Affordable Care Act
denialism | March 22, 2012With the impending, and unprecedented, 3 days of arguments over the Affordable Care Act occurring early next week, it's interesting to see that the test case being used to challenge the law has now become a test case demonstrating the necessity of the law.
Mary Brown, the woman who asserts no one has the authority to make her buy health care is now bankrupt, at least in part due to medical bills. From theLA Times article:
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare…
lborkowski | March 20, 2012Friday will be the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, and there's plenty of discussion about the law's impacts and the upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments. While many of the law's provisions won't take effect until 2014, it's already having an impact on some aspects of health insurance. I described several of these in a post on the law's one-year anniversary, so now I want to focus on two recent stories that underscore the difficulty and importance of changing how the US handles health insurance.
First, it's important to remember that the law isn't an overhaul…
lborkowski | February 21, 2012By Kim Krisberg
Friday wasn't a great day for public health.
That day, Congress voted to raid the Affordable Care Act's Prevention and Public Health Fund to the tune of $5 billion. The move comes as part of a deal to delay scheduled cuts to Medicare physician payment rates and was part of a legislative package to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. Both the Senate and House voted by wide margins to pass the bill, and President Obama is expected to sign it.
Of course, this was hardly the intent of the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which was created via the Affordable…
lborkowski | February 15, 2012Everyone should read the personal story by Kevin Zelnio, a marine biologist and blogger at EvoEcoLab, about his son's recent medical emergency. Having a six-year-old child whose flulike symptoms turn into a struggle to breathe must be scary enough -- but this family's troubles are compounded by not having health insurance.
Zelnio is self-employed, and he and has wife have been unable to find affordable insurance for themselves and their two children. He cites uninsurance as one reason why they didn't bring their son to an urgent care facility as soon as his fever reached 103. They did get…
lborkowski | December 14, 2011Following up on last year's nine-minute animated video explaining the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Kaiser Family Foundation has produced a new interactive feature that gives examples of how different individuals' situations will change (or not) in 2014 when the law is fully implemented. Click on character - 23-year-old uninsured graphic designer Phil Butler, the Santos family who gets insurance through work, etc. - or an employer to get the details about how the individual or family's situation will change. In some cases, like when a person gets health insurance through an…
lborkowski | July 20, 2011One of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that new health plans cover preventive services for women without deductibles or co-payments. The Department of Health and Human Services asked the Institute of Medicine to review what preventive services are important to women's health and well-being and make recommendations about which of these should be required to be covered without cost-sharing.
The IOM issued its report, Clinical Preventive Services for Women: Closing the Gaps, yesterday, and it focuses on the preventive services not already spelled out for coverage in…
lborkowski | April 14, 2011At her Washington Post blog 2chambers, Felicia Sonmez reports that the House has passed legislation repealing the section of the Affordable Care Act that created the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which gives the Department of Health and Human Services $15 billion over the next 10 years to fund prevention and public health.
The Republican complaint? Sonmez reports, "Republicans have criticized the account as a "slush fund" that gives Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wide latitude in administering federal money without congressional oversight." This is an odd critique…
lborkowski | March 23, 2011Exactly one year ago, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - the most sweeping change to US healthcare since the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The law's most important achievement is its creation of a system that will slash our nation's shameful uninsurance rate by an estimated two-thirds once it's fully implemented.
Public opinion on the law is still mixed, and that's likely due to two things. First, many of the law's provisions won't kick in until 2014. Second, for those of us with a reliable source of affordable health…
lborkowski | January 18, 2011This week, House Republicans are voting on whether to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Their bill, misleadingly titled "The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," has a good chance of passing the House but virtually none of passing the Senate or being signed by the President. It's a chance for House Republicans to show the public where they stand on healthcare - but they seem reluctant to engage with the actual projected impacts of the law.
First, the jobs claim. The ACA does not kill jobs. Ezra Klein explains that what House Republicans are referring to is a…
cmonforton | January 4, 2011After being sworn-in on Wednesday (1/5/11), the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives are promising to do at least two things this week:
(1) read on the House floor the U.S. Constitution, and
(2) repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the healthcare overhaul bill that was signed into law by President Obama in March 2010.
Those aligned with the Tea Party movement are pumped up about these actions, but they seem like contradictions to me.
The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787, begins with the idealist proclamation:
"We the people of the United…
lborkowski | December 23, 2010United States Senator Bernard Sanders, Independent of Vermont, received this year's Paul Wellstone Award at the Activist Dinner on 7 November in Denver, during the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Anthony Robbins presented the award "for his principled support for a universal comprehensive health care system..."
Senator Sanders prepared this video for the activists who attended. During his 10-minute address (skip to 0:40 for the start of remarks), Senator Sanders focuses on the new healthcare law and explains why he voted for it, what it does for prevention and…
lborkowski | December 14, 2010Yesterday a federal judge struck down the new healthcare law's individual mandate, which requires everyone to have health insurance. (Actually, the mandate doesn't apply to everyone: those who'd have to spend more than 8% of their income on coverage are exempt, as are undocumented immigrants - and if you don't have coverage, you pay a fine.) US District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, but he did not strike down other portions of the law or issue an injunction against its implementation. Two other district court judges have found the mandate…
lborkowski | October 7, 2010If you feel like you could use an overview of the new healthcare law - the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - head over the the Kaiser Family Foundation's website and watch their nine-minute animated video. Cokie Roberts narrates, explaining the problems the law's designed to address and its major provisions.
If you want more details, check out KFF's Implementation Timeline, which lists and briefly summarizes the various provisions that will be taking effect each year (including several that were implemented last month).
And for a more irreverant look at dysfunction of the status…
lborkowski | December 21, 2009This post was originally published on our Wordpress site
In a historic achievement, 60 Senators have agreed to a healthcare bill that will dramatically expand health insurance coverage and curb some of the insurance industry’s worst practices. Getting agreement between the Senate and the House, which has passed its own healthcare bill, will still be an arduous process, but the chambers agree on most essential elements, and this is the farthest Congress has come in decades towards fixing our healthcare system’s serious problems. (If you want to compare the House and Senate bills, the Kaiser…
lborkowski | August 17, 2009This post was originally published on our old Wordpress site.
Both the Washington Post and the New York Times report that the Obama administration is signaling a new willingness to jettison the public plan element of healthcare reform legislation. Jonathan Cohn at The Treatment questions whether anything’s really changed, though, because Obama has consistently praised the public option as a good idea without insisting that it be included in the final bill.
As the summer has worn on and Congressional committees have come out with specific proposals, healthcare reform supporters are getting a…