The Health Care Debate

Come here to talk about topics that are not related to development, or even Kansas City.
aknowledgeableperson
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

It may not be the Nobel Peace Prize but it is another award for the Big O:

""If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," President Barack Obama said -- many times -- of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

For all of these reasons, PolitiFact has named "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," the Lie of the Year for 2013. Readers in a separate online poll overwhelmingly agreed with the choice."

From Politilfact.com
By Angie Drobnic Holan
Published on Thursday, December 12th, 2013 at 4:44 p.m.


Plus there are three requirements of the government in the ACA that the Obama Admin has failed to follow through on, something not to be blamed on the GOP
1. No rules finalized that would stop hospitals from filing lawsuits on patients who have failed to pay their bills. An estimated 2M individuals have filed bankruptcies due to the failure of writing these rules.
2. Hospitals are still not required to publish their price lists, their so-called chargemaster. Many of the above 2M lawsuits are based on amounts that come from the chargemaster. The chargemaster can be compared to the list price of a new car - something very few pay in full.
3. ACA requires the Treasury Department to publish a list of charity care provided by each hospital on an annual basis, something the Department has failed to do.
knucklehead
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by knucklehead »

Unfortunately delays in issuing regulations are a feature of our corrupt political system.

Many regulatory agencies are captive to the industries they regulate. The rule making proceedings to develop new rules are dominated by comments from industry. Industry ties up the rulemaking proceedings for years. Industry spends big bucks hiring experts and lobbyests. Then if industry doesn't like the result, they hire top lawyers to contest the rules in court, many times sucessfully manuvering the suit to a conservative judge. If they lose in court, the adopt a long-term strategy of destroying the rules through constant incremental attacks (such making sure enforcement is not funded adequately or planting loopholes in rule modifications they characterise as minor administrative changes) over many years while no one is really paying attention.

Industry also has inordinate influence over who gets nominated to the regulatory boards and has a carefully honed system of rewarding regulators who "play ball" with high paying jobs once they leave government service. Everyone knows how the game is played. The key is just don't leave a paper trail.

Industry neuters the rules, then when something goes wrong, their big defense is "but we complied with all the rules" Yes the very rules they sabatoged.
aknowledgeableperson
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

That may be true in other circumstances but in these three cases.

For #1 an "initial draft" was published in June 2012 and there were some objections by the hospital association but nothing since. For items 2 and 3 nothing has been released so far, not even "initial drafts". But item 3 does not involve industry compliance, it is a requirement on the Treasury department to release a report.
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chaglang
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by chaglang »

[T]he Urban Institute's Health Policy Center has calculated ... figures for the first time, using American Community Survey data from 2009, 2010, and 2011 to grasp, at the metro level, how many people will likely lose out on health coverage in states that have turned their backs on this part of the law. The totals are staggering. In the Dallas/Ft. Forth metropolitan area, 357,000 adults living below the poverty line who would have qualified for Medicaid under the new law won't get it because of Texas' decision not to expand.
Kansas City's total: 113,000.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-a ... -bad/8354/
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chaglang
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by chaglang »

JE Dunn files a brief in support of Hobby Lobby:

http://www.kansascity.com/2014/02/15/48 ... lobby.html

There's some history with the Dunn family backing right wing politics. The Star actually does a nice job in pointing out that they may be picking and choosing what they consider a violation of their religious beliefs:

Contraception:
Steve Dunn wrote in his email that while the company covers some forms of contraceptives for employees, the drugs that induce abortions by causing miscarriages, referred to as abortifacients, “directly contradicts the religious views of the family owners.”
There are some differences between the Dunn family position that the firm operates according to Catholic moral and religious teachings, as stated in its support for Hobby Lobby, and some church teachings.

For example, Catholic doctrine bans all contraceptives, not just abortion-inducing drugs.
Nuclear weapons:
And the Catholic Church supports nuclear disarmament and opposes nuclear weapons. JE Dunn was the general contractor for the new nuclear weapons parts plant that was built for the National Nuclear Security Administration at Missouri 150 and Botts Road.

“JE Dunn has a long history of working with the federal government, including building military facilities,” Steve Dunn wrote. “However, electing to work with the government in that regard is different than complying with a mandate to provide abortifacients.”
Seems pretty easy to poke holes in, though I have a hard time subscribing to the idea that a business owner's beliefs are transferred to their business, especially when great pains are taken to partition the owner from the business in other situations, like taxes or liability.
knucklehead
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by knucklehead »

Pretty sure if Jesus was alive today, JE Dunn would call him a worthless bum.

