In a Republican party that’s gone all out against Obamacare, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval went all in.
Sandoval is the only Republican governor whose state is both running its own health insurance exchange this year and expanding its Medicaid program under the health law. He’s arguably doing more to put the Democrats’ signature law into place than any other Republican.
But in fully implementing Obamacare, Sandoval faces a double-edged sword: He’s helping bring health care coverage to a state with the second highest uninsured rate in the country, while he may be hurting his national ambitions because he’s not actively blocking the president’s law.
Sandoval has always maintained that he dislikes the health law and he’d like to see it repealed. But as long as it’s the law of the land, he says it is his job to make it work for the people of his state.
“I opposed the Affordable Care Act from its inception,” he wrote in an email. But he’s a former federal judge and in his view, once the Supreme Court upheld the legislation, “the Affordable Care Act became the law of the land.”
Even after sticking his neck out on Obamacare — which few others in his party would consider amid fear of a conservative backlash — Sandoval is overwhelmingly popular in Nevada. State lawmakers backed his Obamacare approach on a bipartisan basis, and he’s cruising toward reelection next year with no formidable opponent in sight.
“Sandoval’s approval numbers are stratospheric, so it’s a very small group of folks who are concerned about it,” said Jon Ralston, the state’s leading political analyst. The objections came from those on the far right who “seized on that because they don’t believe Sandoval is conservative enough.”
On health care, Democrats laud him too.
“I don’t know what the politics are from his standpoint but I think it’s the right decision,” said Democratic Rep. Dina Titus, whose Nevada district has one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. “People are signing up, fortunately, in Nevada and the website is working pretty well. We’ve been very aggressive.”
In a Thursday interview on Fox News, failed Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum had the audacity to compare the struggles of Nelson Mandela and his decades long fight against apartheid, to the Republican’s petty political game of trying to repeal Obamacare.
Said Santorum;
“He was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives — and Obamacare is front and center in that.”
These Republicans are without shame. It has dawned on me that what Rick Santorum did there, was and is a part of the Republican’s play book – keep your name in the news by saying the dumbest, most outrageous things you can, and hope that there are some in the audience who will believe.
Keep it up Ricky boy. Your plan is working and people are talking about you again. Elections must be coming again and it sounds like you’re planning another run.
If you have no health insurance and have no interest in seeing what plans are available to you through healthcare.gov, then you’re either a Republican who thinks your party’s false message is more important than your own wellbeing, or you are a low information consumer listening to the lies of right winged media outlets.
For those that take their health seriously, they’re signing up for health care!
More people signed up on the government’s new health insurance website on the first two days of December than in the entire first month of the launch of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform, sources familiar with the numbers said on Wednesday.
The sources said about 29,000 people enrolled on Sunday and Monday, surpassing nearly 27,000 for all of October when the opening of the HealthCare.gov website was beset by glitches that led to a public apology by the president and a retooling of the portal.
Obama’s administration has been criticized by Republican opponents for not regularly disclosing figures over political concerns.
The improved enrollment figures provide the first evidence that a five-week emergency effort by the administration to fix HealthCare.gov was allowing more people to sign up for insurance in 36 states served by the website. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C. run their own online insurance marketplaces.
The agency in charge of the healthcare policy rollout, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said on Wednesday that it would announce official numbers later in December.
The upward swing is a tentative good sign for Obama, whose job approval ratings plummeted as the website made a disastrous debut on Oct. 1 and millions received policy cancellation notices despite Obama’s repeated pledge they could keep their current plans under the Affordable Care Act.
Preliminary government data has also indicated that about 100,000 people chose a health plan through HealthCare.gov during November. Tens of thousands more Americans have signed up through state exchanges.
While enrollment is improving, the administration is still far off track of the 7 million people whom the Congressional Budget Office has said were expected to sign up for private insurance through March 31.
Earlier today, I tweeted a recent poll by CNN saying that 70% of young Americans believe the problems with the Obamacare website will eventually be fixed.
Needless to say, some Republicans on Twitter couldn’t believe that this poll actually existed, and thought that I was making it up. I don’t blame them for thinking this. Their political leaders are constantly feeding them false information which they readily eat up, so naturally when someone shares the truth, they feel the need to question it as well.
