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Showing posts with the label Affordable Care Act

The Supremes speak

So, this just happened. Justices Back Federal Health Care Subsidy - New York Times headline The Supreme Court has spoken. Does that mean that the opponents of the Affordable Care Act will finally accept reality and beat their swords into plowshares? Not likely. Just read the statements of the Republican candidates for the presidency in response to the decision. They've spent years enflaming their base with hatred for this law. To give up now would be to disappoint that base that the candidates need for a primary win. So, no doubt the fiery, intemperate rhetoric will continue.  But, for now, the health care of millions of Americans is safe. And that is a good thing.

All the "skewed" numbers (With update 04/11/14)

I've been bemused but not really surprised at the reaction of the right-wingers to the news last week that the Affordable Care Act had blown right past the stated goal of 7 million people signed up for private insurance under the new insurance exchanges by the deadline of March 31. The figure announced last week was 7.1 million. The revised figure announced yesterday was actually 7.5 million. And what has been the right's response to this? The same as their response to inconvenient facts like evolution or climate change. Denial, of course! "It's all a lie! They are cooking the books." These are the same people who spent the last two months of the presidential campaign in 2012 insisting that all those polls that showed Obama ahead were somehow "skewed." They went to great efforts to "unskew" them and show that, actually, Romney was well in the lead and would win by a landslide. One of the people who believed that was Mitt Romney himself. He was ...

Stupidity reigns - even in the doctor's office

One of my daughters tells a story about her friend who recently visited her doctor's office here in the Houston area. A prominent sign in the doctor's waiting room proclaimed, "WE DO NOT ACCEPT OBAMACARE!" Which just goes to prove that apparently you don't have to be very smart or well-informed to be a doctor. I'm not sure I would want to trust my life to that particular doctor. The thing about the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is that the insurance is provided by private insurance companies. Contrary to the lies told by its opponents, it is not government-provided insurance. The government mandates that the insurance policies must meet certain standards and must provide a minimum of services and, in the case of some low income people who qualify, it will provide subsidies to help pay the premiums. But the insurance policy itself comes from Blue Cross or Cigna or some other private insurance company and that is what the person's insurance card will s...

Have you heard the good news about Obamacare?

The national media, especially that portion of it that is located inside the Washington beltway, seem to have completely adopted the Republican line on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. It's a "train wreck." The website is a disaster. Repeal is inevitable. But if you get past the front pages where all these horror stories appear, you may find quite a different tale, buried somewhere on page six. This week, for example, we saw headlines like these: No big drop in Obamacare support and Obamacare enrollments surging and HealthCare.gov website working better The stories that appear beneath these headlines detail the fact that support for the health care program is holding essentially steady, that enrollments in the program during the first two weeks of November were more than twice what they were for the entire month of October, and, finally, that the glitch-prone website is now working for at least 90 percent of its visitors. These are all hopeful signs that point to t...

Cruelty as a governing philosophy

One in four people in Texas do not have medical insurance. That is the highest rate of any state in the country. These people suffer every day because they cannot afford to go to the doctor when they are sick or their children or sick. When things get bad enough, they wind up at overcrowded emergency rooms and, ultimately, we all pay the bills for that care - if in fact the hospitals get paid at all. The state government of Texas had an opportunity to cure part of this problem by expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, but that wouldn't fit with their philosophy. That philosophy, to sum it up in one word, is cruelty. Cruelty toward anyone who isn't a millionaire and who isn't able to contribute large sums of money to their political campaigns. Indeed, it is not enough for Rick Perry to reject the expansion of Medicaid and deny its benefits to about a million needy Texans. No, he wants to restrict the current very limited Medicaid program in Texas even further. Th...

Bring on the stupid

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act this week along with the government shutdown orchestrated by the tea party Republicans has surely brought out some of the most world class stupid reactions recently seen on our political stage. When you consider all the vast stupidity that has occurred in the political arena in recent years, you begin to get a true idea of just how insane this week's actors on the stage have shown themselves to be. I think the one who tops my own personal list - and, admittedly, he has lots of competition - is Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R. - Texas, of course!) berating a park ranger at the World War II Memorial and telling her that she should be ashamed of herself because the memorial was closed. As if she personally had made the decision to close the memorial when, in fact, it was Neugebauer and his fellow tea party posse members who locked those gates. Neugebauer and other tea partiers, like Michele Bachmann, who showed up to have their pictures taken wi...

Can the U.S. catch up to Rwanda?

The one thing that many people know about the country of Rwanda is that there was a terrible genocide there in 1994. Over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu people were killed in the awful conflict which roiled the country at that time. Since 1994, Rwanda has been ruled by one man, Paul Kagame. At first he was the de facto leader and then in elections in 2000 he was selected as the country's president. He has been in power since then. His regime is autocratic and repressive and doesn't really brook criticism from any source. He is justifiably excoriated for his record of suppressing dissent. Paradoxically, he is also considered one of the most effective leaders in Africa. His country is safe and clean and relatively free of government corruption. Per capita income has tripled in 18 years, average life expectancy has increased by 10 years ( 10 years! ), deaths of children under 5 have dropped by half in five years, and malaria deaths have dropped by roughly two-thirds. The remarka...

Time to move on

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The Kaiser Family Foundation has been polling the public regarding reaction to last week's Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of  the Affordable Care Act. Guess what they found? It seems that most people (56%) are ready to move on .  They believe that opponents of the law should stop trying to overturn it and start addressing other burning issues facing the country. (Click on image to enlarge it.) So now I guess we can expect the Republican Tea Party to stop throwing its hissy fit and move on to things like shoring up our decaying infrastructure; creating jobs to help pull the economy out of its depression; finally acknowledging and taking steps to slow the heating up of the planet; creating more effective oversight of Wall Street and financial institutions; working to make sure that the food and drugs consumed by Americans are safe; providing more and better support for the public school system in this country; working to protect the rights of voters and to ensure ...

The conflicted court

The Supreme Court of the United States has appeared less and less supreme in recent years. Not that its power to interpret the Constitution has been impaired but that its interpretations have seemed more and more politically partisan and less and less actually based on the rule of law. Two high points of this politically partisan court are usually cited by its critics as evidence of its right-wing bias. The first, of course, was the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 that stopped the count of votes in Florida and substituted the Court's own vote for the popular vote of the people in that year's presidential election. The reasoning behind this decision was so flawed and convoluted that even those who wrote it (Scalia) stipulated that it could not be cited as precedent in any other case. The second was the notorious Citizens United decision which declared that corporations have the same rights as people! In fact, in the view of the Court, they have even more rights than people becaus...