Almost a year ago this man and I were involved in a major altercation where he tried to stab me in the head and I nearly shot him. Today we ran into each other again and I learned that after his time in prison and some help from probation he now has a full time job and has another son on the way that will be here in November. I was glad it ended well for us both that day and I am ecstatic now to learn that he has turned his life around and we can embrace as friends.
No one is ever lost forever and as long as you continue to work to be a better version of yourself than you were yesterday things will work out eventually.
With some police resorting to their gun to settle all disputes, it’s good to see a story where a police officer had every right to be afraid, but somehow found the courage and not take the coward’s way out by pulling the trigger.
At the time of this writing, the post has already been shared almost 70,000 times and liked by almost 200,000 people.
16.4 Million to be exact! This, despite the constant barrage of attacks from the Republicans in Congress and the Republicans sitting in the Supreme Court. And for your information, the healthcare act is still under attack as the Supreme Court ponders whether they will gut the act and drop millions of Americans from receiving coverage!
Yay America!
A whopping 16.4 million people have gained health insurance coverage since Obamacare passed, according to a new government report released Monday.
The breakdown: 14.1 million adults insured since Obamacare’s first open-enrollment period which began in October 2013, and 2.3 million young adults aged 19-25 covered on a parent’s plan since the policy took effect in 2010.
The two-page report by the Department of Health and Human Services provides fresh evidence that the still-unpopular law has sharply reversed the trend of Americans losing their coverage. The uninsured rate fell from 20.3 percent to 13.2 percent as of March 4, 2015, a drop of 35 percent.
The reduction in uninsured is steeper among blacks (9.2 percentage points) and Hispanics (12.3 percentage points) than among whites (5.3 percentage points).
Three year old Cooper hadn’t seen his mom in over 9 months because of her military service in Afghanistan. But after seeing his mother Kathryn Waldvogel getting into full formation waiting to be discharged, Cooper just couldn’t wait another second. The three-year old ran towards his mother, causing her to break formation – something that is not advised by the military.
“All of a sudden we had to file into the building and get into formation, and I just look up and Cooper and my mom are right there,” Waldvogel said.
He’s a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he’d been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
“I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.
That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion’s share of the cost of the life-saving surgery – or die. He chose the former.
“A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA,” Angstadt said. “I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs.
Did you know? Obamacare, also known as the ACA will reduce the federal budget even more than the CBO initially reported. Also, more people will be covered than initially thought. Also, the Republicans are dead set on repealing the whole thing.
In 2010, it estimated that Obamacare’s costs to the federal budget between 2014 and 2019 would hit $759 billion. That figure has steadily declined with each revision. The new figures project “a net cost of $36 billion for 2014, $5 billion less than the previous projection for the year; and $1,383 billion for the 2015–2024 period.” That last figures is “$104 billion less than the previous projection.”
It also projected an increase to the number of people gaining coverage under Obamacare — though a modest one. Compared to its February estimates, the CBO now assumes that 7 million more people will gain coverage under the Obamacare exchanges. In total, it projects that “12 million more nonelderly people will have health insurance in 2014 than would have had it in the absence of the ACA” — an increase that appears to be independent of the spike in Obamacare enrollments at the end of March.
You’d think that people were dying because they signed up for health insurance. You’d think that people were going broke because they had to leave behind their old policies that didn’t cover needed expenses and treatments. You’d think that the opponents of the Affordable Care Act would come up with a specific, viable alternative that they could run on this November.
Oh, the horror. None of this is happening.
I will say for the final time that the website rollout was terrible and horrible, but it’s now time to move beyond that because over 7 million people now have health insurance and the numbers keep going up. Citizens living in the most prosperous country in the world will not have to worry about medical costs bankrupting them or forcing them to lose their houses or their livelihoods. People can now make decisions based on their own life choices, rather than having to stay at a dead-end job because of the benefits.
Oh, the horror?
The real horror is being perpetrated by the states that refuse to take free federal money to expand Medicaid and cover even more people. These states are led by governors and legislatures that are acting on ideology rather than common sense. They have convinced themselves that president Obama wishes to enslave their citizens through federal programs, making them dependent on the government for their happiness. It’s irrational and will eventually lead to defeat for the politicians that are erecting the legal roadblocks to health care.
The history of the United States has moved inexorably in one direction, and that’s towards equality, access and enhanced civil rights. The Affordable Care Act will survive and thrive because it enables citizens to live better lives. In the end, it is truly American.
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.
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.
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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