Quote:

 

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2014/July/15/Senate-Bills-On-Contraception-And-Abortion.aspx

Senate Democrats Launch Fight To Reverse Supreme Court, State Abortion Restrictions

Most of the momentum in fights over birth control and abortion has been in the direction of opponents of late. But you wouldn’t know that by watching the U.S. Senate.

Democrats who control the chamber have scheduled a vote for Wednesday on a bill that would effectively reverse the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling regarding contraceptive requirements in the Affordable Care Act. And on Tuesday the Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a separate, sweeping measure that would invalidate many state abortion restrictions.

Republicans accused Democrats of using the bills as a political wedge in advance of the mid-term elections in November. Democrats did not deny political intentions......



Women's rights advocates listen as Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images).

Mason

Jul 16 2014, 11:03 AM

.

OOPS!


http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/14/chicago-faces-67-million-shortfall-after-obamacares-medicaid-expansion-busts-budget/


.

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http://online.wsj.com/articles/hospital-operator-hca-holdings-raises-outlook-1405516692
Hospital Operator HCA Touts Benefits From Health-Care Reform Law
Company Posts Higher Admissions, Says Results Easily Beat Estimates
HCA Holdings Inc. said admissions to its hospitals rebounded in the second quarter and greater-than-expected benefits from the health-care reform law contributed to sharply stronger results than estimated. "Results for the second quarter of 2014 exceeded our internal expectations, both in terms of our core operations and health-care reform," Chief Executive R. Milton Johnson said, while raising the company's outlook for the year as well...

Quote:

 

http://online.wsj.com/articles/unitedhealth-tops-expectations-raises-outlook-1405592679
UnitedHealth Tops Expectations, Raises Outlook
Health Insurer's Revenue Rises, Helped by Growth in Its Public, Senior Markets
UnitedHealth, which is the biggest health insurer in the U.S., said impacts of the federal Affordable Care Act cut into its after-tax net margin for the most recent period by 90 basis points to 4.3%. This year will be the first to reflect the full implementation of the law, as cuts in government funding for certain provisions are projected to weigh on results. UnitedHealth credited growth in coverage in its public and senior sectors with helping to increase its top line, as well as improvement in its pharmacy services business....

Quote:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/17/the-administration-just-took-obamacare-away-from-the-territories/


The administration just took Obamacare away from the territories

Looking for a place where Obamacare doesn't exist? Try moving to the U.S. Territories, where the Obama administration just provided a pretty big waiver from the law's major coverage provisions.

The Affordable Care Act's design dealt a pretty big problem to the territories. It required insurers there to comply with the law's major market reforms — guaranteed coverage, mandated benefits, limits on profits, etc. — without requiring residents to get coverage or providing subsidies to help afford coverage. The territories — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands — have been warning for years that would destroy their insurance markets. The individual mandate and the subsidies are the major ways the ACA tries to bring healthy people into the individual insurance market to balance out sick patients who can no longer be denied coverage.

That was until Wednesday, when the Obama administration told the territories that the coverage requirements actually don't apply to them. The exemption was posted on a Health and Human Services Web site on Thursday.

It's an apparent reversal from last July, when a HHS official told the territories there was nothing HHS could do to help them out.

"However meritorious your request might be, HHS is not authorized to choose which provisions...might apply to the territories," wrote Gary Cohen last year, then the head of the HHS office overseeing Obamacare's insurance market reforms. Cohen left the department earlier this year.

What sparked the latest change? The definition of "state" in the Public Health Service Act indicates that the ACA market rules don't apply to the territories, HHS wrote.

[...]

Quote:

 

http://www.nationaljournal.com/washington-inside-out/politicized-court-system-bodes-badly-for-obamacare-20140716
Politicized Court System Bodes Badly for Obamacare
Despite clear signs of health care reform's success, the Affordable Care Act faces a long road of legal hurdles ahead.
By Norm Ornstein

The news these days about the Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare—has been very positive.

On most fronts, it is working quite well. The ranks of uninsured Americans have declined dramatically. People receiving insurance under the act—with numbers that at least match the rosy expectations and projections raised when it was enacted—are quite satisfied.

