The Affordable Care Act II - Because Mr. Obama Loves You All

[B-Man]

Fake news: Preventive care will, in the long run, save money.

 

Now that we've been hooked into to paying for everyone else's routine maintenance, the truth comes out:

 

"Preventive Care Saves Money? Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True/Contrary to conventional wisdom, it tends to cost money, but it improves quality of life at a very reasonable price" (NYT).

 

 

I guess we're not supposed to be mad about all the preventive care that got built into Obamacare, because it's just a nice thing to do anyway.

But we don't generally pay to improve each other's quality of life.

We expect you to work and pay for your own quality-of-life improvements.

 

From the article:

Let’s begin with emergency rooms, which many people believed would get less use after passage of the Affordable Care Act. 

We believed it, because the fake-news press and the lying politicians told us so.

The opposite occurred. It’s not just the A.C.A. The Oregon Medicaid Health Insurance experiment, which randomly chose some uninsured people to get Medicaid before the A.C.A. went into effect, also found that insurance led to increased use of emergency medicine. Massachusetts saw the same effect after it introduced a program to increase the number of insured residents.

Emergency room care is not free, after all. People didn’t always choose it because they couldn’t afford to go to a doctor’s office. They often went there because it was more convenient. When we decreased the cost for people to use that care, many used it more.....

ADDED: It is so irritating that this article blames us the believers — "Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True," "many people believed...." This is the same newspaper that will turn and blame us for doubting what it tells us, as though we're a bunch of yokels when we don't adopt the beliefs it serves up as true.

 

 

 

 

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Edited February 8, 2018 by B-Man

[B-Man]

WASN’T THAT THE WHOLE POINT OF OBAMACARE’S CRONYISM?

 

Warren on Medicare for All: ‘Taxpayers Have Helped Make Insurance Companies Wildly Profitable.’

[B-Man]

RANDY BARNETT: The New Challenge to Obamacare.

 

Readers may be familiar with a new constitutional challenge by 20 state attorneys general to the Affordable Care Act, which Ilya blogged about here. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that with the amount of the penalty for failing to have health insurance now set to zero, the individual insurance “requirement”–AKA the “individual mandate”–can no longer be justified as a tax. This is so because one of the essential characteristics of a tax is that it raises at least some revenue for the government. For this reason, the “saving construction” employed by Chief Justice Roberts no longer applies, as it is no longer even a “reasonably possible” reading of the insurance requirement, which now raises no revenue.

 

On this claim, the AG’s are on very strong ground. To the extent they are correct, the NFIB v. Sebelius was a bigger victory than we realized when it was decided, as it left the insurance mandate susceptible to being killed off in this way via reconciliation.

 

Because this constitutional claim makes sense, the attention will turn to the issue of standing and, perhaps, mainly to severability. If the insurance requirement is invalidated, does that bring down the rest of the Affordable Care Act?

 

Read the whole thing.

[Tiberius]

On 1/10/2014 at 4:01 PM, B-Man said:

HealthCare.gov Security Bill Opposed by the Administration Passes in the House

 

The federal Obamacare website is a security disaster waiting to happen. Two security experts at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services have told House investigators that they recommended against launching it in October due to security concerns that it would be a target for hackers and identity thieves. That’s a major reason that over one-third of House Democrats joined every single Republican today to require that the federal government quickly notify Americans in the event that their personally identifiable information is jeopardized on the health law’s exchanges. The bill passed this morning by 291 to 122 and goes to the Senate where it faces an uncertain future.

 

But it shouldn’t. While the House was voting, news broke that Target Corp. was announcing that up to 70 million of its customers saw their records hit by identity thieves last November and December.

 

{snip}

 

Target Corp. was required by federal law to alert all of its customers about any security breach. But HealthCare.gov’s designers exempted it from any such requirement, even though the Federal Register shows that outside experts begged them to put in accountability provisions.

 

The House bill by representatives Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania and Diane Black of Tennessee would fix that glaring transparency omission. But the Obama administration strongly opposed the bill even though the doctrine of sovereign immunity severely limits the extent to which the federal government would ever be liable for any damages caused by a security breach.

 

Clearly, as far as HealthCare.gov is concerned the operating principle is: One law for the private sector and one law for Obamacare.

 

 

 

 

.Added: Jeez LA, you beat me by a few seconds.

 

 

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Funny, I don't see Republicans worry like this today that our voting systems might be hacked. No incentive to protect them? 

[3rdnlng]

18 minutes ago, Tiberius said:

Funny, I don't see Republicans worry like this today that our voting systems might be hacked. No incentive to protect them? 

Who votes online?

[B-Man]

7 minutes ago, 3rdnlng said:

Who votes online?

 

As Mayor Johnson would say:

 

"Never mind that sh*t"...........Why didn't you ask him why he's responding to a post from January 2014 ??

 

It's not even from the first page..............I'm sure we've all hit that instead of the last page, but it is from page #2 of #238........

 

 

I know I laugh at examples of Gator's desperation and nonsense, but that was a classic.

 

 

 

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[3rdnlng]

1 minute ago, B-Man said:

 

As Mayor Johnson would say:

 

"Never mind that sh*t"...........Why didn't you ask him why he's responding to a post from January 2014 ??

 

It's not even from the first page..............I'm sure we've all hit that instead of the last page, but it is from page #2 of #238........

 

 

I know I laugh at examples of Gator's desperation and nonsense, but that was a classic.

