OXON HILL, MD - FEBRUARY 24: President Donald Trump addresses the crowd during CPAC at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on February 24, 2017 in Oxon Hill, Md. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
They say Obamacare is bad, but it appears this “bad” law is covering more people than the proposed bill coming from the Trump administration. The White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee, cannot or will not guarantee healthcare coverage to every American covered by Obamacare.
Sanders repeatedly dodged the question on ABC’s “This Week,” saying Trump had promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it “with something that’s better.”
Host George Stephanopoulos pressed Sanders on why, if Trump was so intent on replacing the law with something better, the White House couldn’t guarantee that everyone currently with insurance wouldn’t lose it. Sanders said it was “a goal” to make sure people didn’t lose coverage, but she stopped short of saying people would be able to keep their current insurance, or would even be offered similar plans.
Republicans control The House, The Senate, and come January 20th, 2017 after Donald Trump is sworn in as the next president, Republicans would also control The White House. And given their hate for Obamacare, it seems just a matter of time until Donald Trump and his Republican friends in Congress repeal Obamacare, taking away healthcare from millions of Americans.
The administration said Wednesday that 6.4 million people have enrolled for subsidized private coverage through HealthCare.gov, ahead of last year’s pace.
Despite rising premiums, dwindling insurers, and the Republican vow to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law, about 400,000 more people signed up through Monday than for a comparable period in 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services Department said.
It was a lie Republicans used to scare people away from getting healthcare, willfully misleading people with the claim that the program will fail causing premiums to rise because of the “fact” that millions will not pay for the coverage.
Republicans even went on a crusade advising some not to pay for the coverage, telling them to take the penalty instead. And like other claims these Republicans and their conservative media outlets made about Obamacare, this claim, this fact as they called it, is now proven as false.
What did you expect? After all, we are talking about Republicans here!
According to reports, only about 9% of the 8 million people who signed up failed to pay their premiums. Health insurance industry experts had feared that number could be between 10% and 15%, Congress was told Thursday.
The update was released as the Obama administration prepares for the second year of enrollment under the program.
Obamacare’s website had a chaotic launch last year, but enrollment is projected to grow next year.
Rob Portman is a Republican Senator for the state of Ohio. And on Thursday, the Republican senator told reporters that if they get control of the Senate in the November election, a vote to Repeal Obamacare will follow. With the House of Representatives already controlled by Republicans, the prospects of a repeal bill passing both houses of Congress is extremely likely.
“I suspect we will vote to repeal early to put on record the fact that we Republicans think it was a bad policy and we think it is hurting our constituents,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), appearing at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “We think health care costs should be going down, not up. We think people should be able to keep the insurance that they had. They are worried about the fact that the next shoe to drop is going to be employer coverage.”
As Portman’s remarks indicated, a repeal vote by a Republican-controlled Senate would be a largely perfunctory exercise, designed to register GOP opposition with the health care law once again. The president would never sign such a measure, even if he were severely chastened by the 2014 election results. Even top conservative donors concede as much.
While the rest of the Republicans are running away with breakneck speed from their “repeal Obamacare” nonsense, Mitch McConnell is slowly moseying along. Apparently, he didn’t get the memo that Obamacare is a hugely successful law and that millions of Americans are presently benefiting from it.
Mitch McConnell is running for the Senate again, the man has been there like, 100 years or so, but he is running again by telling the voters of Kentucky that he is still going to repeal Obamacare. You see, Kentuckians loathe Obamacare, so this repeal nonsense promised to be an easy win for McConnell. But there is only problem for Mitch – Kentucky residents loves Obamacare… sorry, they hate Obamacare but they love Kynect!
Kynect is what Obamacare is called in Kentucky!
When asked if he is going to dismantle Kynect, Mitch showed physical pain. His face said it all. His very being showed what is meant by the phrase, caught like a deer in headlights. You could see the wheels in his head turning, trying to figure out who was asking the question and why were they trying to put him on the spot. You saw the pain of him trying to muster words into a sentence that he hoped would explain that Kynect would stay even if he somehow managed to repeal Obamacare. You saw the pain of a man who knew he was lying to himself, but went ahead and lied anyway. After what seemed like an eternity, Mitch slowly turned to the general direction of the question and said, “I think that’s unconnected to my comments about the overall question.”
Another lie by McConnell of course, because Kynect is Obamacare and Obamacare is Kynect!
Nothing could be more connected — or should be more important to Kentucky’s senior senator — than the fates of the more than 400,000 Kentuckians who are getting health insurance, many for the first time, and the federal Affordable Care Act, which is making that possible.
Repeal the federal law, which McConnell calls “Obamacare,” and the state exchange would collapse.
Kynect could not survive without the ACA’s insurance reforms, including no longer allowing insurance companies to cancel policies when people get sick or deny them coverage because of pre-existing conditions, as well as the provision ending lifetime limits on benefit payments. (Kentucky tried to enact such reforms in the 1990s and found out we were too small a market to do it alone.)
Kentucky’s exchange also could not survive without the federal funding and tax credits that are helping 300,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians gain access to regular preventive medicine, including colonoscopies, mammograms and birth control without co-pays.
As a result of a law that McConnell wants to repeal, one in 10 of his constituents no longer have to worry that an illness or injury will drive them into personal bankruptcy or a premature grave.
Repealing the federal law would also end the Medicaid expansion that is enabling Kentucky to expand desperately needed drug treatment and mental health services.