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The Commonwealth Fund's extensive survey found 78 percent of those newly insured are satisfied, including 74 percent of Republicans. A majority said their plans included the doctors they wanted; only 5 percent said they had none of their former doctors in their plans.

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At the same time, more insurance companies have indicated they will participate in exchanges in 2015, offering affordable plans; that suggests they will do just fine in this marketplace. This is in contrast to the confident and dire predictions of opponents of both huge hikes in premiums in the second year and a drop in insurers that would devastate the market element of the exchanges.

Quote:

 

Following Obamacare's disastrous first weeks of rollout, attacks on the law became the central focus of electioneering ads run by Americans for Prosperity and other conservative groups last year and earlier this year. Many of these ads showcased "victims" of the law who turned out, under media scrutiny, to be anything but victims, or people who had not understood their options or the net cost of plans under the exchanges. Republican candidates who planned to run on a "repeal Obamacare" platform, or even a "repeal and replace" plank, have in most cases tried to shift the focus. This is in part because many, like Michigan's Terri Lynn Land, have had no good answer to the question of whether they support the expansion of Medicaid in their states, and they have had no answer about what they would do to replace the ACA.

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...the threat comes from an as-yet little noticed and more obscure set of four lawsuits filed by ideologically conservative activists and their lawyers, two of which have reached federal Appellate Courts, the D.C. Circuit and the 4th Circuit both of which could rule any time now on their cases, Halbig v. Burwell and King v. Burwell.

The key to this litigation is an awkward wording in the statute about the subsidies available to the less affluent, which says the subsidies come "through an Exchange established by the State under Section 1311." If we relied only on a literal reading of these words in isolation, there would be no subsidies allowed by exchanges not established by individual states—meaning that millions of people who are insured in the federal exchanges in the 36 states that refused to establish their own state-run marketplaces would be stripped of eligibility for subsidies. This would be devastating for most of them; the insurance they are receiving is affordable because of the financial assistance. But the damage would go beyond these individuals. As they dropped their insurance because of its unaffordability—except for the really sick or endangered among them, who would still benefit by keeping their plans even at a higher cost—it would radically alter all individual insurance markets, changing the risk pool in ways that would destabilize them.

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Two individual judges who have heard the case based on these particular words have dismissed it pretty much out of hand. First, as legal scholar Timothy Jost has pointed out, if one reads other sections of the law alongside Section 1311—Sections 1312, 1321, and 1453—it is abundantly clear that Congress created a fallback of federally run exchanges for states that failed to establish their own, defined all exchanges including the federal ones as being "Exchanges established by the State," and made clear that all Americans are residents of states that established exchanges.

Quote:

 

Second, it is quite clear what Congress's intent was—and it was not to exclude millions of Americans from the benefits of the law because their states capriciously decided not to establish their own exchanges. The plaintiffs in these cases claim otherwise: that Congress wanted to coerce states to set up their own exchanges by denying the residents of the recalcitrant states any subsidies. It is pretty easy to determine congressional intent in this case—by asking the drafters of the law what their intent was. Five principal drafters—Max Baucus, Tom Harkin, Henry Waxman, Sander Levin, and George Miller—wrote a friend of the court brief making it crystal clear that their intent was to provide benefits and subsidies to all who are eligible.

Quote:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-challenge-for-obamacare-enrollees-dont-understand-their-insurance-plans/2014/07/16/056d044a-fe33-11e3-932c-0a55b81f48ce_story.html

New challenge for Obamacare: Enrollees who don’t understand their insurance plans

Nine months after Americans began signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, a challenging new phase is emerging as confused enrollees clamor for help in understanding their coverage.

[...]

At a Silver Spring health clinic, Rebecca Wener spends most of her time helping clients figure out their new plans. Julio Herrera, 63, a construction worker, bought what he thought would be the most affordable plan when he enrolled through Maryland’s new insurance exchange this spring.

But he does not understand why he is getting charged for hospital bills when he already pays the insurance company every month. And he did not grasp this thing — a deductible — that was $4,000.