Here is one example of the replies I got to the tweet mentioned above:
So with that said, here is the link to the A CNN/ORC International poll where that tweet came from. And here is a CNN article that mentions this data. Below is an exert of the actual article.
Younger Americans are much less likely to express negative views of the new health care law.
“Only 25% of 18-to-34 year olds say that the new law is a failure, compared to more than four in 10 in any other age bracket. Seven in 10 younger Americans think the current problems faced by Obamacare will eventually be fixed. Senior citizens are split, and most people between 35 and 65 years old think that the system is permanently broken,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
The poll was conducted November 18-20 for CNN by ORC International, with 843 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
To the doubters: – Where it says “only 25% of 18-34 year olds say that the new law is a failure,” it means that the remainder 75% think the law is NOT a failure. And where it says, “seven in 10 younger Americans think the current problems faced by Obamacare will eventually be fixed,” that “seven in 10” actually mean 70%.
(Reuters) – The Obama administration declared victory on Sunday in its effort to get HealthCare.gov working smoothly for the vast majority of users, saying the site had reached a goal of handling 50,000 simultaneous users after a five-week “tech surge.”
In a six-page progress and performance report, administration officials said the troubled website could now handle at least 800,000 visitors per day, with the system remaining up at least 90 percent of the time.
The new performance levels mark significant improvement after the Obamacare website’s disastrous October 1 launch, when it crashed in the face of high traffic volumes and remained down 60 percent of the time for weeks.
But officials remain concerned about high volumes this month, with the potential for large numbers of people entering the site to apply for insurance coverage beginning January 1.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says it will meet its self-imposed deadline of fixing the troubled health care website so that 50,000 people can log in at the same time starting Saturday. Yet questions remain about the stability of the site, the volume of traffic it can handle and the quality of the data it is delivering to insurers.
Round-the-clock repair work since HealthCare.gov went live on Oct. 1 has produced fewer errors, and pages are loading faster.
But the revised site still won’t be able to do everything the administration originally had envisioned. And companion websites for small businesses and Spanish speakers have been delayed.
Still, the White House hopes a more smoothly functioning website after weeks of bad publicity will mark a fresh start for Obama.
Things were hairy there for a couple of months, what with the government shutdown (Republicans’ fault) and the still incomprehensible fail of the healthcare website (all you, Democrats), but slowly and surely, things seem to be turning around, just in time for the holidays.
The best part, though, is that thousands of people are effectively signing up for health insurance through state exchanges and Medicaid, and will soon have a much better experience on healthcare.gov. I went on the site and breezed through the process here in New Jersey. In late October, that didn’t happen.
Of course, this will be a long, messy process. The Saudis and Israelis are wary and nervous about a reinvigorated Iran, and for good reason. Iran threatens the Saudi near-monopoly on oil in the region and their Sunni government is a natural enemy for the Iranian Shiite mullahs who really run the country. Israel is, of course, afraid that Iran will ignore any limits placed on it by a treaty and once their economy improves, will go ahead and build nuclear weapons and use them on Jerusalem.
If you thought it was difficult to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, then this will be well-nigh impossible, but it has to work. Iran once had a vibrant economy and the people are committed to a free-market system. The religious leaders might have to make more concessions to the business sector, as the Chinese Communist Party has done in the name of capitalism, and my sense is that a rising middle class will not look kindly on a regime that would threaten that prosperity with a risky and suicidal strike on Israel. And really, do you think Iran would nuke the Old City, with its timeless Muslim shrines? I might be naive, but I don’t.
As for the Saudis, they have been fed on American weapons and support, while suppressing any free speech or political movements that could give women the right to drive, much less tolerate a free press or alternative political parties. Yet we see them as an ally and the somewhat more free Iranians as the third leg of the axis of evil. Never forget that 15 of the 19 September 11 conspirators were radicalized Saudis. That says something about the level of repression inside that country. I suspect that their bigger fear is what their society will need to undergo in order to compete in a world where Iran and Iraq have freer economies.
