President Obama made a special appearance at Funny or Die’s studios and was interviewed by non other than comedian Zach Galifianakis. You just know this was not going to turn out well or, maybe it did.
The no holds bar interview touched on all the hot topics of the day; where’s the birth certificate, being born in Kenya, why Michele Obama married a nerd, etc. Just all the normal things the American public is interested in.
Questions like, “Is it going to be hard in two years, when you’re no longer President and people will stop letting you win at basketball?” And, “so how does this work, do you send Ambassador Rodman to North Korea on your behalf? I read somewhere that you’d be sending Hulk Hogan to Syria or is that more of a job for Tonya Harding?”
But there was a point to all this. Coming up on the March deadline for enrolling in the Affordable Care Act, the president brought the attention back to healthcare.
“That’s the thing that doesn’t work?” Zach asked.
All in all, a very funny piece from Funny or Die, and definitely a must see.
Obamacare has not yet turned America into a nation of part-time workers, as many of its strongest critics have long said it would.
In fact, the opposite seems to be happening, according to new government numbers published Friday: The number of part-time jobs is actually shrinking, and full-time jobs are being created instead.
Specifically, the number of part-time workers in the U.S. fell in February to about 27.3 million, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. That number is down by about 300,000 since March 2010, when the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, became law.
Meanwhile, the ranks of full-time workers have grown by more than 2 million within the past year to 117.8 million in February. The number of part-time workers fell by about 230,000 over that period.
Republicans argue that Obamacare’s decree that businesses must give full-time workers health-care coverage will cause a bunch of jobs to switch from full-time to part-time. And a handful of employers have actually cut worker hours because of Obamacare.
But the majority of those cutting hours are in the struggling public sector — state and local governments. In the private sector, the chief financial officers of 500 companies recently said that Obamacare will have a limited impact on their hiring decisions.
This law is helping Americans and the economy in more ways than one, so Republicans are determined, now more than ever, to repeal the darn thing before its positive effects are felt by all.
A new report by The Cimmerce Deoartment is sayint that The Affordable Care Act, President Barack Barack Obama’s signature health law, is already boosting household income and spending.
The Commerce Department reported Monday that consumer spending rose a better-than-expected 0.4% and personal incomes climbed 0.3% in January. The new health-care law accounted for a big chunk of the increase on both fronts.
On the incomes side, the law’s expanded coverage boosted Medicaid benefits by an estimated $19.2 billion, according to Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The ACA also offered several refundable tax credits, including health insurance premium subsidies, which added up to $14.7 billion.
Taken together, the Obamacare provisions are responsible for about three-quarters of January’s overall rise in Americans’ incomes.
Why are Republicans against people taking their health decisions into their own hands? Why are they so against Americans paying their own way? Why do they insist on taking away our health care and replacing it with nothing?
Besides them just being evil, who knows?
Meanwhile, Americans are enjoying the benefits of living more health conscious lives, now that they’re finally able to afford healthcare.
Some 700,000 people have enrolled in Obamacare so far in February, raising total enrollment to roughly 4 million with a little more than a month to go before the sign-up deadline expires to get insurance this year.
The new figures for state and federal exchanges released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday illustrate participation in the sweeping initiative continues to grow steadily, a point raised by President Barack Obama at a White House event later in the day.
A new poll is showing stronger acceptance of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Fifty six percent of those polled accept or are in favor of the bill while thirty one percent want it reoealed.
The poll shows that 48 percent want to keep and improve the law, and another eight percent want to keep it as is — for a total of 56 percent who want to keep it. (50 percent of independents want to keep and fix.)
Meanwhile, 19 percent want to repeal the law and not replace it, while 12 percent want to repeal and replace with a GOP alternative — totaling 31 percent.
Back in October Kaiser found that 37 percent want repeal/replace or just repeal, versus 47 percent who want to keep/expand it. There was a temporary spike for repeal in December, at the height of the problems; now it appears to be back down to below where it was.
The subject of the latest debunked Obamacare horror story is finally talking, and of course it’s to Fox News.
Julie Boonstra is a Michigan resident with leukemia, and she appeared in an Americans For Prosperity ad against Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Gary Peters, saying that Obamacare made her cancer treatment unaffordable because of out of pocket spending. Subsequent fact checking, though, found that her monthly premium payments were essentially cut in half, and the limits the law imposes on out of pocket expenses means that at worse, she’d break even between those costs and her premium saving.
The ad also implied she lost access to her doctor, though fact checking determined that her doctor is included in the plan she picked on the exchange.
So with no real basis to the story she presented in the ad, how does Boonstra respond? The only way she can, the way Republicans always go, playing the victim.
“They’re not scaring me. Cancer scares me,” she said. “I battle cancer every day. They’re not going to intimidate me.” […]
“Under my old policy, I knew what I could afford every single month because I wasn’t hit with extra charges. Now I don’t know what I have to pay month to month,” she said. “Leukemia tests are extremely expensive.”
Just to set the record straight, pointing out factual inconsistencies is not intimidation. No one is saying that Boonstra isn’t experiencing real angst over having to change health insurance in the middle of her fight with cancer. No one is diminishing her fight with cancer, they’re just pointing out some basic truths which show that her story just doesn’t add up.
