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Showing below up to 113 results in range #1 to #113.
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Obviously, Obamacare is not perfect, but the answer is to fix the law, not scrap it. One practical response would be to launch a crash program to train many more new doctors nationwide. Overall, the Affordable Care Act is making health insurance available to more Americans while maintaining the quality of care and limiting cost growth. Those are benefits worth keeping. | 
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From Mend, don’t end: Obamacare is working; Congress should improve it, by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 6, 2014) (view)
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"The Affordable Care Act is bringing some basic fairness to our health insurance market. So when I learned that a handful of insurers around the country are blaming their significant rate increases on the new law—even though the facts show that the impact of the law on premiums is small, just 1% to 2% declining over time—I let them know that we'd be closely reviewing their rate hikes. It's understandable that some insurance companies and their allies don't welcome this change. They've made large profits from the status quo." |
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From Health Insurers Finally Get Some Oversight, by Kathleen Sebelius (The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2010) (view)
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It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change. That is especially true in Kentucky, a state where residents’ collective health has long been horrendous. The state ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in almost every major health category, including smoking, cancer deaths, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, heart disease and diabetes. We’re making progress, but incremental improvements are not enough. We need big solutions with the potential for transformational change. |
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From My State Needs Obamacare. Now., by Steve Beshear (The New York Times, September 26, 2013) (view)
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"I am a physician, and I spent 16 years of my career in and around the health-insurance industry, and I think the health-reform law is a huge step in the right direction. Let's consider what the law has already accomplished: Roughly four million Medicare beneficiaries who have hit the "doughnut hole" in their drug coverage are getting $250 rebates this year, along with a 50 percent discount on prescription drugs; a temporary reinsurance program was established to protect early retirees; and a temporary high-risk insurance pool was created to help Americans who are uninsured because of preexisting conditions." |
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From Health-care reform is making a difference, by Michael R. McGarvey (The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 23, 2010) (view)
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But having lived in hospitals with Mason for months, I have seen that bad things — accidents, freak illnesses — happen to smart, cautious and otherwise undeserving people. It’s one thing we all have in common. We are fragile beings. So what is wrong with allowing us to purchase a financial safety net? What’s so un-American about that? |
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From Obamacare saved my family from financial ruin, by Janine Urbaniak Reid (The Washington Post, October 9, 2013) (view)
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Virtually anyone who has tried to purchase insurance in the individual market will attest that it was complicated and time consuming. People were denied and priced out, and they had few if any real choices. This is why the Marketplace matters. It is simple and user-friendly, and the coverage is affordable. |
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Medicare guaranteed health care for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor. Obamacare begins to fill the remaining gaps. It will get better over time, but already — crashing Web sites and all — it’s a beautiful thing. |
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From Obamacare is here. Get used to it., by Eugene Robinson (The Washington Post, October 7, 2013) (view)
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This is the part of the debate that I find so curious. There is nothing novel or coercive about linking taxes to the purchase of specific types of goods or services. As any taxpayer probably knows, there are many tax provisions that raise or lower your tax bill depending on what you have bought and what you have elected not to buy. "Obamacare" is unusual, perhaps even unique, in that it uses a penalty to encourage a purchase. Usually we use penalties to discourage a purchase and subsidies to encourage a purchase. |
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From Healthcare reform law: What's the big deal?, by William Leach (Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2011) (view)
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The potential for some reduction in the availability of low-wage work is real. But mainstream economists aren’t seeing anything like the catastrophe Republicans have foretold, and they don’t anticipate a calamity, either. That is because only 3 percent of small businesses — those with fewer than 500 employees — have more than 50 workers, so 97 percent of small employers are exempt from the law’s mandates. |
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From The myth about job-killing Obamacare, by The Washington Post editorial board (The Washington Post, October 5, 2013) (view)
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"In fact, there are two "health-care bills" competing in this election. One is the parody Republicans have lovingly created that casts the health-care law as a big-government monstrosity with no redeeming features. The other is the law itself, an admittedly sprawling legislative compromise that nonetheless moves things in the right direction -- and most of whose individual elements voters support." |
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From Health reform's reality vs. its parody, by E. J. Dionne (The Washington Post, October 4, 2010) (view)
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In other words, to get a description of the typical person Obamacare needs to enroll, just take the description of a typical Tea Party member or Fox News viewer — older, affluent, white — and put a “not” in front of each characteristic. These are people the right-wing message machine is not set up to talk to, but who can be reached through many of the same channels, from ads on Spanish-language media to celebrity tweets, that turned out Obama voters last year. I have to admit, I find the image of hard-line conservatives defeated by an army of tweeting celebrities highly attractive; but it’s also realistic. |
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Reform still might not sound like a great deal to people who are young, feel healthy and don’t want to pay for coverage . Yet having lots of healthy people paying into the new system on its terms will not only limit their financial risk, but also their participation will allow others who have been priced out of the health-insurance market — those with serious preexisting conditions, for example — to obtain good coverage. They deserve compassion, too. |
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From Coverage under health-care law may change — for the better, by The Washington Post editorial board (The Washington Post, October 29, 2013) (view)
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"Health care reform means health security. It means getting control of escalating health care costs and improving quality. It means that we will be living in a country that cares for all of its people the way it cares for its seniors, veterans, and active duty military personnel — with guaranteed health care. It means joining the ranks of all other developed countries." |
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It is working in states that have followed the essential design of the Affordable Care Act, particularly in Kentucky, Connecticut, Washington and California. The law was written with states’ rights and state responsibilities in mind. States that created their own health-care exchanges — and especially those that did this while also expanding Medicaid coverage — are providing insurance to tens of thousands of happy customers, in many cases for the first time. |