 

 

 

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Give the poor little pissant a break. It probably took him 4 years just to read the article.

[Tiberius]

On 1/23/2014 at 8:40 AM, B-Man said:

Administration fears part of health care system so flawed it could bankrupt insurance companies

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/22/administration-fears-part-health-care-system-so-flawed-it-could-bankrupt/

Wow! The craziness that had Republicans spewing nonsense. How are the insurance companies doing under Obamacare? Stocks doubled? 

[Tiberius]

 

[B-Man]

DAN MCLAUGHLIN: The Supreme Court Proves It Didn’t Mean What It Said in King v. Burwell.

In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare provided subsidies to buyers of health insurance on the federally operated exchanges, not just exchanges established and operated by a state. Many legal observers at the time, myself included, argued that the decision in King v. Burwell was a politically driven outcome that disregarded longstanding rules for how the Court reads statutes, and that the Court in the future would have to either accept a dramatic sea change in those rules or admit (at least implicitly) that King v. Burwell was a political, not a legal, decision. Well, what do you know? The Court’s decision last month in Digital Realty Trust, Inc. v. Somers makes it crystal clear that the Court does not take King v. Burwell seriously as a legal precedent, and would have decided that case differently if it had not been so politically charged.

 

To recap, the Court in King v. Burwell upheld a rule passed by Obama’s IRS that extended subsidies to buyers on the federal exchanges. To reach that conclusion, however, the Court had to leapfrog the language of the statute, which made its meaning obvious in four ways.

 

Read the whole thing.

 

 

 

I’d just add that for all the charges against Trump for incivility, it was Obama who all-but-threatened a political war with the Supreme Court to force decisions he wanted on his namesake health insurance law.

[Deranged Rhino]

28 minutes ago, B-Man said:

 

I’d just add that for all the charges against Trump for incivility, it was Obama who all-but-threatened a political war with the Supreme Court to force decisions he wanted on his namesake health insurance law.

 

It was so important to 44 it makes you wonder if he abused the 702 program to get Roberts to comply... It's not as if he's above it as we now know. 

 

[Nanker]

So Chief Justice Robert’s likes oysters and snails?

 

 

[keepthefaith]

On 3/12/2018 at 1:37 PM, Tiberius said:

Wow! The craziness that had Republicans spewing nonsense. How are the insurance companies doing under Obamacare? Stocks doubled? 

 

Do you read and comprehend the articles you link before typing your commentary? 

Edited April 1, 2018 by keepthefaith

[B-Man]

[DC Tom]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/22/why-health-care-costs-are-making-consumers-more-afraid-of-medical-bills-than-an-actual-illness.html

 

Everyone who's surprised...?

[row_33]

8 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/22/why-health-care-costs-are-making-consumers-more-afraid-of-medical-bills-than-an-actual-illness.html

 

Everyone who's surprised...?

 

So costs have risen and services have been cut?  ??

[Keukasmallie]

Just forward the bill to Barack and Michele, what's the problem?

[Tiberius]

16 hours ago, DC Tom said:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/22/why-health-care-costs-are-making-consumers-more-afraid-of-medical-bills-than-an-actual-illness.html

 

Everyone who's surprised...?

And because of the Media/Democratic Party Complex, Obamacare is actually more popular than the Republican tax cuts. Why don't people turn off the media and watch some good old fashion news? 

[Tiberius]

Still alive! Remember, "Day one!!" 

Dead? It's still expanding! This bum can't stop it 

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/30/lepage-sued-medicaid-expansion-ballot-measure-559952

Quote

 

Obamacare supporters are suing Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s administration to force him to expand Medicaid, accusing the Republican of ignoring a ballot initiative that ordered the state to join the coverage program. 

LePage has refused to expand Medicaid nearly six months after 59 percent of the state’s voters approved it in a first-of-its-kind ballot measure. He has insisted he won’t adopt Medicaid expansion unless state lawmakers meet his conditions for funding the program.

 

 

[B-Man]

Yeah................................about that Medicaid expansion..................

 

 

FIRST IN FLIGHT FROM FISCAL SANITY: North Carolina Medicaid Scandal Broadens on Dem. Gov. Cooper’s Watch.

The political backstory to this tale begins with Cooper surprising the pollsters and his opponent — incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory — in November 2016 by winning a narrow victory. Through deft sleight-of-hand, and taking advantage of a quirk in state law, Cooper arranged an early swearing-in for himself just minutes after midnight on January 1, 2017. That legerdemain allowed Cooper just 12 days laterto appoint Cohen, at the time Obama’s Chief Operating Officer of Medicaid, to head the North Carolina DHHS before Barack Obama left office.

 

Thus was set the stage for the Cooper Administration to bring to a screeching halt what had been one of his predecessor’s top priorities — rolling back years of reckless spending by North Carolina Democrats. One of McCrory’s main targets had been Medicaid spending in the state; which had come to swallow nearly $15 billion of North Carolina’s $23 billion annual budget.

 

The runaway Medicaid spending had placed North Carolina in a financial bind, with little cash for anything else. Thus, in 2015 McCrory and the Republican state legislature passed a law that would limit Medicaid spending, remove management of the program from the state Health Secretary and contract it out to private companies, and prohibit further expansion of the program; all steps permitted under federal law.

 

As soon as Cooper had himself sworn in early, he immediately submitted a request to the Obama Administration to illegally expand Medicaid and maintain government control of the program.

 

 

Read the whole thing.

 

 

 

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