The newly released poll conducted by CNN comes a day after duelling court decisions, one striking down the subsidies in the law that helps with policy payments and the other decision upholding them.
The poll, which surveyed 1012 people and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points found, that 53% have a favorable opinion of the law while 44% felt the law has not been beneficial.
I took my talents to South Beach over the weekend for a relative’s surprise birthday party, and on the plane to and fro I had the opportunity to…think. Love airplane mode. Phones and tablets should have other modes, such as marriage mode, play-with-children mode, just-watch-one-screen mode, or perhaps physical media mode, where you would be forced to consume news and entertainment using a newspaper or magazine. I know, I know. I’m old and out-of-touch.
Not really.
Consuming news over the past 10 days has been a wild ride. The Middle East is blowing up again, Malaysia Airlines underwent another tragedy. U.S. courts are issuing contradictory opinions on the same set of facts. We have reached a news critical mass.
And speaking of leaders with no credibility and few morals, Vladimir Putin has almost succeeded
As for the latest domestic squabbles, the Third Circuit Court in DC struck down the ACA subsidies and the Fourth Circuit in Richmond upheld them. Gotta love our judicial system. Both sides can claim victories, but my sense is that the ultimate decision by the Supreme Court, either next year or the year after, will uphold the subsidies that people get when buying insurance on the national exchange even though the law says that subsidies should only be given to people who buy on the state exchanges. Of course, the last time we tried to parse the ACA arguments in the court, the general consensus was that the law was toast. Ouch. And even if the Republicans win the Senate in November, which they won’t, the law will still survive.
Meanwhile, sleep tight America. Rick Perry’s got the border covered.
But don’t worry; he’ll never be president.
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The New York Times reports that two federal appeals court panels issued conflicting rulings Tuesday on whether the government could subsidize health insurance premiums for people in three dozen states that use the federal insurance exchange. The decisions are the latest in a series of legal challenges to central components of President Obama’s health care law.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, upheld the subsidies, saying that a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service was “a permissible exercise of the agency’s discretion.”
The ruling came within hours of a 2-to-1 ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said that the government could not subsidize insurance for people in states that use the federal exchange.
This bit of news will totally mess up your crazy Republican uncle’s day. So be my guest and share this news with him.
A report published last week in the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine provided an overview of Obamacare’s first year, its successes and the challenges ahead. It also offered a yet another estimate of the number of people covered by the law: 20 million.
The NEJM report pulled a wealth of information, much of it already known by those closely following the law’s implementation but presented together by the journal, from think tanks and government agencies. It covered a range of topics, including the number of people covered, 2015 premiums, and the adequacy of provider networks for plans offered through the law.
But its bottom line was that millions of people have become insured under Obamacare.
“Taking all existing coverage expansions together, we estimate that 20 million Americans have gained coverage as of May 1 under the ACA,” the authors wrote. “We do not know yet exactly how many of these people were previously uninsured, but it seems certain that many were.”
They reached the 20 million total this way: 1 million adults under age 26 enrolled in their parents’ plan; 8 million enrolled in private coverage through the insurance marketplaces; 5 million enrolled in private coverage directly through their insurer; 6 million enrolled in Medicaid.
The Malaysian plane (MH17) that was shot down in the Ukraine yesterday contained over 100 of the world’s top AIDS researchers, as they were en route to a conference in Melbourne, Australia. As of midnight Australia time on Friday, conference organizers said they had only been able to confirm seven names. Among the dead are World Health Organization advisor Glenn Thomas, as well as research giant and lauded humanitarian Dr. Joep Lange and his wife, Jacqueline van Tongeren, who has been researching AIDS for three decades. So that’s 30 years of AIDS research, literally shot down. Dr. Lange has written more than 350 papers and spent his career fighting for access to low-cost AIDS treatment in Africa. The International Aids Society said that Dr Lange’s death meant “the HIV/Aids movement has truly lost a giant.” Wow. What will this mean for the future of AIDS research?