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"Republican politicians never tire of denouncing health care reform as a “government takeover” — or socialism. What is true is that the law relies heavily on private insurers and employers to provide coverage. It also strengthens regulation of those insurers and provides government subsidies to help low- and middle-income people buy private insurance on the exchanges. Those exchanges will promote greater competition among insurers and a better deal for consumers, which last time we checked was a fundamental of capitalism." |
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From Health Care and the Campaign, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, October 23, 2010) (view)
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Republicans predictably point to the failure to make the CLASS Act work as a reason to repeal the entire health care reform act. Long-term care premiums would have been paid for five years before any benefits were awarded. So it's true that because of the creative accounting, the CLASS Act produced $70 billion of the $143 billion in deficit reduction attributed to health care reform. But health care reform still saves money and has many other positive provisions, including many that already have taken effect. |
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From Don't give up on long-term coverage, by The St. Petersburg Times editorial board (The St. Petersburg Times, October 19, 2011) (view)
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"The best approach is to spread risks, not concentrate them. That's why the coverage guarantee in the healthcare reform law makes sense. Congress may not have found the perfect mechanism to provide that guarantee without driving healthy people out of the system, but the right response is to keep working on the new law rather than abandoning it." |
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From Health insurance: Spread the risks, by Los Angeles Times editorial board (Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2010) (view)
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Since the Affordable Care Act was signed three years ago, more than 370 innovative medical practices, called accountable care organizations, have sprung up across the country, with 150 more in the works. At these centers, Medicare or private insurers reward doctors financially when their patients require fewer hospital stays, emergency room visits and surgeries — exactly the opposite of what doctors have traditionally been paid to do. The more money the organization saves, the more money its participating providers share. And the best way to save costs (which is, happily, also the best way to keep patients alive) is to catch problems before they explode into emergencies. |
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Romney argues that Obamacare is economically inefficient. But where is the efficiency in a system that neglects routine physicals and preventive care, and then pays $550,000 in bills as a result? To me, this is repugnant economically as well as morally. |
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In the end, this transition we’re going through could prove more exciting than people think, but right now asking large numbers of people to go from being an “employee” to a “work entrepreneur” feels scary and uncertain. Having a national health care safety net under the vast majority of Americans — to ease and enable people to make this transition — is both morally right and in the interest of everyone who wants a stable society. |
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From Why I (Still) Support Obamacare, by Thomas Friedman (The New York Times, November 9, 2013) (view)
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The unvarnished truth is that neither president nor Congress can — or should — “fix” the fundamental logic of the new system, which will inevitably result in many people paying less but some people paying more after they transition into a reformed insurance market. As long as implementation troubles don’t do long-term damage, and there isn’t evidence of that yet, the overall structure will be an improvement over what we have today. |
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From There is no ‘fix’ to the Affordable Care Act that has everyone paying less, by The Washington Post editorial board (The Washington Post, November 9, 2013) (view)
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Even as coverage efforts are sputtering, success on the cost front is becoming more noticeable. Since 2010, the average rate of health-care cost increases has been less than half the average in the prior 40 years. The first wave of the cost slowdown emerged just after the recession and was attributed to the economic hangover. Three years later, the economy is growing, and costs show no sign of rising. Something deeper is at work. |
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From The health-care law’s success story: Slowing down medical costs, by David Cutler (The Washington Post, November 8, 2013) (view)
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Shopping for insurance today, [Patrick Tumulty] wouldn’t have been denied coverage or charged vastly more because of his expensive preexisting condition. His insurer wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of paying bills because of that condition. He would have been able to afford a checkup (with no co-payment) that might have detected his disease earlier. His policy would cover his expensive prescription medications. He wouldn’t have to worry about bumping up against annual and lifetime limits on benefits. |
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From Obamacare: Weaving a sturdier safety net, by Ruth Marcus (The Washington Post, November 7, 2013) (view)
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"Congressional Democrats, many of them beholden to lawyers who like the tort system as it is, made only a token effort to fix the malpractice morass. The law calls for just $50 million to finance tort-reform demonstration projects, and places limits on what these projects can offer as alternatives to lawsuits. Republicans should propose a much more robust program of resolving medical errors in ways that make patients whole and help the health care system become as mistake-free as possible." |
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From GOP can streamline health law, improve malpractice system, by The Boston Globe editorial board (The Boston Globe, November 7, 2010) (view)
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Sure, Fox News can dredge up lots of “victims” to insist they were happy with their substandard health coverage. That’s because they haven’t had a medical crisis yet. |
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From Our eyes will dry over Obamacare, by Froma Harrop (The Providence Journal, November 6, 2013) (view)
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Over the next several months we will get a better idea of how many people manage to enroll, whether their coverage is adequate, and whether their overall medical costs, including premiums and out of pocket costs, fall. We might ultimately declare Obamacare a failure, and if that happens we should figure out a better way to expand access to affordable health insurance and care. |
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"Sure, the health care law is not perfect, but it would cut the nation’s long-term fiscal imbalance by a quarter and reduce the projected deficit within Medicare by three-quarters. That may seem fanciful, given how distorted the public discussion has become. But that’s what the projections show, as long as Congress sticks to its guns and the Obama administration does a good job carrying out the provisions of the law." |
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From To Save Money, Save the Health Care Act, by Peter Orszag (The New York Times, November 3, 2010) (view)
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Since Obamacare was passed in 2010, the growth in health care spending has slowed to the lowest rate on record for any three-year period since 1965. "If half the recent slowdown in spending can be sustained," the report says, "health care spending a decade from now will be about $1,400 per person lower than if growth returned to its 2000-2007 trend." |
