“Deciduous Tree Rot”: McConnell Should Be Removed “Root And Branch”
In Kentucky, the federal health care exchange created by the Affordable Care Act is called Kynect. Kynect is very popular, but ObamaCare is very unpopular. So it goes.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to rip up ObamaCare “root and branch” and toss it in the mulch pile, but he doesn’t want to do a thing to Kynect because it has already given more than 400,000 Kentuckians health insurance, many for the first time. Of course, since Kynect and ObamaCare are actually two words for the same thing, it isn’t possible to kill one without killing the other.
The Lexington Herald-Leader explains:
Repeal the federal law, which McConnell calls “Obamacare,” and the state exchange would collapse.
Kynect could not survive without the ACA’s insurance reforms, including no longer allowing insurance companies to cancel policies when people get sick or deny them coverage because of pre-existing conditions, as well as the provision ending lifetime limits on benefit payments. (Kentucky tried to enact such reforms in the 1990s and found out we were too small a market to do it alone.)
Kentucky’s exchange also could not survive without the federal funding and tax credits that are helping 300,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians gain access to regular preventive medicine, including colonoscopies, mammograms and birth control without co-pays.
As a result of a law that McConnell wants to repeal, one in 10 of his constituents no longer have to worry that an illness or injury will drive them into personal bankruptcy or a premature grave.
Repealing the federal law would also end the Medicaid expansion that is enabling Kentucky to expand desperately needed drug treatment and mental health services.
Kynect is the Affordable Care Act is Obamacare — even if Kentuckians are confused about which is which.
The Herald-Leader goes on to wonder how average Kentuckians are supposed to understand the Affordable Care Act if Mitch McConnell doesn’t understand (or pretends not to understand) it himself.
The answer to that is pretty easy. If Kentuckians start with the presumption that nothing that Mitch McConnell says about Kynect or ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act is true, they will be much less confused. If they like Kynect, then they like ObamaCare and the Affordable Care Act. If they like it, they should vote out Mitch McConnell and prevent him from removing their benefits “root and branch.”
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 28, 2014
“If You Vote For A Republican…Beware”: Republican Governors Show Their True Colors Turning Down Billions In Medicaid Expansion
In a 2012 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states could decide to take the Medicaid expansion or not. In a purely political, but predictable move, Republican governor after Republican governor chose to say no to Medicaid expansion for their states even though their community hospitals are bursting at the seams.
Why would any elected official turn down free health care dollars for its citizens? These 24 Republican governors would prefer to say no to billions of federal dollars that would provide healthcare coverage for millions of destitute folks, than take funds from the Obama administration. They claim their states could not afford the expansions. The truth is that the federal government pays 100 percent of the cost the first three years and then at least 90 percent thereafter. Hate truly is stronger than compassion in the GOP and it is costing the party their logic, reason and good business sense. When you turn down health care for millions of citizens, billions of dollars and job creation out of spite, you are not representing the best interests of your constituents.
Many Republicans say they don’t think the government should be involved in keeping its citizens healthy through a government-provided healthcare system. My question is why is it OK for great government health care to be provided to these elected Republicans but it’s not OK to provide for our American people?
Rick Perry, governor of Texas, turned down the Medicaid expansion that would have created 200,000 new jobs in addition to insuring millions of people. As a result of his selfish ideology, Texas will lose more than $9 billion.
In Florida, the healthcare company Columbia/HCA, was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud while Rick Scott, prior to being governor, was CEO. Now Scott doesn’t want to let Florida’s citizens receive the benefits from the Medicaid expansion. Florida will lose $5 billion.
If Louisiana accepted the ACA provisions and expanded Medicaid, 240,000 people would be eligible for affordable care, yet Governor Bobby Jindal refused.
Gov. Mary Fallin and legislative leaders also rejected the expansion of Medicaid coverage for approximately 175,000 uninsured Oklahomans leaving the state with no viable overall healthcare plan.
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett’s decision not to accept the expansion will leave $500 million in federal funds on the table in 2014. These funds could provide health care for 500,000 people, a financial boost to hospitals and local healthcare providers, and create upwards of 35,000 jobs.
