Category: health care law

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health care law Healthcare

Bill Clinton Explains The Dangers of Ending ObamaCare

Former President Bill Clinton spoke at a recent fundraiser earlier this week and warned of the dangers this country faced if the Supreme Court rules against President Obama’s Health Care Law. Given his special abilities to explain complex matters to a two-year old, Mr. Clinton broke it down like this”

If the Supreme Court decides to invalidate the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, there will be consequences, Clinton said, which he claims aren’t being reported, and which he spelled out:

• Changing the health-care delivery system has already produced two years in a row of 4 percent inflation in health-care costs. This is the first time in 50 years that health-care costs have gone up so little. Killing the Affordable Care Act would let inflation loose again.

• Some 2.6 million people ages 21 to 26, who now have insurance coverage for the first time because they can be carried under their parents’ policy, would lose it.

• $1.3 billion dollars in insurance refunds have already been paid to businesses and individuals because now the law says 85 percent of your premium has to go to health care and not to profits and promotion. (California hasn’t reported yet, but will likely increase that figure to more than $1.5 billion.) Refunds would shrink.

• If Republicans succeed in persuading the Supreme Court to repeal the individual mandate, somewhere between 12 million and 16 million Americans will be unable to get health insurance because of preexisting conditions.

The Daily Beast also reports that “Clinton predicted that if the law is declared unconstitutional, Republicans will suffer a backlash when millions of Americans calculate what they have lost. Before the Affordable Care Act passed, two thirds of all the applications for bankruptcy were because of health-care emergencies, a consequence likely to return if health care inflation again rises precipitously.”

“Before Mitt Romney as governor signed the individual mandate, Massachusetts had the highest health-care costs in America. Today, that state is seventh, because inflation in health-care costs in that state have been much lower than in the country as a whole. Why? The mandate prevents insurance companies from shifting their promotional costs to consumers, Clinton said.”

The Supreme Court will issue its decision on Health Care on Thursday.

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health care law Politics Repeal

Here are Five Ways the Health Care law Helps Young Adults

Republicans have been on a successful campaign to repeal the Affordable Health Care Law, the signature piece of legislation passed by the Obama administration. They have managed to bring their case all the way to the Supreme Court and now a decision on the future of the law is expected sometime in June.

But one thing Republicans cannot deny – although they will try – is the immediate help the law is bring to both Seniors and young adults. Listed below are just some of the benefits young adults are presently experiencing because of the Affordable Health Care Law.

  1. Young adults can stay on their parent’s health insurance up to the age of 26. This is the case even if they’re married or live on their own. This provision resulted in 2.5 million young people gaining coverage. For young adults, this new protection means that they will have the freedom to make career choices based on what they want to do, not on where they can get health insurance. And for parents, it means they can breathe a little easier knowing their children are covered.
  2. The law offers free prevention benefits that keep people healthy. Now, young adults can receive recommended preventive  services, like flu shots, HIV and cancer screenings, contraceptive counseling and FDA-approved birth control, with no cost sharing. Visit  www.healthcare.gov/prevention for a full list of services and plan dates.
  3. Coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. For people who have been uninsured for six months and can’t buy private insurance because of a pre-existing condition, they may be able to join the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan. And under the new law, no plan can deny coverage to people under age 19 because of a pre-existing condition. To find out about plans available in your State, please visithttp://www.pcip.gov.
  4. Insurers cannot put limits on coverage. In the past, some people with cancer or other chronic illnesses ran out of insurance coverage because their health care expenses reached a dollar limit imposed by their insurance company. Under the health care law, insurers can no longer impose lifetime dollar limits on essential health benefits and annual limits are being phased out by 2014. Also, insurance companies can no longer drop people when they get sick due to a mistake you made on your application.
  5. Starting in 2014, there will be more options through the Affordable Care Act for coverage for young adults. New Affordable Insurance Exchanges, tax credits and the improvements to Medicaid will result in at least 30 million more insured people, including as many as 10 million young adults. For young adults, lacking affordable health care will soon become a thing of the past.
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Barack Obama health care law Mitt Romney ObamaCare Politics

Report: President Obama Modeled “ObamaCare” From “RomneyCare”

In a newly released ad by Rick Perry, Mitt Romney was asked whether he would take the same health care law he enacted in Massachusetts and apply it nationwide. Mitt Romney is heard saying, “Yes,” he will.

Well in newly released documents, it seem Romney got his wish. The documents show that President Obama used Romney’s plan, even employed some of Romney’s people to model the Affordable Health Care program he signed into law over a year ago.

MSNBC reports;

Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney’s landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney’s own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”

The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.

“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney administration on health care and who attended five meetings at the Obama White House in 2009, including the meeting with the president. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.”

In an apparent move to get the conservative vote, Romney flip flopped saying he would not apply the Massachusetts Health care model nationwide. He now believe that each state should implement their own plan.

If Romney wins, the debates between him and President Obama regarding RomneyCare and ObamaCare should be very interesting.

Categories
health care law Politics Repeal

Next Stop For Health Care Law – The U.S Supreme Court

In a move some are describing as  pure confidence, the Obama Administration has allowed the September 25th deadline to pass without filing their appeal to the 11th Circuit Court, in the ongoing battle by Republicans to repeal the President’s Health Care Law. Republicans have claimed that the individual mandate in the law is “unconstitutional.”

Former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, who supports the law, told Politico that this move to allow the case to be heard now by the Supreme Court, “confirms what I had already concluded: That the government is confident that it’s going to prevail in the Supreme Court and would like to have a decision sooner rather than later.”

But opponents to the law are looking at this decision differently.  Randy E. Barnett, a Georgetown Law professor who is working with the plaintiffs, credits the President for not delaying the case anymore and for sending it to the Supreme Court for their decision in what he refers to as a “constitutional controversy.”

Politico Reports:

The issue of the constitutionality of the individual mandate has been widely expected to be decided by the Supreme Court. The key question has been the timing. The Justice Department’s apparent decision to ask the Supreme Court to review the case greatly increases the chances the issue will be heard in the 2011-12 term, which begins Monday.

The Supreme Court now has several strong reasons to accept the case. The court rarely declines requests from the government to take a case, especially in situations in which a circuit court has struck down a piece of a high-profile law.

The current political make-up of the Supreme Court is 5 to 4 in favor of the Republicans/Conservatives. In a perfect world, one would expect these justices to strictly adhere to the rule of law and judicial precedent. But this particular court is an activist court, implementing decisions that benefit their political party’s ideology over the rule of law.

Expect justice to eventually prevail, but with the current political occupants of this Court, justice will be delayed then detoured until the new occupants move in.

For more on this story, click here.

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