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Mr. Leonardi's comments highlight the fact that it has been a customary practice of insurers to send their policyholders notifications that a particular plan will no longer be available or there's been a change in benefits. Only one-third of the policies being canceled in Connecticut were plans that did not have protection under the law's grandfather clause and did not meet the benefit standards or the consumer protections required by the law. The other two-thirds were discontinued as part of the insurance companies' business-as-usual practices. |
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From Health Law Puts People, Not Insurers, First, by Frances Padilla (The Hartford Courant, November 22, 2013) (view)
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Fixing our health care system is not only right from a budget and policy perspective; it’s morally right. No one should be turned down for health coverage because of pre-existing conditions. No one should have to live in fear of going broke from getting sick. No one should have to use emergency rooms as his or her only option. As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” |
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Many higher-income people who won’t qualify for subsidies, however, will have to buy policies providing more benefits than they want. Maternity care for those who will not have children is one sore point. But that is one price of moving toward universal coverage with comprehensive benefits. And some of these higher-income people could suffer a catastrophic accident or illness that would previously have bankrupted them, but will now be paid for by insurance. |
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From Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, November 2, 2013) (view)
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It has been a year since my college roommate, Scott Androes, died of prostate cancer, in part because he didn’t have insurance and thus didn’t see a doctor promptly. Scott fully acknowledged that he had made a terrible mistake in economizing on insurance, but, in a civilized country, is this a mistake that people should die from? |
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From This Is Why We Need Obamacare, by Nicholas D. Kristof (The New York Times, November 2, 2013) (view)
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In addition to providing security, millions of people who are working at jobs that they hate will no longer feel the need to stay there in order to get insurance. That is a big deal. In fact it's a bigger deal than almost any other piece of legislation that Congress has passed in the last three decades. |
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From No One Died at Healthcare.gov: The Phony Crisis of Obamacare, by Dean Baker (The Huffington Post, November 18, 2013) (view)
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If the GOP succeeds in invalidating the one way to use private health plans to achieve universal coverage, frustrated Americans will eventually say, “Just give us single-payer and be done with it.” I can’t say whether that tipping point comes at 60 million uninsured or 70 million. But it will happen. |
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From My Supreme Court health-care brief, by Matt Miller (The Washington Post, November 16, 2011) (view)
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Judge Laurence Silberman (a Reagan appointee) ruled that the individual mandate is constitutional because it regulates the way people pay for their inevitable participation in the market for medical care. In addition, he wrote, the mandate is a critical part of the new rules Congress created for the insurance industry, which are designed to expand coverage and stop insurers from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions. As the Supreme Court has previously decided, Congress can intervene in local, individual decisions when necessary to support a legitimate regulatory regime for interstate commerce. |
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From Healthcare at the high court, by Los Angeles Times editorial board (Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2011) (view)
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Almost everyone needs health care at some point, and if uninsured people are unable to pay steep medical bills they will get charity care that shifts the costs to others, whose insurance premiums go up to cover the cost of the free riders. There is no denying the health care market is interconnected and that individuals’ decisions to purchase insurance — or not — affects the whole system. |
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From Health Reform and the Supreme Court, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, November 14, 2011) (view)
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Can we please get a grip? Whenever industry standards are lifted -- a higher minimum wage, safer workplaces, non-toxic foods and drugs, safer cars -- people no longer have the "freedom" to contract for the sub-standard goods and services. But that freedom is usually a mirage because big businesses have most of the power and average people don't have much of a choice. This has been especially the case with health insurance, which is why minimum standards here are essential. |
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From Having the Backbone to Set Minimum Standards for Health Insurance, by Robert Reich (The Huffington Post, November 13, 2013) (view)
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Yet critics of Obamacare apparently think there is something particularly odious when a person who might not have a baby pays premiums to assist someone who does. It’s true that men cannot have babies, although it is worth mentioning that they do play a rather important role in their creation. In any event, it is hardly very radical to argue that society is better off when kids are born healthy to healthy moms. |
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From What’s the matter with motherhood?, by E. J. Dionne (The Washington Post, November 10, 2013) (view)
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The essential benefits and cost limits are meant to prevent people with insurance from being bankrupted by medical bills — a distressingly common occurrence. But they're also part of a larger effort in the law to stop insurers from cherry-picking customers, leaving those who may need expensive treatments unable to find coverage. |
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From Obamacare cancellation blues, by Los Angeles Times editorial board (Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2013) (view)
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A few years later, similar doubts surrounded the launch of two Republican initiatives: President George W. Bush’s Medicare prescription drug plan and Mitt Romney’s health-care reform in Massachusetts. Today, the Medicare prescription drug benefit helps millions of seniors, and the Massachusetts plan is a model for the nation. Soon the Affordable Care Act will add a new chapter to this history of real-world success. |
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Large employers who are capping hours at 29 per week to avoid the ACA should not get away with it. There needs to be a secondary formula for determining what constitutes a large employer that includes the part-time workforce in some fashion, at least for the purposes of the health insurance mandate and assessing the penalty, if not for providing coverage. |
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From Improving heath care reform, by Tampa Bay Times editorial board (Tampa Bay Times, May 31, 2013) (view)
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Still, here’s what it seems is about to happen: millions of Americans will suddenly gain health coverage, and millions more will feel much more secure knowing that such coverage is available if they lose their jobs or suffer other misfortunes. Only a relative handful of people will be hurt at all. And as contrasts emerge between the experience of states like California that are making the most of the new policy and that of states like Texas whose politicians are doing their best to undermine it, the sheer meanspiritedness of the Obamacare opponents will become ever more obvious. |
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The law has slowed the growth of premium increases by doing away with the worst insurance company abuses. Nearly 13 million individuals and families have saved an average of $150 due to a new rule requiring more premium dollars to be spent on delivering actual care instead of on overhead costs and CEO salaries. Insurance companies must also now publicly justify all premium increases of 10 percent or more. Those two provisions alone have already produced more than $2 billion in rebates for millions of Americans who are privately insured. |