Funny how the rich like to coopt historical figures for their own benefit after they are dead. Kinda like sanatizing Martin Luther King to eliminate his opinions about US Foreign policy and economic justice. They love them some Jesus and MLK after they are dead and have been sanatized - but hate them when they are alive.
shinatoo
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by shinatoo »

Image
NDTeve
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by NDTeve »

yep. now I know why I don't click on these threads.
shinatoo
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by shinatoo »

Why is that?
phuqueue
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by phuqueue »

Scared to step out of the GOP echo chamber
LenexatoKCMO
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by LenexatoKCMO »

phuqueue wrote:Scared to step out of the GOP echo chamber
Why would the GOPers be upset by a survey indicating people are benefitting from the scheme they designed? :P
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grovester
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by grovester »

LenexatoKCMO wrote:
phuqueue wrote:Scared to step out of the GOP echo chamber
Why would the GOPers be upset by a survey indicating people are benefitting from the scheme they designed? :P
They're not real people, they are the 47%. Why wouldn't they be happy?
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KCMax
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Re: The Health Care Debate

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aknowledgeableperson
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

Just some more news about Obamacare, ACA or whatever they call it. From Time Magazine, How Kentucky Got Obamacare Right, by Steven Brill
Over the past year, Kentucky’s health care website has proved to be a huge success. More than a half-million Kentucky residents have signed up for the Bluegrass State’s version of Obamacare. A majority of Kentuckians approve of it. That this has happened in a deeply red state is unexpected but hardly an accident.

This is the story of how one state, led by Governor Steven Beshear and a team of smart, determined career civil servants, got it right–by preparing exhaustively, by dealing frontally with the system’s challenges and by celebrating rather than soft-pedaling the reality that Obamacare is a social-welfare program intended to help the poor and the middle class get health care coverage. It’s also a story about how the politics of Obamacare has played out differently in Kentucky compared with much of the rest of the country. Which helps explain why the Affordable Care Act, as put into place elsewhere, may never become as broadly popular as Social Security or Medicare–even if it survives as long as those programs.

...

But beyond the numbers, there is a political difference. Obamacare continues to be a loser or at best a toss-up politically across much of the country. In Kentucky–one of the reddest of red states, where Obama lost to Mitt Romney 60% to 38% in 2012 and would surely lose by more today–Obamacare is a winner.

Only it’s not known as Obamacare. It’s called Kynect, the name Beshear smartly gave it in the run-up to the launch.

Polls consistently report that voters in Kentucky approve of Kynect, even if they voice disapproval when asked about Obamacare. Again, Kynect is Obamacare.

...

In fact, no one mentioned Obamacare, except for the one enrollee who said that Kynect was “a lot better than Obamacare.”

...

Across the country, however, polls continue to show that more people disapprove of Obamacare than approve of it. The difference in Kentucky is not just about a website that functioned well from the start.

Beshear and his team did a smarter job setting expectations and anticipating hurdles. For example, they were unafraid to acknowledge how complicated buying health insurance would be for consumers, let alone consumers buying it for the first time. Rather than tout, as the President did, that logging on to Kynect would be as simple as buying an airplane ticket online, the Kentucky team prepared from the start to guide people through the complicated process of buying insurance, especially for the first time.

They took full advantage of federal funds available to deploy specially trained assistants–those Kynectors, like the ones who helped the Browns–at all enrollment centers to guide consumers through the process. And unlike the federal exchange, they included on their website a tool for people to search for insurance agents who could help them enroll (and be paid by the insurance companies for doing so). In fact, 44% of the Kentucky enrollees on the exchange used an agent.

More important, Beshear’s basic sales pitch was better because, unlike Obama, the Kentucky governor was unafraid to highlight what Obamacare really is: a massive new government income-redistribution program providing health insurance, through subsidies and the expansion of Medicaid, to millions of people, like the Browns, who could not otherwise afford it.

This appears in the August 18, 2014 issue of TIME
phuqueue
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by phuqueue »

So you think that if people were outraged with how much their new coverage costs, they would nonetheless report that they are satisfied overall? Hundreds of people telling pollsters, "I used to get the same or better coverage for less than I pay now, but whatever, I'm pretty satisfied with it." Sounds plausible to me!
aknowledgeableperson
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

The key is in the poll. People polled were people with "New Coverage", not people who already had coverage.
phuqueue
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by phuqueue »

"New coverage" doesn't mean they had no coverage before. Some were uninsured, others changed plans. This is explicit in the breakdown: 79% of people who were previously uninsured are satisfied and 77% of people who were previously insured are also satisfied.

Setting this aside, it's still pretty weird to expect that people would be satisfied with a product that they think they were price-gouged on.
aknowledgeableperson
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

Sorry about that. I focused on the heading as opposed at looking at the details. Anyway, my comment did not apply to cost. There are many who are paying less, especially since there is the subsidy involved.

Would be curious what the results will be one or two years into this project. The survey was taken between April/June. Many may not have used the coverage except for a doctor's visit or two.
phuqueue
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by phuqueue »

You didn't mention cost, Sarah Palin up there was talking about it -- "notice how the survey didn't ask if people were satisfied with the price," as if people would report being satisfied with something that they feel they're being overcharged for.
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im2kull
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Re: The Health Care Debate

Post by im2kull »

People, when questioned, who are only offered choices that lean toward good or bad and have no "Neutral/I could care less/was forced to do this/that" option will more than likely error on the side of "Somewhat Satisfied", rather than say "Oh I hate this". Give that poll a neutral/I don't care/middle ground option and see how the numbers then turn out.
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