According to reports, delegates already gathered in Melbourne for pre-conference meetings were informed of the deaths of 108 of their colleagues after the plane was downed by a surface-to-air missile yesterday. Chris Beyrer, who will take over the presidency of the International AIDS Society at the end of the global conference next week said, “We have been working hard to try and confirm how many people were on the flight. We’ve been speaking to a number of different authorities, and we think the actual number is much smaller.” The conference in Melbourne from July 20-25 will be featuring the world’s leading researchers, as well as advocates and guests such as Bill Clinton and Sir Bob Geldof.
“It’s going to be a very somber mood at the conference in Melbourne, especially for those of us who have been coming to these conferences for many years,” Clive Aspin, a health researcher, told Fairfax Media. It seems many of Dr. Lange’s colleagues already feel the impact of his death. Professor David Cooper, a leading Australian HIV researcher said, “Joep was absolutely committed to the development of affordable HIV treatments, particularly combination therapies, for use in resource-poor countries. The joy in collaborating with Joep was that he would always bring a fresh view, a unique take on things, and he never accepted that something was impossible to achieve.”
At this incredibly sad and sensitive time the IAS stands with our international family and sends condolences to the loved ones of those who have been lost to this tragedy,” IAS said in a statement.
Overall, 189 Dutch, 44 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, 9 Brits, 4 Germans, 4 Belgians, 3 Filipinos, 1 Canadian, 1 American and 1 Kiwi lost their lives in the plane crash.
h/t – hellobeautiful
There was a minimal difference between the previously uninsured and the previously insured: 79 percent of the former were satisfied and 77 percent of the latter were, according to the survey by the group, which is generally supportive of Obamacare.
Those surveyed also reported being better off: 58 percent said that they were better off now than they were before, while 9 percent said they were worse off. And 81 percent said that they were optimistic that their new coverage would help them get the health care they need.
The Fourth of July is always a great time to revisit what makes the United States a great nation, and I always come back to the same characteristic: Compromise. There is probably nothing more American than our genius for compromise, even more so than apple pie and motherhood, both of which were invented by people who didn’t live here in the first place. But compromise? We are good at that, and the reason I think we’re in the political quagmire we find ourselves in today is because we’ve stopped compromising, and I blame the Tea Party for this situation.
I know the right wing likes to blame President Obama or Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for not compromising when the Democrats had the majority from 2009-2011, but the truth is that all three of them did offer opportunities for the Republicans to support the health care law that, after all, was the brainchild of conservative scholars who thought it a far better idea than what the Clintons were peddling in the 1990s. The same is true for the Dodd-Frank bill and the stimulus package, which had far too many Republican tax breaks and not enough in grass-roots spending to be fully effective. But at least those laws got passed.
The problem today is that the Tea Party-inspired GOP has become the party that has consistently traded the good for the perfect and has come up empty each time. They could have had a grand bargain twice that cut social programs and the deficit, but because it didn’t go far enough, the Tea Party faction in the House wouldn’t support it. The same is true of the ACA, which the right still wants to repeal, and a whole host of other issues where we could actually have made some progress and then improved the legislation down the road, but because the bills required compromise, the Tea Party was not interested.
I fully understand that this is sometimes the way politics goes in this country, but this time it seems different because now the right is saying that they, and only they, interpret the Constitution as it should be analyzed, so anything that runs afoul of that reading is wrong and un-American. This is the dangerous part of their agenda and the one that runs directly against their reading of American history, because they reject compromise of any sort.
This country, plain and simply, was built on compromise. The Declaration of Independence was a compromise that mentioned freedom and equality but didn’t mention slavery. The Constitution was a compromise over commerce, slavery and representation. The run-up to the Civil War included a number of compromises that in the end could not satisfy the southerners who decided that slavery was a protected right and got the Supreme Court to agree with them. Financial legislation, social legislation, immigration laws and even US foreign policy in the era of the great world wars had elements of compromise.
FDR compromised, as did every other president we’ve ever elected. You’d think that Ronald Reagan was some great pillar of conservatism who blocked everything the Democrats sent him over eight years, but he compromised too. He cut taxes and then raised them. He signed a compromise immigration law and a tax overhaul that had both liberal and conservative elements. He bargained with terrorists after saying he would never do that. George H.W. Bush, who I think will be rehabilitated once historians get into the meat of his administration, did the absolute right thing by raising taxes to fight the budget deficit in the early 1990s.