“If there is one concept that people don’t understand, it’s the deductible,” said Wener, a specially trained enrollment worker at Community Clinic, a nonprofit group that helps low-income Maryland residents. “That’s been a really huge thing. And the very cheapest plans have very big deductibles.” (The deductible is the amount consumers must pay in medical costs every year before insurance kicks in.)

[...]

Until this year, Dibekulu Dagne, an Arlington, Va., cab driver from Ethiopia, and his family got virtually free medical care at the Arlington Free Clinic. But under the health-care law, they were eligible to receive federal subsides to help pay for private insurance. He enrolled his wife, his daughter and himself in a plan with a monthly premium of nearly $900. His cost, with the federal subsidy, is $261 a month.

But he said he does not understand why he has to pay premiums when he is on vacation. Or why his wife, a home caregiver, had to pay when she went for her first doctor visit, referring to the co-payment required for most physician services. “Why?” he said. “My wife went to the doctor for a checkup. She had to pay. She’s not happy about the payment.”

And it is not only immigrants who are having trouble.

Other people often do not understand why they have to pay monthly for a service they may not use and then have to pay more when they use it. It is also hard for them to grasp the more abstract value of having insurance if they become seriously ill or have a major accident.

[...]

Wener, of Community Clinic in Maryland, often draws charts and diagrams on her notepad to explain terms to her clients. Regardless of how many times they go to the doctor, she tells them, they need to pay the monthly premium. To explain what a hypothetical $1,000 deductible means, she draws a line into two segments. Anything up to the $1,000 mark means clients have to pay in full before health insurance begins to pay.

That means a hospital charge for $500 and a doctor’s bill for $100 will come out of their pocket. “That’s when their faces are usually looking at me in horror,” she said.

[...]

kbp

Jul 17 2014, 03:54 PM

Quote:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/17/the-administration-just-took-obamacare-away-from-the-territories/


The administration just took Obamacare away from the territories

Looking for a place where Obamacare doesn't exist? Try moving to the U.S. Territories, where the Obama administration just provided a pretty big waiver from the law's major coverage provisions.

The Affordable Care Act's design dealt a pretty big problem to the territories. It required insurers there to comply with the law's major market reforms — guaranteed coverage, mandated benefits, limits on profits, etc. — without requiring residents to get coverage or providing subsidies to help afford coverage. The territories — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands — have been warning for years that would destroy their insurance markets. The individual mandate and the subsidies are the major ways the ACA tries to bring healthy people into the individual insurance market to balance out sick patients who can no longer be denied coverage.

That was until Wednesday, when the Obama administration told the territories that the coverage requirements actually don't apply to them. The exemption was posted on a Health and Human Services Web site on Thursday.

It's an apparent reversal from last July, when a HHS official told the territories there was nothing HHS could do to help them out.

"However meritorious your request might be, HHS is not authorized to choose which provisions...might apply to the territories," wrote Gary Cohen last year, then the head of the HHS office overseeing Obamacare's insurance market reforms. Cohen left the department earlier this year.

What sparked the latest change? The definition of "state" in the Public Health Service Act indicates that the ACA market rules don't apply to the territories, HHS wrote.

[...]

That's the administration redefining text from one year to the next!

Not that I care about how politics work with territories, but...

I distinctly recall that somewhere in the Obamacare Act it defines "STATE" to include District of Columbia and US territories.

Select the definition of choice, last years or now, it's just another example of the Emperor making the law up as he goes along in one or the other.

Quote:

 

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/07/18/death-blow-for-obamacare/ilXv6eZOTsQoBzw0vGzq1I/story.html

A death blow for Obamacare?
By Laurence H. Tribe

...If the challengers prevail, people of modest means in 36 states would be doubly damned. Besides being deprived of affordable care, they would also be subject to a tax penalty for not complying with the ACA’s requirement that they buy insurance. That penalty was designed to work in tandem with the tax credit: a penalty if you don’t buy insurance, but financial assistance to help you afford it. The challengers are trying to eliminate the carrot while keeping the stick.

Congress almost certainly didn’t intend this harsh result. In including the phrase “exchange established by a state” in the ACA, Congress probably meant to include those indirectly established by states that opted to pass to the federal government the burden of setting up and running these novel exchanges.....