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From What's At Stake if the Health Law Is Repealed, by Kathleen Sebelius (The Huffington Post, May 16, 2013) (view)
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But it may help the court to remember that five years after its rollout, the ACA marks this immutable truth: Those who opposed it were not only wrong, they were spectacularly wrong. They said it would explode the deficit. Actually, the deficit has fallen, even as the ACA was implemented. They said prices would skyrocket. Actually, premiums came in 18-percent lower than original forecasts. Before Obamacare, 10-percent annual increases were the norm in the individual market. |
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From Paying attention, Supreme Court? Then leave Obamacare alone, by The Star-Ledger editorial board (The Star-Ledger, March 4, 2015) (view)
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Just as ironic, perhaps, was that all of the justices and lawyers taking part in this week's oral arguments seemed to agree that a tax could be levied on everyone to set up a single-payer, national health system. Yet somehow critics argue that a health reform law that maintains and builds on our private insurance system is unconstitutional. |
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From New health care law should be preserved, by Sander Levin (The Detroit News, March 30, 2012) (view)
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"Last week in Iowa City, a cheerful Obama addressed the Americans who had first brought his candidacy for President into the full light of unprecedented possibility. In 2007, Obama promised an Iowa audience that a health care bill would be on the way as soon as he was elected. It would reform much of what was wrong in our system, which was badly tainted by money and lobbyists and indifferent greed. As the facts prove, that greed was turned most terrible by a sense of profit so narcissistic it made those infected blind to everyone else." |
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From President Obama starts a revolution, by Stanley Crouch (New York Daily News, March 29, 2010) (view)
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"Congress has never before compelled people to buy anything from a private company, so there is no precisely apt Supreme Court precedent. Still, two provisions in the Constitution give Congress broad powers to regulate economic activity — the power to impose taxes for the general welfare and the power to regulate interstate commerce. The new law has been framed to fall within both of those provisions. The penalties for not buying insurance have been structured as a tax, to be collected by the Internal Revenue Service." |
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From The Legal Assault on Health Reforms, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, March 28, 2010) (view)
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"There are things that this bill does immediately that I could not, in good conscience, oppose: It ends denial of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and prevents health insurance companies from dropping people from coverage when they get sick. It allows people who are 26 and younger to stay on their parents' health care plans. As the mother of three children under the age of 26, that is an important issue for me." |
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From Why I voted for this health care bill, by Betsy Markey (The Denver Post, March 26, 2010) (view)
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"The mandate also could be viewed as a constitutional exercise of Congress' power to levy fees in support of the public's "general welfare." It's written into the tax code and enforced with limited tax penalties, not jail terms or property liens. In essence, the insurance obligation is a shared burden, like Social Security or Medicare, but with more services delivered by the private sector." |
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From Let go of the status quo, by Los Angeles Times editorial board (Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2010) (view)
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For rural Americans who pay more out-of-pocket for their medical care, the law is providing relief. Insurance companies are now limited in how much of your premiums can be spent on overhead like marketing and CEO salaries. States are getting new resources to help control unreasonable premium increases. And to help ensure that families don't have to put off the care they need, new insurance plans must provide preventive care — like mammograms and colonoscopies — free of charge. |
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From A health-care law for rural America, by Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Vilsack (The Denver Post, March 24, 2011) (view)
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"As for cost, the Congressional Budget Office found the law will actually help reduce the 10-year deficit. And though opponents insist that’s only because costs are backloaded, the CBO says the measure would also cut the deficit significantly in its second decade, thereby giving the lie to that charge." |
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The underlying fight is thus over social insurance approaches that have been part of the fabric of American life since the progressive era and the New Deal. If opponents of the ACA can discredit it, they can move on to demonize other necessary public programs — and undercut arguments for further government efforts to ease inequalities and injustices. |
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Two years later, I look back on that vote and I know we did the right thing -- and the proof is in the peoples' lives that are better now and millions more that will be better for it in the years to come. Instead of running away from what we accomplished, we should embrace it. |
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From Healthcare Is Better and More Affordable Because of Health Reform, by John Kerry (The Huffington Post, March 23, 2012) (view)
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This law is about innovation - using information technology to cut down costs, delivering personalized care to every patient, investing in cutting-edge biomedical research and preventing diseases before they happen. It is about giving small businesses tax credits to help cover their employees. It is about slowing the growth of health costs and demanding insurers invest a large portion of premiums in patient care. It is about fighting waste and restoring transparency and accountability to the insurance industry. |
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From Affordable Care Act for a healthier America, by Nancy Pelosi (San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 2012) (view)
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"To watch a woman die of colon cancer because she could not afford a colon screening -- that was no longer an option. To watch a family lose their home because a child's medical bills have wiped them out -- that was no longer an option. Health care in America is finally a right, not a privilege, because enough of us understand: We are in this together." |
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From Health care is now an American right, by Chicago Sun-Times editorial board (Chicago Sun-Times, March 23, 2010) (view)
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"When Americans figure out that insurance companies can no longer deny them coverage because, as it happens, they urgently need it, and when they discover that their kids can remain covered until age 26 and when they can for the first time afford health insurance themselves, this law will become untouchable. Self-interest usually trumps ideology." |
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From The health-care vote: One more step on a long, slow journey, by Richard Cohen (The Washington Post, March 23, 2010) (view)
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"But if you turn on C-SPAN and get away from the media filter what you see is not a "socialistic" takeover of "one-sixth" of the economy "rammed through" with "totalitarian tactics," but a moderate, cost-effective attempt to rein in soaring health care costs and to bring some protection to millions of Americans who are being preyed upon constantly by some of the meanest, greediest, most blood thirsty and sociopathic corporations in the world." |
