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.
Julie Boonstra, has been used by Republicans to try to prove that Obamacare will literally kill people. However, claims that she would lose coverage and risk her life as a result have been debunked.
Boonstra, 49, who suffers from leukemia, is featured prominently in the Koch-backed Americans For Prosperity ads. She told a heartbreaking tale of Obamacare canceling her insurance plan and lamenting that her new one was too expensive.
“If I do not receive my medication, I will die,” Boonstra says in the ad. “I feel lied to.”
When journalists looked into her claim, Boonstra identified the new plan she chose on the Obamacare exchanges: a so-called “gold” plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield, per the Detroit News.
Her old plan cost $1,100 per month, which adds up to $13,200 a year in premiums alone — before co-pays, out-of-pocket costs and drug expenses.
Her new plan costs $571 per month, which adds up to $6,852 per year. Her out-of-pocket costs are maxed at $5,100, which means a maximum cost of $11,952 per year. That means her new plan cannot cost her more for treatment than her new plan.
In other words, Boonstra would save at least $1,248 under Obamacare.
When the Detroit News told her this, Boonstra was in disbelief, saying it “can’t be true.”
“I personally do not believe that,” she told the paper.
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.
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.
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama’s health care law would make some people so lazy that they didn’t want to work at all.
Last week, Republicans used a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that said 2.3 million less hours would be worked after the Affordable Care Act was implemented to claim that the law was destroying jobs.
A Washington Post fact check, however, pointed out that access to health care meant that people would no longer be forced to work if their only reason for working was to receive insurance benefits.
But on Sunday, Blunt stuck to the Republican talking point, saying that providing health care “can’t be a good idea” if it allowed people who were only working for health insurance benefits to leave the workforce.
“I think any law you pass that discourages people from working can’t be a good idea,” the Missouri Republican asserted. “Why would we wanna do that? Why would we think that’s a good thing? How does that allow people to prepare for the time when they don’t work?”
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), who also appeared on Fox News Sunday, was ready with an answer.
“They’re in employment solely because they get health benefits,” Cardin explained. “This is a voluntary choice.”
“In some cases, these people might have two jobs because of these health benefits,” he added. “Now, they don’t need to work two full-time jobs to get their health benefits.”
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!
Republicans are trying again to portray that they are a party of responsibility, that they are not just concerned with blocking every single policy the President puts forth.
They are actually on a retreat right now, trying to rebrand themselves and trying to come up with a cohesive message for the American people.
Why you might ask? Because this is election year, and they are trying once again to fool the people into voting for their sorry candidates in the midterns.
Here’s an example of their rebranding efforts, already in full effect.
Over 40 times Republicans have tried and failed to repeal Obamacare, and they have been criticized by the nation for trying to repeal the healthcare law with nothing to replace it with. So the joke now is, they do have a replacement, and they’re hoping you wouldn’t ask any questions about it.
Well Chuck Todd at MSNBC asked some questions and found out that this mysterious replacement amounted to nothing more than a tall Republican tale. Todd invited Republican Orrin Hatch and part of their conversation went like this:
CHUCK TODD: One of the assumed benefits in your new plan would allow for cheaper policies for young folks. At the same time, you would allow insurers to sell insurance at varying rates. So if you allow for a cheaper policy for younger, healthier people, right, this has been among the issues, the translation is you’re going to see — how do you prevent a spike for older Americans who, maybe just by default of genetics, are starting with a lot of health care problems, and because of that, end up getting charged more? How do you prevent that spike in rates for them?
ORRIN HATCH: Well, we have a formula in there that it can’t go beyond a certain position. But the fact of the matter is, somebody has to pay for these things. And the Obamacare bill doesn’t pay for things, they pushed them into — into Medicaid, which is non-functioning and not doing what it should do right now.
In other words, we have nothing. You totally on your own. If you can’t afford it, then just die already.
McConnell is fighting for his political life. He is in the midst of a re-election campaign in Kentucky and that campaign is not going according to plan. According to a PPP poll, McConnell is in a virtual tie with his Democratic Challenger Allison Grimes.
Mitch is therefore looking for all the help he can find and these days and Kentucky is loving Obamacare, they just call it by another name. So guess what Mitch’s new plan is… be the proponent for Obamacare… um Obamacare by another name that is.
Here is the latest ad the McConnell campaign put out. Notice there is absolutely no mention of his countless oppositions to healthcare.
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