Likewise, Governor Christi of New Jersey vetoed a bill that would permanently establish the Medicaid expansion.
By 2022, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia will all lose more than $2 billion each.
Expanding Medicaid coverage costs less than 1 percent of the state budgets on average, while not accepting the funds are leading to state budget shortfalls and health facilities closures.
While the Republicans are quick to send our military into harm’s way, they are less eager to take care of them when they return home.
About 1.3 million veterans are uninsured nationwide. According to a report by Pew, approximately 258,600 of these veterans are living below the poverty line in states refusing to expand Medicaid. Without veteran’s benefits and with incomes too low to qualify for subsidies to use state exchanges, these veterans are left without affordable coverage options.
State governors owe the best health care available to their citizens whether veterans, indigent or just the sick. But, that isn’t what these Republican governors are doing. They are placing their political ideology over their citizens’ health.
The states with the most uninsured and the poorest people are the same states refusing to take federal funds to help their people. Instead of embracing the Medicaid expansion, they are shunning it as if it was a plague. While taxpayers in all states fund the Medicaid expansion, only people in half the states are reaping the advantages of those tax dollars, jobs and medical benefits — the states with Democratic governors.
Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, on the day after the Affordable Care Act of 2010 was signed into law, appointed a task force to prepare his state to accept more Medicaid money and establish rules on how it would be spent. Its program will offer 300 insurance options provided by 12 private insurance companies and nine managed-care systems. These aren’t government programs but private ones — just like the coverage carried today by millions of Americans.
Governor Beshear (D) of Kentucky has made the Medicaid expansion a key component of his administration. He quickly accepted ACA realizing that the 640,000 uninsured Kentuckians would be able to get insurance through Medicaid expansion and coverage through the health benefit exchanges.
Every American citizen over the voting age of 18 has the right to vote for a Democrat, a Republican or someone from one of the smaller parties. But, if you vote for a Republican… beware of what you might lose as a result.
By: Gerry Myers, CEO, President and Co-founder of Advisory Link; The Huffington Post Blog, May 26, 2014
“The Human Consequences”: Cost Of The Medicaid Expansion Rejection In Lives As Well As Dollars
The more research that is done on the human toll of denying people health insurance, the easier it is to place a price in lives as well as dollars of decisions like that made by nearly half the states to reject the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act. At Politico Magazine (in a piece given the wonderful, Celine-esque title, “Death on the Installment Plan”) Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago utilizes the findings of last week’s study on the lives saved by RomneyCare in Massachusetts to make some suggestions for those that might be saved by making Medicaid available to more non-elderly adults:
As a matter of fiscal policy, [rejecting the Medicaid expansion] makes little sense. The federal government would initially cover 100 percent of the costs. Its share will gradually drop to 90 percent over the coming years. Over the next decade, the federal government will cover more than 95 percent of the Medicaid expansion’s total cost. Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the ACA raises state expenditures on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) by only 1.6 percent, when compared with what expenditures would have been in the absence of health reform.
Even the above figures overstate states’ true fiscal burden, since these federal dollars would cover many services such as mental health care, public hospital services and services to the correctional population that would otherwise be supported by states and localities. Medicaid expansion is a significant economic stimulus to the states that have adopted it. Even in deeply conservative states such as Texas, the expansion is strongly supported by the medical community, hospitals, cities and localities and other key constituencies.
Texas and other huge states like Florida are leaving tens of billions of dollars on the table. When asked to give an accounting of themselves, officials offer flimsy justifications to evade two obvious realities: First, Republican politicians do not want to embrace the centerpiece domestic policy achievement of the Obama presidency. Second, many of these same politicians display conspicuously tepid concern for the wellbeing of the expansion’s most obvious beneficiaries: poor, nonwhite, politically marginal residents of their own states….