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Already, roughly 50 million people, or 1-in-6, have no health insurance. Without reform, even if you do have coverage, you could lose it in a flash if you're fired from your job, if you get critically ill and your insurance company finds a pretext for canceling your policy, or if you're so ill that you burn through your policy's lifetime limit. Health care costs are a factor in most bankruptcies; in fact, they contributed to the the bankruptcy of the married couple that filed one of the main legal challenges to the health reform law. Changing this system is urgent and necessary. The only reasonable question is how. |
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From As health law turns 2, the demonization continues, by USA Today editorial board (USA Today, March 22, 2012) (view)
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Conservatives are fighting government involvement in a system that is badly in need of reform. Instead of arguing the merits of the issue, they raise the specter of a government “takeover” of health care and say care will be “rationed” out. But the government isn’t taking over health care. It would help people access private health insurance. And rationing? Insurance companies already do that. |
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From A difficult first year, by Las Vegas Sun editorial board (Las Vegas Sun, March 22, 2011) (view)
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"Health care reform will likely become popular, just as Medicare and Social Security did. The cries of socialized medicine and, worse, of creeping socialism, and, worse yet, of dead grannies littering the streets will look like what they were — political rhetoric. In fact, you can go to YouTube to hear Ronald Reagan arguing long ago against the coming of Medicare, speaking of a time when we'd tell our children "what it once was like in America when men were free."" |
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From Landmark change of health reform will be a defining moment, by Mike Littwin (The Denver Post, March 22, 2010) (view)
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"Reform does not institute European-style, state-run health care. It does not wipe from the landscape the private industries that form the foundation of American health care. If anything, it shores them up. Millions of people will now get subsidies to help them buy policies from private insurers; there is no public option to compete with them, one of the many compromises Democrats made trying to gain Republican support." |
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From An American cure for an ailing system, by Star Tribune editorial board (Star Tribune, March 22, 2010) (view)
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"Yes, a few conservative policy intellectuals, after making a show of thinking hard about the issues, claimed to be disturbed by reform’s fiscal implications (but were strangely unmoved by the clean bill of fiscal health from the Congressional Budget Office) or to want stronger action on costs (even though this reform does more to tackle health care costs than any previous legislation). For the most part, however, opponents of reform didn’t even pretend to engage with the reality either of the existing health care system or of the moderate, centrist plan — very close in outline to the reform Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts — that Democrats were proposing." |
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"The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that does not provide or guarantee health care coverage for virtually all of its citizens. It is a moral obligation to end this indefensible neglect of hard-working Americans. The bill does not quite reach full universality, but by 2019, fully 94 to 95 percent of American citizens and legal residents below Medicare age will have coverage." |
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From Health Care Reform, at Last, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, March 21, 2010) (view)
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But for those who dislike the requirement, here's a question: Do our emergency rooms have the right to turn away people who show up with no or lousy insurance? Of course not. Yet those of us who have good insurance are paying for millions of people, many of them hardworking parents struggling to put food on the table, who visit our hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices without adequate coverage. |
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From New health care law helping middle-class families, by Donna Shalala (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 19, 2011) (view)
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So let's talk about my new policy under Obamacare. For one, my premiums have declined by half. Before selecting my plan, I did my homework (a critical component for purchasing a good policy). I made sure that my doctors accepted the insurance and that my specific drugs, treatments and tests would be covered. So far, I've used my new plan many times and it's working. |
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But what about the cost? Put it this way: the budget office’s estimate of the cost over the next decade of Obamacare’s “coverage provisions” — basically, the subsidies needed to make insurance affordable for all — is about only a third of the cost of the tax cuts, overwhelmingly favoring the wealthy, that Mitt Romney is proposing over the same period. True, Mr. Romney says that he would offset that cost, but he has failed to provide any plausible explanation of how he’d do that. The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, is fully paid for, with an explicit combination of tax increases and spending cuts elsewhere. |
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In fact, critics are already crowing that the court has unmasked the law for what it really is — a tax increase, despite supporters' squeamish reluctance to acknowledge that. Well, fine, it is a tax: a tax on free-riders who'd rather skip paying for health coverage and then send their bills (in effect) to the rest of us when they get seriously ill and end up in the emergency room. |
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From Supreme Court ObamaCare ruling benefits millions, by USA Today editorial board (USA Today, June 28, 2012) (view)
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In the decade before the law was passed, national health expenditures increased about 7 percent a year. But in the past two years, those increases have dropped to less than 4 percent per year, saving Americans more than $220 billion. And that trend is expected to continue, with health-care costs projected to stay level as a share of gross domestic product from 2009 all the way through 2013. |
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From The Affordable Care Act has made the U.S. health-care system stronger, by Kathleen Sebelius (The Washington Post, July 9, 2012) (view)
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"Most of the major elements of the reform law don’t go into effect until 2014, but some important benefits start this year. Administration officials had two early successes: pressuring insurance companies to immediately end their indefensible practice of rescinding coverage after a policyholder becomes sick and to immediately start covering children with pre-existing conditions. Officials also persuaded insurers and a handful of employers to allow parents to keep their dependent children on family policies until age 26." |
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From Reform Moves Ahead, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, July 18, 2010) (view)
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The administration listened to my concerns. And more important, it listened to the concerns of the business community. This brief delay will not slow or diminish the overall effectiveness of the ACA. Already, the bill has done more than any law in the past half-century to expand health coverage. |
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Remember the rocky rollout of the Medicare prescription drug program in 2006? There were glitches and stories about people who couldn't navigate the system or get the help they needed. Eventually, however, goodwill, patience and sincere effort by just about everyone involved ironed out the kinks in Medicare Part D. It's so popular now that no one would dare try to eliminate it. |
