example, that capping the exclusion at 50% of average health plan cost would mean that 6 million Americans would no longer have job-related coverage (comparable to projected employer-coverage losses under the ACA) and an average annual tax increase of about $500 per person by 2019.5

Our health care system is unfathomably complex. Any reform will inevitably disrupt current arrangements and create winners and losers, as we are seeing with the ACA. The Republican proposal will give an advantage to some Americans and will put others at a disadvantage. In my opinion, Senators Hatch, Coburn, and Burr are to be commended, however, for moving beyond simply demanding repeal and putting out a proposal, the effects of which can now be debated.

[VA $l!m]

k, i'm going to post in this thread  even though im not sure if it is 100% relevant to the topic, but i just saw a piece on STEWART i hope some of you might have caught tonight.
The piece on Medicare expansion in conservative states is actually something i have been wishing i would have written in to the Daily Show about in hopes they would talk about it. luckily they did it on their own. go John!

anyway, i'll try and repost my own topic later when i have the strength, but i just wanted to get something down here while i was thinking about it.

basically people like myself are getting fucked up the a$$ by conservatives in our red states just to make a political point. nothing new i guess, smh.
but as the piece said, these are treatable conditions many of us have but we have absolutely no way of getting treatment on our own through clinics or whatever other BS the conservatives suggest. we simply have been relegated to going to the emergency room over and over again until we are dead.

the most idiotic part of the whole situation is that many of us would actually be able to regain function with simple treatments and therefore be able to re-enter a more productive role in society, IE working and paying taxes. so in the long run this is actually  much much more of a burden on the economics of the country.

i know im not being very eloquent here, i apologize, my focus is thin ATM, but the fact my state, a relatively poor state, is turning down Gov't funding (millions) that has  already been approved to expand medicade for the sole purpose of sticking it to OBAMA, should be considered criminal, if not seditious action IMO.
we're talking about TAX dollars every person in my state pays to the FEderal Gov't that they are trying to  giving back to us to save hundreds of thousands of sick people but b/c of a few fucking pieces of shit backed by corporations we are being marginalized into death.
simple HUMAN COMMODITIES, pawns in a game.

when i first lost my physical ability to function and work 4 years ago, if i had been given very inexpensive treatment and care such as physical therapy, there could have been a insanely better chance of me recovering and rejoining the workforce.
instead i have been bounced around, fastracked through a public health system designed to eject patients as fast as possible, and denied disability b/c i was unable to prove to a judge my condition when the catch 22 is that i could not afford to discover the proper evidence needed b/c i cant get any care. (srry for the run on)... hopefully you could follow.

k, pain is too much, ill try and revise later,.

i just hope people are aware that this is complete insanity. we are killing off our workforce and tax payers. this model of bullshit has literally zero sustainability.
eventually these idiots will have no more of us to take advantage of and then what will they do for commodities?

[antelope19]

What a mess......

After five and a half months of dragging feet, dodging accountability, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, allowing nearly 80,000 Marylanders to lose their health coverage, AND even claiming the site is 'functional for most people', the O'Malley-Brown administration will now "likely dump all or part of the state's health insurance exchange website and adopt Connecticut's system, a move that could make it the first state to abandon an dysfunctional site.

[sls.stormyrider]

Slim, you are 100% correct

and, to both posts above, this is not a failure of ACA/ Obamacare but a failure of local implentation (in the case of MD) combined with the SC ruiling and politicians doing things for political and idealogic purposes as opposed to what is best for the residents of the state.

Not that I'm against local control, etc, I'm not. I'm just making the point that if the Feds say you can do something on you're own instead of us doing it, and the solution by local business or local govt sucks, that's not the Feds fault.

[VDB]

Tennessee state senator compares signing up for Obamacare to Nazi 'train rides for Jews'

Tennessee state Senator Stacey Campfield is coming under bipartisan fire for his "Thought of the Day" post on his blog.

"Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory [sic] sign ups for 'train rides' for Jews in the 40s," he wrote today.

Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Roy Herron responded in a statement that "Senator Campfield's blog post this morning is just the latest example of Tea Party Republican extremism. To compare attempts to save American lives through access to healthcare with Nazis killing European Jews is outrageous, pathetic, and hateful."

"Sen. Campfield and other Tea Party Republicans," he continued, "ought to look at the 5,000 Tennesseans who will die within the next 3 years because Tea Party Republicans refused to take the 100% federal funding to expand Medicaid and have denied working Tennesseans access to healthcare."

Campfield's fellow Republicans were no more supportive. In a statement, GOP Chairman Chris Devaney wrote that "[w]hile Stacey Campfield routinely makes remarks that are over the top, today's comments are ignorant and repugnant."

"No political or policy disagreement should ever be compared to the suffering endured by an entire generation of people. Those comments have no place in our public discourse. He should offer an apology to members of the Jewish faith immediately."

At this time, Campfield has yet to issue an apology, but he did speak to WKRN, saying that he "is not minimizing loss of life" in Nazi Germany," but that "it is not an accurate portrayal for the administration to brag and signups for Obamacare when it's mandatory."

"When you control people's health, you control their lives and if they live or die," he added.

[sls.stormyrider]

wow

at least the states GOP chairman called him out.

I also have issues with the last sentence, but it pales compared to his main point.

[VDB]

I also have issues with the last sentence

Say what you will about compelling people to buy health insurance and whether that violates some inalienable freedom of ours, but it's still a far cry from "government-run healthcare" and "death panels" -- not that you'd know it from listening to the right.

[sls.stormyrider]

the irony is that the "ethics panel / end of life consultation" which became "the death panel" was proposed by a republican. Not that any of them would come clean at this point