ObamaCare

In looking back at the year 2012, one of the most momentous occasions was the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. Here are a few of our posts on the topic: Broccoli, Coercion, and Severability: Three days of SCOTUS arguments on the Affordable Care Act: Liz summarized the legal issues the Court was considering: the constitutionality of the law's individual mandate, whether the federal government could force states to expand their Medicaid programs as a condition of continuing to participate in Medicaid, and whether the law as a whole could stand if a single provision were to be…
The 2012 election campaign is in full swing, and, for better or worse, health care is one of the major defining issues of the election. How can it not be, given the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also colloquially known as "Obamacare," was one of the Obama administration's major accomplishments and arguably the largest remaking of the American health care system since Medicare in 1965? It's also been singularly unpopular thus far, contributing to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, as well as the erosion of…
First, if you don't have health insurance, that's OK. Just wait until you are catastrophically ill and then they'll pick you up in an ambulance and bring you to an emergency room. He does not discuss what happens later when they come to collect the payments. Also, according to Romney, an Obamacare like plan was a great way to manage health insurance for Massachusetts at the time he was governor, but this does not apply to other people.
And now for something completely different. Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
Just as Republican lawmakers have been hyping the virtues of purchasing private health insurance----versus the evils of "Obamacare"----my husband Jim and I needed to do just that. I had been writing a check for $659 each month to maintain health insurance coverage under my former employer's plan, as provided by COBRA. After 18 months, it was due to expire. The time had come for us to venture into the Republicans' fantasy land of the free marketplace for health insurance. We took a deep breath and dove in. The first thing we learned is that you don't really purchase health insurance. You…
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm not really a political blogger. True, I do from time to time succumb to the blogger's temptation of being a pundit on current events or pontificating on politics, but in general I don't do that very often because political bloggers are a dime a dozen and politics isn't my area of strength. Writing about science and science-based medicine is. That's part of the reason why I really haven't said much about the massive health care reform bill that was passed on Sunday or the political process, except when on occasion the utter insanity of it all (…