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Category: ObamaCare
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.
– h/t ProgressTexas
The 25 GOP-led states that are refusing to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act are not just turning down an estimated $42.6 billion in 2014 alone, they’re also missing a chance to save 27,000 lives — according to a new study from the pro-expansion group Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
HCAN’s projection is based on a Harvard School of Public Health study published in 2012 in the New England Journal of Medicine that compared states that had expanded Medicaid to childless adults to those who hadn’t:
The mortality rate in expansion states was 6.1 percent lower than in the neighboring expansion states. For every 500,000 adults gaining Medicaid benefits, 2,840 deaths would be prevented each year, the researchers found. Put another way, for every 176 people added to the Medicaid rolls, one life would be saved.
An estimated five million residents of states that haven’t expanded the program will find themselves in a “coverage gap,” where they will neither qualify for Medicaid nor be able to afford a policy in the insurance exchanges. Applying that 1-in-176 formula to five million uninsured, HCAN comes up with the 27,000 lives that may be lost.
The report also estimates how many jobs would be created by the expansion, which is entirely funded by the federal government for three years, tapering down to 90 percent by the end of the decade. In Texas, where 1 in 4 residents are uninsured, not only could nearly 6,000 lives be saved by expansion, but 300,000 jobs could be created by adding $67.9 billion a year in economic activity.
Instead of accepting new economic growth, states are putting their most vulnerable hospitals at risk of closing.
Did you notice the best part?
Did you see what happened when everyone was complaining about a website?
Single-payer got started in America!!!
Vermont is using authority granted in a provision under the Affordable Care Act to start a single-payer system. Most Americans still don’t know what the phrase “single-payer” even means. It had little support in Congress in 2009 and Senate “Democrats” like Nelson and Lieberman even killed the public option. But, the ACA had this sweet little provision that allowed states to set up a single-payer system and now people will see it in action. You know what that means.
As Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) opines, “The quickest route toward a national health care program will be when individual states go forward and demonstrate that universal and non-profit health care works, and that it is the cost-effective and moral thing to do.”
As many predicted, ACA is already leading to the kind of transformative progressive change Obama promised. The progressive movement will be responsible for showing the nation how well single-payer works after the Vermont system goes into effect. When public and non-profit insurance becomes the national norm, we’ll know where it began.
By David Cole in a comment on our Facebook Page.
The President’s poll numbers hit a low of 39% approval and 54% disapproval when this poll was taken during the December 21st to 23rd period. Around that same time, Americans were storming the healthcare.gov website signing up for policies that went into effect January 1st. But since the 39% lows, Americans are beginning to see President Obama in a whole new light and Obamacare-love seems to be the only reason, considering the President has not done anything tremendous since those lows. In fact, he is on vacation with his family.
According to the new poll taken between December 27 and December 29th, President Obama’s approval shot up to 44% and his disapproval fell to 49%. Just another small piece of evidence to prove that, unlike the Republican lie claiming that people don’t want Obamacare, they do want Obamacare and they’re loving it!
HONOLULU (AP) — A December surge propelled health care sign-ups through the government’s rehabilitated website past the 1 million mark, the Obama administration said Sunday, reflecting new signs of life for the problem-plagued federal insurance exchange.
Of the more than 1.1 million people now enrolled, nearly 1 million signed up in December, with the majority coming in the week before a pre-Christmas deadline for coverage to start in January. Compare that to a paltry 27,000 in October —the website’s first, error-prone month — or 137,000 in November.The figures tell only part of the story. The administration has yet to provide a December update on the 14 states running their own exchanges. While California, New York, Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut have performed well, others are still struggling.
Still, the end-of-year surge suggests that with HealthCare.Gov now functioning better, the federal market may be starting to pull its weight. The windfall comes at a critical moment for Obama’s sweeping health care law, which becomes “real” for many Americans on Jan. 1 when coverage through the exchanges and key patient protections kick in.
“As we continue our open enrollment campaign, we experienced a welcome surge in enrollment as millions of Americans seek access to affordable health care coverage,” Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a blog post.
WASHINGTON – States with their own well-running health insurance exchanges reported Wednesday an increase of 30 percent to 40 percent in enrollments from last week to this week.
“We’re seeing huge interest,” said Peter Lee, director of California’s exchange, during a conference call sponsored by Families USA, a health care advocacy group that supports the Affordable Care Act.
Six months ago, “no American knew about” the state exchanges.
In the first week of December, 50,000 people signed up for insurance in California.