Clearly, we are at the beginning of the process and Obama and Kerry have to make sure that Israel is protected from any mischief, nuclear or otherwise. But Israel also has to solve its own problem with settlements and a two state solution to the Palestinian problem. Interesting times indeed.
The Republicans, and some influential Democrats such as Charles Schumer of New York, have lined up against the Iran agreement and the Republicans continue to hope and pray that people don’t sign up for health care. In addition, the House has said that they won’t be voting on the immigration bill this year (though most Americans support a path to citizenship), and this while Chris Christie is considering supporting a Dreamer bill in New Jersey (or at least the idea of one). As long as the GOP hard right continues to play hardball, the Democrats will begin to look better and better as we move towards November. Something to be thankful for?
Paul Rosenberg: The week started off with news that former V.P. candidate Sarah Palin had compared the federal debt to slavery, and finished off with the New York Times and “Good Morning America” comparing problems with the rollout of Obamacare exchanges with Bush’s catastrophic non-response to Hurricane Katrina. Such comparisons are both ghastly and ludicrous — 1,833 people died in Katrina, while millions died due to slavery, not to mention the part where tens of millions lived their whole lives as slaves — yet conservatives can’t seem to stop themselves from glibly making them, equating slavery with anything they don’t like (except when they’re praising it), and Katrina with any problem President Obama might have. What’s more, the so-called liberal media seems less likely to challenge them than to follow their lead, or at least give them a pass.
Last month MSNBC’s Morgan Whittaker noted that Obamacare had joined a list of four other things that conservative politicians and media figures had compared to slavery just this year: abortion (Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and former Gov. Mike Huckabee); affirmative action (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in Fisher v. University of Texas); welfare (Sen. Rand Paul [technically just “servitude”] and E.W. Jackson, GOP candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia); and gun control (Glenn Beck and Fox News host Shepard Smith). The slavery comparison is uniquely offensive, given the unfathomable evil that slavery was, but the way in which conservatives glibly treat it as a political plaything is anything but unique.
Case in point: As early as April 2010, Media Matters had counted eight different things that had been touted as “Obama’s Katrina,” including the BP oil spill (Limbaugh, Drudge, Fox.etc. vs. facts here); the GM bankruptcy (Politico, June 8, 2009); the H1N1 flu (Rush Limbaugh, Nov. 3, 2009); the Fort Hood shootings (Human Events, Nov. 11, 2009); the Christmas underwear bomber (Pajamas Media, Dec. 29, 2009); the Haiti earthquake (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2010); the Kentucky ice storms (Confederate Yankee, Feb. 1, 2010); and even housing policies in Chicago back when Obama was a state senator (Mickey Kaus, Slate, June 30, 2008).
Of course the list has kept growing since then, with the IRS and Benghazi as two top favorite additions. Conservatives are especially fond of Benghazi, since it lets them tweet things like “You could call #Benghazi Obama’s Watergate, except no one died,” as Texas Rep. Steve Stockman did on May 8, 2013. This elides the entire history of Watergate: It began with the Plumbers, formed to plug leaks in the wake of the Pentagon Papers (burglarizing Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist looking for dirt to smear Ellsberg with), the release of which was necessary because Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War was to continue the Vietnam War, in which tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died. But it’s damn hard to fit all that into 140 characters. Hence the usefulness of the “Watergate” accusation.
Here is a little bit of news Fox and your Republicans in Congress won’t tell you. There is a report showing that health care spending has risen by the lowest rate ever recorded. White House officials said Wednesday a continuation of the trend could lead to more jobs and lower-than-expected costs.
Reduced health care costs for employers could lead to 200,000 to 400,000 new jobs per year by the second half of the decade, said Jason Furman, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
“If just half the recent slowdown in spending can be sustained, health care spending a decade from now will be $1,400 per person lower,” Furman said.
The Council of Economic Advisers report released Wednesday also said health care inflation is the lowest it has been in 50 years.
The Affordable Care Act is, in part, responsible for the lower costs, Furman and other health experts agree, while Republicans say the declining rate of increases comes purely because of the slowed economy.