Nearly 5 million low-income Americans are income-eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, yet live in states that now reject the Medicaid expansion. Within this rather small but critical low-income population, that same one-per-830 estimate [made in the Massachusetts study] implies that almost 5,800 people will die every year as a result of being left uninsured. That’s only an estimate. It may overestimate—or underestimate—the true human consequences. In my view, there’s no escaping the fact that partisan opposition to the ACA is costing thousands of actual human lives every year.
That’s a hell of a toll for scoring an ideological point.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 12, 2014
“Inventing A Failure”: Republican Lies, Damned Lies And In This Case, Bogus Statistics
Last week, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked?
You aren’t, but you should be. Mainstream politicians didn’t always try to advance their agenda through lies, damned lies and — in this case — bogus statistics. And the fact that this has become standard operating procedure for a major party bodes ill for America’s future.
About that report: The really big policy news of 2014, at least so far, is the spectacular recovery of the Affordable Care Act from its stumbling start, thanks to an extraordinary late surge that took enrollment beyond early projections. The age mix of enrollees has improved; insurance companies are broadly satisfied with the risk pool. Multiple independent surveys confirm that the percentage of Americans without health insurance has already declined substantially, and there’s every reason to believe that over the next two years the act will meet its overall goals, except in states that refuse to expand Medicaid.
This is a problem for Republicans, who have bet the ranch on the proposition that health reform is an unfixable failure. “Nobody can make Obamacare work,” declared Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, a couple of weeks ago (when it was already obvious that it was working pretty well). How can they respond to good news?
Well, they could graciously admit that they were wrong, and offer constructive suggestions about how to make the law work even better. Oh, sorry — I forgot that I wasn’t writing jokes for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
No, they have in fact continued to do what they’ve been doing ever since the news on Obamacare started turning positive: sling as much mud as possible at health reform, in the hope that some of it sticks. Premiums were soaring, they declared, when they have actually come in below projections. Millions of people were losing coverage, they insisted, when the great bulk of those whose policies were canceled simply replaced them with new policies. The Obama administration was cooking the books, they cried (projection, anyone?). And, of course, they keep peddling horror stories about people suffering terribly from Obamacare, not one of which has actually withstood scrutiny.
Now comes the latest claim — that many of the people who signed up for insurance aren’t actually paying their premiums. Obviously this claim is part of a continuing pattern. It also, however, involves a change in tactics. Previous attacks on Obamacare were pretty much fact-free; this time the claim was backed by an actual survey purporting to show that a third of enrollees hadn’t paid their first premium.
But the survey was rigged. (Are you surprised?) It asked insurers how many enrollees had paid their first premium; it ignored the fact that the first premium wasn’t even due for the millions of people who signed up for insurance after March 15.
And the fact that the survey was so transparently rigged is a smoking gun, proving that the attacks on Obamacare aren’t just bogus; they’re deliberately bogus. The staffers who set up that survey knew enough about the numbers to skew them, which meant that they have to have known that Obamacare is actually doing O.K.
So why are Republicans doing this? Sad to say, there’s method in their fraudulence.
First of all, it fires up the base. After this latest exercise in deception, we can be fairly sure that Republican leaders know perfectly well that Obamacare has failed to fail. But the party faithful don’t. Like anyone who writes about these issues, I get vast amounts of mail from people who know, just know, that insurance premiums are skyrocketing, that far more people have lost insurance because of Obummercare than have gained it, that all the horror stories are real, and that anyone who says otherwise is just a liberal shill.
Beyond that, the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans know that more than eight million people enrolled in health exchanges; but it also found a majority of respondents believing that this was below expectations, and that the law was working badly.
So Republicans are spreading disinformation about health reform because it works, and because they can — there is no sign that they pay any political price when their accusations are proved false.
And that observation should scare you. What happens to the Congressional Budget Office if a party that has learned that lying about numbers works takes full control of Congress? What happens if it regains the White House, too? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 4, 2014
“GOP Governors Hurting Their Own”: The Latest Plot To Undermine Obamacare And Prevent Millions From Enrolling In Medicaid
It’s actually quite easy to explain. The reason why 19 states have refused to expand Medicaid has nothing to do with the cost — the federal government would cover the full cost of the expansion for the next two years, then 95 percent of the cost thereafter. It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with a lack of need for such a solution. This, as with the refusal to establish health care marketplaces (exchanges), has everything to do with Obama Derangement Syndrome — Republican governors who refuse for a variety of cheap political excuses to attach their names to Obamacare. By doing so, they’re hurting their own people, including Republican voters by numbers into the hundreds of thousands per state.