Last week, 15,000 people were signing up every day, Lee said. He expects the interest to increase as local organizations, such as libraries or even cities, launch their own campaigns to encourage people to buy health insurance.
Lee and other officials in states that have expanded Medicaid coverage and spent millions promoting their exchanges said they are seeing an increasing diversity among the people buying insurance and the types they are purchasing.
The numbers show interest in buying insurance is increasing after the initial problems that hurt the site when it launched Oct. 1, said Ron Pollack, the founding executive director of Families USA. States that are doing well, he said, can share how they succeeded with other states and the federal government.
Here is another Republican doing everything he can to get his name in the news. And there is apparently no better way to get in the news, than to say something dumb and in this case, insensitive to the horrors of genocide and terrorism.
A Republican state senator from North Carolina thinks that extending health care to all Americans is worse than genocide, communism and terrorism – combined.
Sen. Bob Rucho (R-Matthews) made the observation Sunday morning in a Twitter post attacking the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld the individual mandate in a June 2012 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts.
“Justice Robert’s pen & Obamacare has done more damage to the USA then the swords of the Nazis,Soviets & terrorists combined,” Rucho complained.
Rucho, who sponsored a bill to prohibit North Carolina from setting up a health insurance exchange or participating in the Medicaid expansion, did not explain how the Affordable Care Act was worse than the systematic murder of millions of people, but he later defended his remarks.
“Those that tweeted, put your thinking caps back on: ‘The PEN is mightier than the SWORD.’ Edward Bulwar-Lytton,1839. But surely you knew that,” Rucho posted Sunday afternoon.
He’s claiming that the reason he is closing his practice is because of “Obamacare.” But Buzzfeed has found the real reason.
A Kentucky doctor who took out a local newspaper ad saying he was closing his practice “due to the policies of Obamacare” is shutting down his practice because of federal requirements to transfer from paper to electronic records.
Dr. Stephen Kiteck of Somerset, Ky., said the financial burden of electronic records is “too much of a burden to overcome” and that he didn’t want to “make a long-term investment” in his small medical practice.
Though Kiteck’s ad blames Obamacare, the electronic health care incentive programs were part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 — the federal stimulus act — and not part of the Affordable Care Act, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Kiteck said he is approaching retirement age, and that he and his office are “computer illiterate,” adding that he would need special training to add electronic records. He said it would be a financial burden and take “thousands of man hours or woman hours to get the records on the computer.
Seems retirement was right around the corner for the Doctor anyway. Looks like the computer illiterate man was just looking for a reason and thought Obamacare was good as any.
File this one under Classic #Fail!
Jon Stewart kicked off this week’s “Daily Show” by shedding light on some truly odd reactions that some folks had about the passing of Nelson Mandela — including at least one prominent Republican.
Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz, to their credit, offered sincere notes of gratitude for the South African leader’s life work on their respective Facebook pages. What they did not expect, however, were the swift and racist reactions they saw from several of their fans. Example: “This clench-first gorilla [sic] warrior does not deserve respect from informed Americans,” one user wrote on Gingrich’s Facebook.
Stewart was hardly surprised by the outpouring of bile. “Of course, that’s why the Internet was invented,” he said. “To say hateful things with greater efficiency, reach and freedom to keep people from finding out how truly disgusting you are in your home. ‘I would never say those things, it was Dr. Awesomeballs69!'”
Racist Facebook fans are one thing, but Stewart could not let an actual Republicanleader off the hook so easily. Rick Santorum, appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor,” somehow equated apartheid, South Africa’s former system of segregation that Mandela helped end, to the Affordable Care Act.
“The systemic subjugation of a race of people is different than the establishment of subsidized insurance exchanges,” Stewart helpfully explained before channeling his inner Julie Andrews with a “Sound of Music” parody: “Obamacaaare is not apartheeeeeid!”
Video.
Vice President Cheney said on Monday that the deal the U.S. and its international partners reached with Iran last month over its nuclear program is suspect because of some of the Obama administration’s initial missteps in implementing the president’s new health care law.
“I don’t think that Barack Obama believes that the U.S. is an exceptional nation,” Cheney complained on Fox and Friends. “Nobody cares much in the Middle East anymore what the U.S. thinks because we don’t keep our commitments.”
The former vice president moved to Iran and without mentioning any specific criticisms of the agreement, claimed it’s bad because of unrelated health care issues. “We don’t follow through and Iran we’ve got a very serious problem going forward and a deal now been cut,” he said. “The same people that brought us you can keep your insurance if you want are telling us they’ve got a great deal in Iran with respect to their nuclear program. I don’t believe it.”
Watch