An economy hobbled by the recession and the economic crisis in 2008 played a role in some of the reduced spending growth, Furman said, but the report cited “structural change” caused, in part, by the law.
The report’s release came as President Obama and his administration struggle with the political fallout associated with the problem-filled opening of the federal health care exchange, the online marketplace where uninsured Americans can shop for and buy insurance. The exchange’s website, HealthCare.gov, opened Oct. 1 and has been hampered by outages and delays, particularly in its first weeks of operation.
The report did not surprise health economists, said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at MIT who worked with Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s and Obama’s health care laws. But it’s “quite striking” that the growth rate continues to be low.
The White House, Gruber said, “obviously has a point they want to push, but I think they’ve got it right. But I think the health economists are still saying, ‘Wait and see.’ You take the news — it’s great news — but we have to wait and see what will happen in the long term.”
In states with functioning websites, enrollments are picking up:
A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November, according to state officials.
“What we are seeing is incredible momentum,” said Peter Lee, director of Covered California, the nation’s largest state insurance marketplace, which accounted for a third of all enrollments nationally in October. California — which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month — nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month.
Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, are outpacing their enrollment estimates, even as states that depend on the federal website lag far behind.
He called it the “circular firing squad.” That was Rick Santorum definition of the way Republicans conducted themselves over the rollout and implementation of Obamacare.
According to Santorum, Republicans could have just sat back and watched as the website for Obamacare crumbled under the weight of interested American trying to sign up for insurance. But instead Santorum continued, they engineered a government shutdown that accomplished nothing, except guaranteed loss for subpar Republican candidates.
“Everybody knew this wasn’t going to work coming out,” the 2012 Republican presidential contender said during an appearance on Monday’s Morning Joe. “To know that, going into this October 1 and to have it be just a fight between Republicans instead of focusing on what was clearly going to be a problem was not a very smart thing to do.”
The 16-day shutdown also hurt Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for Virginia governor.
“There’s no question about it. I live in Virginia and Ken could not get on message till the last ten days.”
“Because of the government shutdown!” Joe Scarborough interjected.
“The government shutdown,” Santorum said, nodding.
“We had a circular firing squad going on in Washington,” Santorum said of his party. “It was just painful to watch people – both camps trying to do the right things but ending up just shooting each other.”
Don’t get me wrong. What’s happened over the past five weeks has been a colossal, epic failure on President Obama’s part. All he needed to say about the health care law was that you could keep your insurance if it met minimum standards, and then he needed to repeat those standards. He also needed to repeat the benefits of the law, from covering preexisting conditions to free physicals, checkups and flu shots. But Obama thought that passage of the law was enough and that the government didn’t need to publicize what was on public record. Big mistake. Now he’s gotten caught in a web that the right wing has been spinning since 2010. It’s ugly. It’s sobering. It’s a mess. And it hurts.
And now for the good news. Obama’s opponents are still the same gang that shut down the government, opposes marriage equality, wants to voucherize Medicare and cut $40 billion from the food stamp program, denies global warming, thinks transvaginal ultrasounds are effective public policy, supports testing public school students at the expense of a real curriculum, opposes immigration reform and continues to want to deport large numbers of Hispanics.
In the 1990s, my father used to say that Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton. The Tea Party and John Boehner are the best things to happen to Barack Obama. His approval ratings are down now, but they’ll rebound because the right wing hasn’t changed.
Their main vulnerability is their belief that the health care law has imperiled every part of Obama’s agenda. What they forget is that prior to the shutdown, the GOP’s ideas were extreme and unpopular. My sense is that they’ll get even more extreme because they see Obama at a critical point in his presidency. Healthcare.gov will not make the Republicans look any better on women, Hispanics, social programs and, yes, health care.
The health care mess will also leave the front pages soon because the website will be fixed and more people will successfully sign up for care. Also, fiscal negotiations are just around the corner and the right has left itself vulnerable because they’ve pretty much promised not to shut the government down again and they’d be even crazier than I think they are to not raise the debt ceiling. Plus, the press will get tired of this story and move on to other things.
In the end, though, the real advantage is that we’re talking about trying to insure people against catastrophic expenses by providing them with health insurance. Never forget that.
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