The Affordable Care Act originally mandated that all states expand Medicaid eligibility from 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) to 138 percent of FPL. In other words, the government had previously established an income threshold for what constituted poverty: below the line and you’re considered poor and therefore eligible for certain safety-net benefits; above the line and you’re more or less on your own. But Obamacare raised the poverty threshold to qualify for Medicaid coverage, thus expanding Medicaid nationwide — until the Supreme Court ruled against that part of the law in 2012, allowing states to opt out of the expansion.
That’s a massive problem.
4.8 million Americans have incomes higher than the 100 percent threshold, so they don’t qualify for Medicaid without the expansion, but they don’t earn enough to qualify for health insurance premium subsidies through the marketplaces. The ACA was written with a nationwide Medicaid expansion in mind so the law’s premium subsidies only kick in where Medicaid coverage was supposed to leave off, after 138 percent of FPL. Hence the coverage gap.
In Kansas alone, home of climate and science denier Gov. Sam Brownback, there are 77,000 residents trapped in the coverage gap. 77,000 people who have no choice but to go without insurance and medical care, all because Brownback refuses to touch Obamacare with a 10-foot pole, either because of his raging ODS or because he and his fellow red state governors prefer to sabotage the law or both.
By the way, Medicaid expansion in Kansas is supported by 59 percent… of Republicans. Republicans! It’s supported by 72 percent of all voters.
In Georgia, there are around 400,000 residents in the gap, and no sign that Gov. Nathan Deal will participate in the expansion in spite of the fact that 54 percent of Georgians support it. 400,000 is a lot of people, and they’re being denied insurance in order for Deal to prove his quality to the extreme flank of his party.
In fact, Brownback and Deal are so maniacal about blocking the very popular expansion of Medicaid, they’re each lining up to sign recently passed legislation that would block future Democratic governors from expanding Medicaid without the approval of the solidly GOP state legislatures in each state.
In other words, GOP lawmakers have taken steps to guarantee that many of their poorest residents will remain uninsured under the health care reform law, no matter what happens in the gubernatorial election.
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) both oppose Medicaid expansion. They both look likely — if not quite certain — to win re-election in November. That should make the bills passed by their respective state lawmakers unnecessary, but they seem intent on guarding against even the remote possibility of a Democratic governor.
Actually, the possibility of Democratic victories aren’t as remote as Talking Points Memo reported. Polls in both races are neck-and-neck, with PPP showing a slight advantage for the Democratic challengers to Brownback and Deal, Paul Davis in Kansas and state senator Jason Carter (grandson of former President Carter) in Georgia. And there it is: a possible explanation for the laws.
This is how far they’re reaching to stymie evil, evil Obamacare. Not only are they refusing to create state-run exchanges, oddly ceding state power to the federal government, but they’re refusing to allow the expansion of Medicaid, even though they don’t have to spend a penny to do it — worse, they’re passing laws that will prevent others from doing it, too. It’s yet another way to sabotage the law in a long list of plots to undermine it.
So, what are the consequences?
On Wednesday, the Orlando Weekly published the explosive and infuriating story of Charlene Dill, a struggling, 32-year-old mother of three who collapsed and died on a stranger’s floor late last month. According to Weekly reporter Billy Manes, Dill suffered from a treatable heart condition. She also fell into what policy experts call the Medicaid coverage gap–a hole the Supreme Court punctured in the health safety net when seven of its justices rendered the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion entirely voluntary.
We have no choice but to call this what it is: death by Obama Derangement Syndrome.
By: Bob Cesca, Managing Editor for The Daily Banter; Published in The Huffington Post, April 28, 2014
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