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From GOP poisons ObamaCare, then claims it's sick, by USA Today editorial board (USA Today, July 10, 2013) (view)
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Charles Gaba, an enterprising Web site designer, has taken it upon himself to track the number of Americans who have gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Tallying those who have signed up on the state and federal exchanges (2.1 million), those who have obtained Medicaid coverage (4.4 million) and those who gained coverage through the law’s requirement that private plans allow parents to cover their children up to age 26 (3.1 million), he cites more than 9 million newly insured through Obamacare. |
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From Despite what the critics say, Obamacare is working, by Harold Meyerson (The Washington Post, January 8, 2014) (view)
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The assumption that giving up access to hospitals like Cedars means giving up quality care is a powerful one. And it taps into deeply held anxieties about class and status. But while we might think we know what’s good for us medically, the relationship between hospital prestige and hospital quality is a lot weaker than it may seem. Health insurance is changing for some Americans because of Obamacare, but the changes are not the catastrophe many of them think. |
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From If You Can't Go to Cedars-Sinai Anymore, Is It Obamacare's Fault?, by Jonathan Cohn (The New Republic, January 6, 2014) (view)
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"Another set of provisions became law on Saturday: requirements that insurance companies spend a certain percentage of the premiums they collect on care; a discount on prescription drugs for some seniors covered by Medicare; a rule that gives seniors free screening for cancer and other diseases. Republican leaders aren't dumb enough to explicitly propose taking all these benefits away. But Democrats can, and should, force them to have that debate." |
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From Bring on the health-care fight, by Eugene Robinson (The Washington Post, January 4, 2011) (view)
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Through a combination of subsidies for low- and moderate-income people and Medicaid expansion, the Affordable Care Act has extended coverage to 20 million more people and cut the percentage of uninsured Americans by nearly 5 percent. The ACA has done this without skimping on quality of care or inflating costs of coverage. Customers can choose among a variety of coverage levels and prices, but all plans are required to cover certain preventive services, such as vaccinations and disease screenings, without a copayment. |
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From Obamacare reality: Despite its detractors, the plan is helping millions, by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 31, 2015) (view)
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Through these efforts, our ultimate goal is to make sure the insurance market works better for consumers. Insurance needs and health systems vary state to state, and experience tells us that the best way forward is not to mandate a one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, our approach gives states the flexibility to take their own paths, while ensuring they all end up in the best place possible: with an Affordable Insurance Exchange that offers access to comprehensive, quality, affordable health insurance to small business owners and individuals who currently have few good choices in an expensive and broken market. |
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From In defense of health care law's 'essentials', by Kathleen Sebelius (USA Today, January 3, 2012) (view)
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The CBO, which "scores" the impact of proposed legislation, calculated that the health-reform law will reduce federal deficits by at least $143 billion through 2019. Confronted with the fact that repeal would deepen the nation's fiscal woes, Republicans simply claimed the CBO estimate to be rubbish. Who cares what the CBO says, anyway? Er, um, Republicans care, at least when it's convenient. Delving into the CBO's analysis, they unearthed a finding that they proclaimed as definitive: The reform law would eliminate 650,000 jobs. Hence "Job-Killing" in the repeal bill's title. |
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From The GOP's rude awakening on health-care repeal, by Eugene Robinson (The Washington Post, January 21, 2011) (view)
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One of the Republicans' major campaign promises was to cut the national deficit. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, repealing health care would increase deficits by $230 billion over the next decade. How does that square with their mission and the country's economic health? |
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From GOP vote to repeal health reform an empty gesture, by San Francisco Chronicle editorial board (San Francisco Chronicle, January 21, 2011) (view)
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There’s no evidence that the health care law will “kill” jobs. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, correctly points out that an increasing number of small businesses are taking advantage of tax credits in the law to offset the cost of providing health benefits to workers. Reid was also on the mark when he said that repeal of the law would take away free preventive care for seniors and would bring back the Medicare donut hole that would force elderly recipients to pay more for prescription drugs. |
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"Americans will pay a high price if opponents get their way. Reform means that tens of millions of uninsured people will get a chance at security; and many millions more who have coverage can be sure they can keep or replace it, even if they get sick or lose their jobs. Repeal would also take away the best chance for reining in rising health care costs — and the government’s relentlessly rising Medicare burden. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that repealing the reform law would drive up the deficit by $230 billion over the first decade and much more in later years." |
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From The Truth and Consequences of Repeal, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, January 15, 2011) (view)
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Since the New Deal, the court has consistently held that Congress has broad constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. This includes authority over not just goods moving across state lines, but also the economic choices of individuals within states that have significant effects on interstate markets. By that standard, this law’s constitutionality is open and shut. Does anyone doubt that the multitrillion-dollar health insurance industry is an interstate market that Congress has the power to regulate? |
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From On Health Care, Justice Will Prevail, by Laurence Tribe (The New York Times, February 8, 2011) (view)
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If Congress can tax me, and can use my tax dollars to buy a health insurance policy for me, why can't it tell me to get a policy myself (or pay extra taxes)? [Judge Roger] Vinson offers no cogent answer to this basic logical point. |
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The ACA does arguably encourage health plans to use limited networks as a cost-cutting strategy — since they’re now competing on price through the exchanges and no longer allowed to use such counterproductive tactics as denying coverage for preexisting conditions. The practice can be a hassle or worse for patients and providers alike. But it’s been around since before Obama was a state senator from Illinois. And stopping it altogether would push America’s highest-in-the-world health costs further into the stratosphere. |
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From Anti-Obamacare, facts be damned, by Bill Hammond (New York Daily News, February 4, 2014) (view)
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The more Americans learn about the Affordable Care Act, the more they warm up to its opportunities. Parents are relieved they can keep children on their policy until age 26. Creation of insurance pools for people with pre-existing conditions is a bright light, along with rebates for seniors with high prescription costs. Despite the fetid distortions of GOP propagandists, the health-care act attracts small businesses because tax credits enable them to pay for employee coverage. |