And still, the Republicans are stuck on stupid! They’re still talking about repealing a law that is helping the economy, and helping millions and millions and millions of Americans! And as they talk about repeal, they have no idea on what to replace the law with if they somehow manage to repeal it.
President Obama announced Thursday that 8 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, calling the feat a success story that Democrats should “forcefully defend and be proud of” in the face of Republican election-year attacks on the law.
The enrollment figure, revised upward from the 7.5 million signups that the administration had announced earlier this month, renewed hopes at the White House that Democrats will be able to overcome the initial rocky rollout of the health law in the fall as they battle to maintain control of the Senate in the midterms this fall.
“This thing is working,” Obama said at an afternoon news conference. Of the GOP, he added: “They said no one would sign up. They were wrong about that. They are wrong to try to repeal a law that is working.”
The final figure is well above the White House’s initial target of 7 million signups.
Republicans, who have fought the law since it was passed by a sharply divided Congress in 2010, escalated their call for the law to be repealed after the problems with the enrollment Web site, which repeatedly broke down in its first few months. Obama’s job approval ratings dropped, and Democrats worried that the bad headlines would harm the party at the ballot box.
But a buoyant Obama said the better-than-expected enrollment news should convince Democrats to not shy away from embracing his signature domestic achievement.
“I don’t think we should apologize for it, and I don’t think we should be defensive about it,” he said. “I think it is a strong, good, right story to tell. I think what the other side is doing and what the other side is offering would strip away protections for those families.”
While Obamacare is saving millions of lives today, there are still some states – headed by Republican governors – that insist on killing their citizens… literally. One of those states is Florida and the case of Charlene Dill is a sad but perfect example.
Dill, a 32-year-old mother of three, collapsed and died on a stranger’s floor at the end of March. She was at an appointment to try to sell a vacuum cleaner, one of the three part-time jobs that she worked to try to make ends meet for her family. Her death was a result of a documented heart condition — and it could have been prevented.
Dill was uninsured, and she went years without the care she needed to address her chronic conditions because she couldn’t afford it.
Under the health reform law, which seeks to expand coverage to millions of low-income Americans, Dill wasn’t supposed to lack insurance. She was supposed to have access to a public health plan through the law’s expansion of the Medicaid program. But Dill, a Florida resident, is one of the millions of Americans living in a state that has refused to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion after the Supreme Court ruled this provision to be optional. Those low-income people have been left in a coverage gap, making too much income to qualify for a public Medicaid plan but too little income to qualify for the federal subsidies to buy a plan on Obamacare’s private exchanges.
Florida has one of the highest uninsurance rates in the nation, and is home to a disproportionately large number of residents who struggle to afford health services. Nonetheless, lawmakers have continued to resist accepting generous federal funds to expand Medicaid to an estimated 750,000 low-income Floridians like Dill.
Perhaps it’s just me, but this time of year seems to be the boring period between the fun of a nasty winter and the beginning of a well-earned spring. And I’m not just talking about the weather. American politics is on hiatus at this moment because it’s too early to get too riled up by the prospect of electing another do-nothing Congress, and since the one we have now is essentially done for the year, what else is there to talk about? The Affordable Care Act? Boring. Marriage equality? Done. The lost Malaysian plane? Probably found and the story will make a great movie one summer. Ukraine? Potentially deadly and maybe the foremost threat to world peace presently in the news.
This is not to say that these stories are not important because they are, but there doesn’t seem to be any movement or progress or yes-we-canism alive at the moment. The Republicans are still trying to figure out what it believes in and how it can appeal to groups that have shunned its message so far. The House will most likely remain in their hands, which guarantees us another two years of bills that will not become law until a GOP president is elected (shudder). And the Senate will probably also go red, but I’ve already treated that scenario.
I am not, though, down in the dumps. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether religious companies can stop providing certain forms of birth control the ACA requires because it would be a violation of their religious rights. I’m thinking that Justice Roberts is aching to get back on the conservative horse he dismounted two years ago in the health care law case, but Justice Kennedy might be the wild card in this one. It is certain that Justice Scalia will lament the end of the republic if he’s on the losing side.
And the health care law will survive because about six million people will have signed up for insurance through the exchanges or Medicaid and throwing them off the rolls is just too mean for even today’s Republican Party. The law needs fixing and that’s where the focus is going to be in 2014 and 2016 and 2018 as companies and states decide that insurance is too expensive and want employees to sign up for the policies on the website. This will be revolutionary and the effect will be profound. I’m not surprised that neither party is really talking about this out loud, but it’s almost certain to come to pass sometime within the next five years.
As for Vlad the Invader, I’m not ruling out a bit of shooting in Ukraine or areas local to it. It will depend on whether he heeds the economic warnings his aides are no doubt giving him. My sense is that Putin will ask for something big in return, negotiate, and take something smaller that gives him a say in Ukraine, but not the whole country. In the end, Ukraine will make a deal with the EU, but will always need to watch its eastern back.
All of this is in the future, and you can feel free to pay attention to it since you’re obviously not winning $1 billion dollars on March Madness because nobody has a perfect bracket left. The best we can hope for is common sense and pride in a job well done. Some things never change.
With the deadline for Americans to sign up for healthcare fast approaching, celebrities are beginning to step up their effort to get the word out.
This message is from former NBA star Alanzo Mourning, advising the uninsured and those with sub par insurance to get quality coverage under the Affordable Care Act before March 31st, 2014.
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.
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.
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