Obamacare

Putting ideology above the health and safety of the citizens:

Today, for example, about 94% of adults under 65 in Massachusetts have health coverage, the highest rate in the nation. The state guarantees coverage through Medicaid or commercial insurance under a plan developed in 2006 by then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, and Democratic state lawmakers. By contrast, only 68% of working-age Texans are insured, the lowest rate. Residents of the two states also have vastly different health outcomes. Potentially preventable deaths, a measure of the overall effectiveness of a healthcare system, are 36% higher in Texas than in Massachusetts, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The realization of just how inhumane the rejection of Medicaid expansion is, is probably what drove Aldona Wos to desperately try to deflect responsibility. She got caught and exposed by the mainstream media, but they need to take mortality rates like the ones above out of the editorial pages and put them where they should be, on the front page. There is no plane crash or natural disaster that takes anywhere near the lives that cancer does, and refusing to take steps that could prevent those deaths is borderline criminal negligence. If that isn't "newsworthy", I don't know what the hell is. Speaking of shifting responsibility:

At a town hall meeting in Lillington State Representative David Lewis responded to a question about the affect on rural hospitals as a result of the rejection of the Affordable Health Care Act Medicaid increases. The loss of (DISH?) funds as a result will make it difficult for hospitals that absorb the costs of indigent care to make ends meet. Representative Lewis said the GA was looking at ways to help offset this loss of funds. He also said that it is possible that down the road the AHCA Medicaid issue could be revisited and the funds accepted to insure the additional 500k.

I would guess that most people here support single-payer health care, as I do. What we have is the Affordable Care Act, which is at the very least a good start. But it's also pretty damn complicated in a lot of ways. As this DailyKos article shows,the public is pretty misinformed about the impacts of the law.

Now I can tell people about how their kids can stay on their insurance during college. I can tell people about subsidies for the poor uninsured and the Medicaid expansion. Where I run into problems are when business owners call me. It isn't even that they are bitching about having to provide insurance, the just want to know their liability.

If you work for an organization, you can get the organization to sign on to the ever-growing letter urging Governor McCrory to expand Medicaid under Obamacare to allow people making under $15,000 a year in income to get health coverage.

Today our friends at Action NC have a petition for individuals to sign too urging the Governor to act on this commonsense change, paid for entirely by the federal government for the first three years (the feds pay 90% of the costs into the future).

500,000 of our fellow citizens are counting on NC to let them get quality health care for the first time on January 1, 2014. Let's help.

But it's not clear (to me) what her options are:

Unfortunately, Goodwin added, “the shot clock has pretty much run out unless the clock is rewound.” The General Assembly hasn’t passed enabling legislation, so the state probably will yield control initially to the feds. It should try to take a larger role as soon as possible, but it may be locked in to a system it wouldn’t choose for itself.

I saw a statement recently by (I think) Harold Brubaker saying it was "up to the Governor", but since this piece of trash is the only thing to come out of the GOP's broken Legislative machine:

Hi - after Obamacare passed in 2009, I wondered whether or not the cost of my individual health care insurance would become more affordable. The short answer was "no".

So I wondered if a fraternal organization could be created that would attract people to it and work to build the Democratic Party while offering group health insurance at really affordable rates. So why not form a group called the "Fraternal Order of Loyal Democrats" where the qualification for membership is being a registered Democratic Voter in North Carolina. One of the benefits of membership would be the ability to purchase group health insurance at affordable rates?

Great collection of photos including one of Mitt Romney vowing to repeal the healthcare act: from USA TODAY yesterday.

...probably.

I am wondering if they will actually issue a ruling this time. I have been expecting this for over a week. However, a good article that explains several possible ramifications for people like me who really, really need national healthcare, came out a few days ago at TPM:

Most of the speculation and reporting about the Court’s options has centered on the mandate: Will the Court uphold it? Will it strike the mandate alone? Or will it strike the mandate, along with tightly linked measures that end discrimination against people with pre-existing medical conditions, and guarantee them access to affordable insurance.

So I disappeared for a full week, right in the middle of what should have been a busy writing schedule, and I have to claim some “personal days” to cover the time we missed here at the blog – but it won’t be time entirely wasted.

Instead, I’m going to jump into my own personal life for today’s story, and I’m going to do it so that we can stimulate some thinking about where we really need to go to if we ever hope to make some sense out of the crazy way we deliver health care in this country.

Since this appears to be the weekend that a lot of decisions are either going to be made about the future of our “social safety net”…or they wont; we’re entirely unsure…let’s talk about how it actually works for a lot of us – and how it could work a lot better.