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From No GOP prescription for health care, by Lance Dickie (The Seattle Times, February 4, 2011) (view)
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Even supporters of health reform are somewhat surprised by the right’s apparent inability to come up with real cases of hardship. Surely there must be some people somewhere actually being hurt by a reform that affects millions of Americans. Why can’t the right find these people and exploit them? The most likely answer is that the true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. |
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The University of Maryland experts estimated that health reform will provide a net savings to our state budget of more than $850 million by the year 2020. To capture these savings, we will need to implement the law with an eye to Maryland's unique circumstances. Fortunately, rather than a "one-size-fits-all" approach, the law provides a powerful set of tools for states to use and adapt. |
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We should not be surprised that some people will choose to leave jobs for other pursuits, given these new options. Some might choose to stay home to take care of children, instead of working for wages that barely cover child care in order to keep their insurance. Some people might choose to start businesses, to become the entrepreneurs that our society reveres. Some might decide they can finally manage to retire from a job which has caused them too much physical or emotional stress, existing on savings or the support of a spouse. |
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Although the law gives states the option to design and run their own exchanges, some critics have claimed this could burden states if they're not given adequate resources and flexibility. I agree. But what these critics miss is that the law already gives states most of the resources and flexibility they're asking for. |
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From How the Affordable Care Act empowers states, by Kathleen Sebelius (The Washington Post, February 10, 2011) (view)
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I'll never be able to check the "no" box next to cancer on a health history questionnaire. My diagnosis will forever be a part of who I am. That's why I am so thankful that starting in January because of the Affordable Care Act, the up to 129 million Americans living with a pre-existing condition, including nearly 8 million in my home state of Florida, will finally have the peace of mind knowing that we can't be dropped from our insurance or denied coverage. |
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From No One Plans for This, by Debbie Wasserman Schultz (The Huffington Post, December 5, 2013) (view)
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There were many predictions of soaring premiums. But health reform’s efforts to create meaningful competition among insurers are working better than almost anyone (myself included) expected. Premiums for 2014 came in well below expectations, and independent estimates show a very modest increase — 4 percent or less — for average premiums in 2015. In short, if you think of Obamacare as a policy intended to improve American lives, it’s going really well. |
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Obamacare does improve things, especially with the Medicaid expansion and the requirement that insurance companies on the exchanges can't exclude people with pre-existing medical conditions. Ultimately, however, health insurance will still be too expensive, too complicated, and not generous enough in its coverage for many people who don't receive generous employer-provided plans. |
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From Obamacare isn't perfect, but it's a decent fix, by Duncan Black (USA Today, December 3, 2013) (view)
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Some critics of Obamacare argue that the spate of changes show that Washington's reach exceeded its grasp. A simpler explanation is that the uncertain progress shows how hard it is to make the systemic changes needed to fix the healthcare system's complex and intertwined problems. The ambition of the Affordable Care Act wasn't motivated by hubris, it was necessitated by the challenge posed by the system's perverse incentives, its runaway costs and the growing number of uninsured people. |
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From The umpteenth Obamacare fix, by Los Angeles Times editorial board (Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2013) (view)
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"Congress could switch to the carrot approach. Incentives to buy insurance, rather than penalties, would appeal to the young and healthy among the uninsured. Legal challenge or no, the nation still has a moral mandate to assure affordable, quality medical care for 50 million uninsured Americans at risk of suffering debilitating illnesses and death." |
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From Health law has life, by The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board (The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 19, 2010) (view)
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"Having the new law on the books makes the industry look at how our health system delivers care and focus on controlling overall costs through preventive and curative care. Doctors and nurses have told me the new law provides incentives to deliver care in ways that are more cost efficient, increases protections against medical errors and empowers patients and families to have more control over their health decisions." |
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From Obamacare: Helpful law already paying big dividends, by Susan Davis (The San Diego Union-Tribune, December 17, 2010) (view)
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"This latest legal attack on the health care law doesn't make much sense. The federal government argues that the mandate to buy coverage is indeed constitutional because the fine for not having it would be levied as an income tax." |
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From If new health care reforms die, America loses, by Froma Harrop (The Dallas Morning News, December 16, 2010) (view)
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"There's no question that healthcare is a form of interstate commerce subject to regulation by Congress. Nor is there any question that the adults subject to the individual mandate participate in that market, whether it be buying aspirin at a drugstore, visiting a doctor for a checkup or rushing to an emergency room for treatment. (The law exempts Christian Scientists and others who abstain from medical care for religious reasons.) The individual mandate affects how people pay for the care they consume, but it doesn't force them into the healthcare market — they're already there." |
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From The individual mandate: It's constitutional, by Los Angeles Times editorial board (Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2010) (view)
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"After more appeals, the battle over Obamacare's constitutionality will reach the Supreme Court. The justices will doubtless read Judge Hudson's ruling and its clear summary sentence: "At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance -- or crafting a scheme of universal health coverage -- it's about an individual's right to choose to participate."" |
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From Unchecked power: The courts and Obamacare, by New Hampshire Union Leader editorial board (New Hampshire Union Leader, December 15, 2010) (view)
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"As flawed as the law may be to critics on the left and right, going backward is not a reasonable option. More caution against wholesale repeal came in the form of a recent study from Columbia University that suggested that US overspending on health might be harming Americans. Analyzing survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65, Americans have stunningly fallen behind other large, wealthy nations in life expectancy. That is despite a rate of health care spending that has grown nearly twice as fast as the spending in 12 comparison countries since 1970." |