You get the picture, I presume.
Lack of compromise is political suicide, and that’s a lesson that the Tea Party will ultimately learn. The more savvy politicians know that you need to get what you can given the political mood and realities of the times. Then you run on your successes and build on them. That’s how the Republicans ran the country until the 1930s and how the liberals ran things until the 1990s. Since then, what has government really accomplished? It’s so bad now it took the threat of massive disruptions to get a Farm Bill. Bob Dole couldn’t even convince his fellow Republicans to back a measure that would support people with physical disabilities.
We’ll get through this and people will look back and wonder how it ever got so bad. If the Tea Party persists, though, they will become a historic party.
Like the Federalists and the Whigs.
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The Tea Party and most social conservatives can sleep easily throughout the summer now. The two Supreme Court decisions rendered on Monday should delight the right and make the inaction across the street in the Capitol seems like a mere distraction. Like a fly buzzing around the collective government heads. The conservative revolution has been won, and all it took was five justices and very little money.
In the Hobby Lobby case, the court affirmed that not only are corporations people, they also have religious rights that can be exercised on health care issues. Yes, Justice Samuel Alito did say that he didn’t expect the floodgates to open on religious issues, but just look at what the Court’s decision on marriage equality did to even conservative states. Lower courts have run riot over anti-gay marriage laws to the tune of 17 states, many of which are in the most conservative areas of the country. Does Justice Alito really think that lower courts will demure when it comes to challenges on religious grounds? I don’t.
But just as this Court has affirmed the highest aspirations of the conservative movement, and, I’m sure, cemented the idea that Madison, Adams, Jay and Hamilton would have agreed with them, they are just doing what the liberal courts did in the 1950s through 1970s. Remember that the court found a right to privacy in the 1968 Griswold case, and used that right, which appears nowhere in the Constitution, to decide Roe v. Wade. The Warren court did the same with Brown, basing it on previous, smaller cases that affirmed what the justices believed to be correct decisions.
Alito, clearly the more articulate conservative compared to Antonin Scalia, who just wants to rant, also wrote the majority opinion in Harris v. Quinn, the day’s other liberal-bashing case. Here, he and the conservative majority said that some public employees do not have to pay union fees even if they don’t want to actually join the union that represents their field. For example, in New Jersey, public school teachers who don’t join the teacher’s association still have to pay 85% of the association fees because the association represents and negotiates for these teachers. Alito created a new category of worker, a partial public employee who works for both the government and a private person who hired them, and said that this type of employee was exempt from representation fees.
This decision is not major in the sense that it covered a great deal of people, but it does open up the gates to further challenges to unions and laws that require people to pay a representation fee. The next case could give the conservatives an opening to expand the definition to part-timers or support staff or, to be honest, any other public worker. Alito doesn’t like unions. It’s not just the law; it’s personal.
While President Obama and the right wing Republicans duke it out over language and politics, the Supreme Court is moving full steam ahead to craft a country that looks more like 1814 than 2014. The biggest problem, though, is that the former generation had Chielf Justice John Marshall to guide it. We get Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas.
We lose.
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We’re not keeping count here, that would be like rubbing it in that we were right about Obamacare all along and they were wrong. But there are at least 6, count em, 6 Republican predictions on Obamacare that turned out to be wrong or just boldface lies.
Paul Krugman does the honors.
Here they are:
1. Enrollment will be very low, and
2. Even if people sign up, they won’t pay their premiums.
Reality: Signups exceeded expectations, and the vast majority paid.
3. More people will lose coverage cancelled by Obamacare than gain it.
Reality: Sharp drop in the number of uninsured.
4. Rate shock.
Reality: Like it says, affordable care.
5. Young people not signing up, and death spiral.
Reality: Pretty good demographics.
6. Soaring health costs.
Reality: Health costs are below anyone’s expectations.