And as Brian Beutler points out, if the Koch brothers achieved what they’re trying to with this and other ads—repeal—then she would really become a victim. The protections she now has under this law—to never be kicked off her health insurance plan, to never have to worry about having health coverage because of her leukemia, having her annual out of pocket expenses limited, and never having to worry about reaching an annual or lifetime cap where her coverage is just cut off—would be gone if the campaign she’s participating in succeeds. Which is, yes, insane.
If Boonstra is a victim, she’s the willing victim of the Koch brothers and AFP who would ultimately throw her to the wolves. But if she hates the law that much, fine, whatever. What she’s doing, though, jeopardizes every other cancer patient in the nation.
Millions of Americans have already signed up for affordable health insurance through HealthCare.gov.
But millions more are eligible for new or improved coverage. And if you’re one of them, make sure you get covered before March 31st.
President Obama recorded a message just for you — watch it now, then go to HealthCare.gov. Make sure you stick around for the end for a special surprise:
The Obama administration on Wednesday released its monthly update on health insurance enrollment under the Affordable Care Act. Nearly 3.3 million Americans enrolled in private health plans through Obamacare’s state and federal marketplaces from October through February 1, with 1.1 million signing up in January alone. The data comes on the same day that a Gallup survey found that the U.S. uninsurance rate has hit a five-year low:
“We’re seeing a healthy growth in enrollment,” said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a conference call with reporters. According to Sebelius, an additional 6.6 million Americans have been deemed eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP) during the first four months of the open enrollment period.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane… it’s… JON STEWART! The Comedian who does a better job reporting actual news than the so-called seasoned “journalists!”
Let the debunking begin!
Okay. Okay. This one was easy. The debunking in this case had to do with a recent CBO report that Conservatives and even some on CNN took and run with. The report claimed that because of Obamacare or the ACA, workers will now be free to leave some jobs to pursue other things, because they will no longer feel the need to work to keep healthcare.
Simple, right? Wrong.
Conservatives and Republicans took this report to claim that “Obamacare was killing the American dream.” They even went on to manufacture false statistics claiming that millions of people would lose their jobs because of Obamacare forcing them out of the jobs market.
Doomsday!
Jon Stewart, the comedian, set things straight… again!
You know this was going to happen. Yesterday, CVS announced that it will no longer sell tobacco products. Now, CVS is a business, a Corporation. You’d think that its freedom to make whatever decision it sees fit for their brand would go over pretty smoothly with the corporate freedom lovers over at Fox News? But you’d be wrong again for harboring that thought.
On on Fox’s The Five, co-host Dana Perino tried to use the decision to attack President Obama’s signature health care law, saying, “I just wonder, is this President Obama now saying that corporations are allowed to have values and express them? Because if that’s the case, maybe corporations then don’t have to provide contraceptive care to their employees or their health plans. And the Supreme Court justices might want to think about that.”
Ah, for the record, Healthcare is the law. Providing cigarettes is not.
For example, the health care website was a dud in October and November, but as we speak, over 3 million people have signed up for health insurance through the portal and Medicaid, and the goal of signing up 7 million people by the end of March is eminently attainable. The Republican blahblahgosphere will say that not enough young, healthy people have signed up and that the death spiral will begin any time now, but since they’ve been wrong about everything related to the law (remember when the election of Scott Brown meant the end of the ACA?), why would we want to believe them now?
On immigration, the critics say that because there was no final bill last year that this was a failure for Obama. Not if we get a bill this year, and it’s looking more and more likely that we will. Not because it was a bad idea last year, but because the GOP has finally realized that they are national election toast of they don’t do something to help the Hispanic electorate that is running very quickly away from their party.
Likewise for the minimum wage, climate policy, appointees and foreign policy. In every one of these cases, the president won’t get Congress to sign on to his initiatives, but he’s laying the groundwork for later years or, most likely, for his successor who will most likely be a Democrat. At this point, Obama can do the most for this country by executive order and that’s what we’re likely to hear on Tuesday.
Most presidents, if they are remembered at all, are usually known for one or two major laws that transform the country. The ACA will be Obama’s main accomplishment, but I could see him also being remembered for the Consumer Protection Board and the president who saved the American automobile industry. Immigration would put him in the top ten lists of great ones. The right-wing knows this and that’s why their last-ditch efforts to derail anything Obama wants to do will be loud and scary. But that’s all they’ll be for years to come.
In the meantime, we are living through a trying time with a leader that history will remember fondly.
But, according to their governor Rick Perry and Canadian born senator Ted Cruz, Texans don’t want healthcare, right?
Wrong!
New numbers on ACA enrollment are out, and nearly half a million Texans have applied for coverage through the federal exchange. The latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show us that:
457,382 total Texans who applied for coverage through completed applications
390,658 Texans have been found eligible to enroll in a marketplace plan
Over 47,000 have been found eligible to enroll in the state’s existing Medicaid or CHIP plans
Ed Espinoza, Executive Director of Progress Texas, released the following statement:
Twelve weeks of ACA has done more to help Texans without health care than Rick Perry has done in twelve years as Governor.
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