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From A repeal that’ll be dangerous to our health, by Derrick Jackson (The Boston Globe, December 14, 2010) (view)
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"For decades, Supreme Court decisions have made clear that the Constitution allows Congress to adopt rules to deal with such harmful economic effects, which is what the law does - it regulates how we pay for health care by ensuring that those who have insurance don't continue to pay for those who don't. Because of the long-held legal precedent of upholding such provisions, even President Ronald Reagan's solicitor general, Charles Fried, called legal objections to the law "far-fetched."" |
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From Health reform will survive its legal fight, by Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius (The Washington Post, December 14, 2010) (view)
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"As the Obama administration argued in defending the law, "No person can guarantee that he will divorce himself entirely from the market for health-care services." Even inaction, in this situation, affects economic activity and therefore interstate commerce." |
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From Judge Hudson's flawed but restrained ruling on the health law, by The Washington Post editorial board (The Washington Post, December 13, 2010) (view)
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Health spending has been growing unusually slowly, but it's unclear whether Obamacare is the reason. The sluggish economy is a likelier suspect. Regardless, for all the frustration caused by the law's sloppy rollout, its critics have yet to offer a serious alternative that would provide coverage to more than a tiny fraction of the uninsured. |
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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his dozen Republican allies are desperate to stop reform before it goes into effect, reasoning that once subsidies start to go to help uninsured people buy policies, it will be impossible to stop the program. Put another way: Once Americans who could never get affordable health insurance begin to get it, and the 85% of Americans who are mostly unaffected by the law realize it's not the freedom-robbing boogeyman they've been told it is, ObamaCare might actually become popular. |
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From Health care 'temper tantrum' could punish GOP, by USA Today editorial board (USA Today, August 4, 2013) (view)
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"As the Affordable Care Act gets closer to full implementation in 2014, we will see more lives saved thanks to expanded access to health care, and we will see 'Obamacare' become another political 'third rail' for those who would seek to repeal it. I, for one, cannot wait for that day when nobody dare move us backwards to the way things were done pre-March 23, 2010." |
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In fact, the real, lived experience of Obamacare is likely to be one of significantly increased individual freedom. For all our talk of being the land of liberty, those holding one of the dwindling number of jobs that carry decent health benefits often feel anything but free, knowing that if they leave or lose their job, for whatever reason, they may not be able to regain the coverage they need. Over time, as people come to realize that affordable coverage is now guaranteed, it will have a powerful liberating effect. |
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Last week marked a definite milestone, and perhaps a tipping point, in the drive to offer Americans better access to health insurance. With the number of people enrolled in new, individual plans under ACA topping 7 million, the law has gained a level of acceptance that makes all the effort it took to get here worthwhile. |
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"The unanswered question is whether — as the critics charge — the change will push a lot of employers into dropping their retiree drug plans. The remaining tax subsidy is substantial and many companies and their workers value the retiree drug benefit, so defections may be small. If some retirees do lose their company drug benefits, they can buy government-subsidized coverage in Medicare that may be just or almost as good and will be getting better as health care reform progresses." |
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From We Call That Double-Dipping, by The New York Times editorial board (The New York Times, April 5, 2010) (view)
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And, yes, it’s also a big political victory for Democrats. They can point to a system that is already providing vital aid to millions of Americans, and Republicans — who were planning to run against a debacle — have nothing to offer in response. And I mean nothing. So far, not one of the supposed Obamacare horror stories featured in attack ads has stood up to scrutiny. |
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"You don’t have to be Machiavelli to believe that the leaders of Iran and Venezuela shared the barely disguised Republican hope that health care would fail and, therefore, Obama’s whole political agenda would be stalled and, therefore, his presidency enfeebled. He would then be a lame duck for the next three years and America would be a lame power." |
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So let’s say it out loud: The ACA is doing exactly what its supporters said it would do. It is getting health insurance to millions who didn’t have it before. (The Los Angeles Times pegged the number at 9.5 million at the beginning of the week.) And it’s working especially well in places such as Kentucky, where state officials threw themselves fully and competently behind the cause of signing up the uninsured. |
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From The GOP must admit it was wrong on Obamacare, by E. J. Dionne (The Washington Post, April 2, 2014) (view)
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Some individual purchasers — those who used to have skimpy coverage, for example, or who benefited from the discrimination against the elderly and the sick on which the old system relied — will pay more. Many others, however, will not, especially after they get government assistance to buy insurance. And people with preexisting conditions or other problems will no longer be priced out. That these worthwhile reforms are not expected to result in premiums as high as experts once projected is good news for individual buyers and the federal budget. |
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From The Affordable Care Act comes in with better-than-expected numbers, by The Washington Post editorial board (The Washington Post, April 17, 2014) (view)
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Let’s start with the good news about reform, which keeps coming in. First, there was the amazing come-from-behind surge in enrollments. Then there were a series of surveys — from Gallup, the Urban Institute, and RAND — all suggesting large gains in coverage. Taken individually, any one of these indicators might be dismissed as an outlier, but taken together they paint an unmistakable picture of major progress. |
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The typical family pays more than $1,000 a year in higher premiums to pay for someone else's care.
Requiring young, healthy consumers to obtain health insurance -- just as motorists must buy auto insurance and some homeowners must buy flood insurance -- fairly spreads the risk. Sooner or later, they will need health care, and should be expected to pay for it. Personal irresponsibility is not a constitutional right. |
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"Morgan Stanley referred to it as "noise" that would have "no impact whatsoever" on their view of this earnings cycle. And UBS projected that the impact in virtually all cases represented less than 1% of market capitalization for affected companies. When you look past the hype and the overheated rhetoric, the benefits of the health reforms for America's businesses large and small far outweigh the impact of this small tax provision. And while critics have rushed to highlight this small accounting measure, they conveniently leave out the one fact on which every serious health-care analyst agrees: The status quo was completely unsustainable for American businesses." |
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From Don't Believe the Writedown Hype, by Gary Locke (The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2010) (view)
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