It’s quite an impressive track record, actually. And what’s even more impressive is that none of the usual suspects will even consider admitting having been wrong.
The state is of course run by Republicans, but the law does not discriminate. And I would bet my hard earned money that if you ask the average Oklahoman, they would tell you that Obama is the worse thing Kenya ever produced for this country. And I would also be that person is benefiting greatly from Obamacare.
According to a newly released report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the average premium for Oklahomans who used a tax credit to buy healthcare is $75.00 a month. Oklahoma residents who enrolled in the marketplace set up by the law passed by Mr. Obama, are paying less than the national average of $82.00 according to the report.
“What we’re finding is that the marketplace is working for Oklahomans,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell in a released statement. “Consumers have more choices, and they’re paying less for their premiums. When there is choice and competition, everybody benefits.”
The federal health insurance marketplace was created through the Affordable Care Act, the federal health reform law passed in March 2010.
About 79 percent of Oklahomans who selected plans through the marketplace used tax credits.
Overall, Oklahomans paid below the national average, which was $82 among states with federally facilitated marketplaces.
In Oklahoma, 74 percent of enrollees who selected marketplace plans with tax credits had premiums of $100 a month or less, and 47 percent had premiums of $50 a month or less after tax credits, according to the report.
Symptoms of myocardial infarction, or heart attack, are different in men and women. Experts say signs of heart attack exhibited in men are not displayed by women. Extreme chest pressure is one symptom. It’s important to understand the signs of heart attack in women as it can happen at any time.
Here are 7 signs of heart attack in women:
1. Unexplained Fatigue
More than 70% of women suffer from extreme fatigue before a heart attack. They suddenly feel exhausted even after small tasks like getting up from a chair and going to the kitchen. Flu-like exhaustion is also experienced by women. This fatigue is different from chronic fatigue that is caused by hormonal imbalance.
2. Struggling while sleeping
If you are unable to fall asleep it may indicate a heart attack. It’s difficult to detect this sign as it may be due to many other reasons, if you notice any unexplained reasons or prolonged disturbance in your sleep this may be warning you of a heart attack. One study found almost half of women who had a heart attack experienced sleep disturbances beforehand.
3. Pain
If you are experiencing mild pain in your jaw, back, shoulder, neck, or ear, these might be signs of heart attack. Women usually don’t feel the numbness in chest and shoulder like men, but may feel tightness running along their jaw and going down the neck. These mild pains can expand down to shoulders towards left side. Pressure in breastbone and upper back are also signs of heart attack in women.
4. Short of Breath
Difficulties taking long and deep breaths is a bad sign. More than half of women suffer shortness of breath before the heart attack. They find it difficult to talk from inability to catch oxygen. This is one of the most common early heart attack signs in women.
5. Indigestion or Nausea
Dizziness or nausea is a sign prior to heart attack women often display. They may have indigestion or vomit shortly before their heart attack. The chances of experiencing gastrointestinal problems double in women before a heart attack.
6. Anxiety and Stress
Women often feel anxious, stressed, and keyed up before a heart attack. Anxiety is a common sign of heart attack in women, more than 30% of women get this symptom. This has been described as a feeling of impending doom by several women.
7. Sudden Sweat
Sudden pallor for no apparent reason is not a good sign and may be an indicator of heart attack. More than 40% of women feel dizzy and break into a cold sweat before a stroke. You should call 911 when you experience abrupt lightheadedness or dizziness, these signs should not be taken lightly.
Immediately notify your doctor if you observe any of the above-mentioned signs in you or anyone else.
If you only listen to Fox News, you need help because all you know are lies. But if you get your news from any other source, chances are, you might have already heard – Obamacare is a jobs maker, not a jobs killer like the liars would want you to believe.
Obamacare was once called “The Job-Killing Health Care Law.” But the latest jobs report suggests that the broader economy—and the health care sector, specifically—are adding jobs at a healthy rate.
Booming growth in the heath care industry shouldn’t come as a surprise. The health care sector was gaining about 25,000 jobs per month in the years before the Affordable Care Act, and the law’s infusion of newly insured patients will help bolster providers’ bottom lines.
