States Are Focus of Effort to Foil Health Care Law
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
RICHMOND, Va. — The federal government is again open for business, and Republicans in Washington are licking their wounds from the failed Tea Party attempt to derail President Obama’s health care overhaul. But here in Virginia’s capital, conservative activists are pursuing a hardball campaign as they chart an alternative path to undoing “Obamacare” — through the states.
One leading target is Emmett W. Hanger Jr., a Republican state senator from the deeply conservative Shenandoah Valley, who prides himself on “going against the grain.” As chairman of a commission weighing one of the thorniest issues in Virginia politics, whether to expand Medicaid under Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he is feeling heat from the Republican right.
His openness to expansion has aroused the ire of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Dressed in emerald green T-shirts bearing the slogan “Economic Freedom in Action!” its members are waging what the senator calls “an attempt to intimidate me” in Richmond and at home.
They have phoned his constituents, distributed leaflets and knocked on 2,000 doors in his rural district. When the Republican town committee met Monday night in Mr. Hanger’s home county, Augusta, Americans for Prosperity was there.
In Richmond on Tuesday, hundreds of volunteers in green shirts turned out for a commission hearing, bused in by the advocacy group’s field organizers, who provided Subway sandwiches for lunch.
“This has been one of those trench warfare kind of efforts for a year now, and I think it is one of those hidden stories of the whole fight against Obamacare,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “It’s not flashy; it’s just in a whole bunch of state capitals and in the districts of a whole lot of state legislators, but it’s such a crucial aspect of the overall long-term effort to roll back Obamacare.”
Greg Kesich: Obamacare website disappointing – until you compare it with almost anything else
Yesterday at 9:31 AMPeople who claim to be shocked by the delays are acting as if they’ve never had to adapt to a new system.
I went on the new Obamacare website to see if it’s as bad as they say.
It might be, but I can’t be sure because after 20 attempts to sign on, I gave up.
I came close one time. I just had to respond to a confirmation email to create my new account, but when I clicked the link I got bounced back to the site and a message that told me I had taken too long and had to start over.
I can’t say I was surprised, but a lot of commentators who never wanted to reform the health care system at all are claiming that they are shocked. If you listen to them this proves that the entire Affordable Care Act will collapse (“Obamacare is imploding,” Marc A. Thiessen on washingtonpost.com) or that its failure is intentional (“Obamacare’s website is crashing because it doesn’t want you to know how costly its plans are,” Avik Roy, Forbes magazine).
But since I live in America in the 21st century, I’m not disappointed when I hear that new software is not working as well as it was advertised, because that’s what I’ve learned to expect. Face it, when was the last time you heard anybody say: “We just got a new software system at work and it’s fantastic!”?
Week Two of the Obamacare Federal Health Insurance Exchange Rollout––No Improvement
There was no progress for the new federal health insurance exchange's information technology and enrollment challenges in its second week.At the end of week two of the Obamacare launch, health plans were generally seeing no more enrollments per day then they saw in the first week.
As troubling, the backroom issues plaguing the connection between health insurers and the federal government had not been resolved and there is no indication from the feds when they will have these things cleared up.
My sense is that the feds, based upon the number of enrollments they have sent to the insurance companies, enrolled about 10,000 people in the first week (about 5,000 single and family contracts) and another 10,000 people in the second week in the 36 states using the federal exchange.
The Washington Post earlier this week cited estimates that the number was about 36,000 the first week using a web analysis firm's review of traffic. My estimates are based upon hard numbers from high market share plans then projected over the entire 36-state federal market.
There also may be some paper applications waiting for the systems to work so that they may be entered and enrolled with the insurers.
http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2013/10/week-two-of-obamacare-federal-health.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HealthCarePolicyAndMarketplaceBlog+%28Health+Care+Policy+and+Marketplace+Blog%29
Decades Later, Condemnation for a Skid Row Cancer Study
By GINA KOLATA
A medical researcher from Columbia University, Dr. Perry Hudson, made the skid row alcoholics in Lower Manhattan an offer: If they agreed to surgical biopsies of their prostates, they would get a clean bed and three square meals for a few days, plus free medical care and treatment if they had prostate cancer.
It was the 1950s, and Dr. Hudson was trying to prove that prostate cancer could be caught early and cured. But he did not warn the men he was recruiting that the biopsies to search for cancer could cause impotence and rectal tears. Or that the treatment should cancer be found — surgery to remove their prostates and, often, their testicles — had not been proven to prolong life. But he said in a recent telephone interview that he believed the treatments did prolong life. “I told them the cure rate is extremely high,” he said.
As more than 1,200 men living in flophouses on the Bowery signed up for Dr. Hudson’s study in the 1950s and ‘60s, neither his academic peers nor the federal officials overseeing his grants criticized his ethics, but times have changed. Two papers published on Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine prompted medical historians to denounce this largely forgotten chapter in the history of government-financed medical research on vulnerable populations.
They said the Bowery study was unethical, because of both the powerlessness of the people who participated in it and the things done to them.
“The invasiveness of this particular research was really horrendous,” said Alan Brandt, a Harvard medical historian who has written about the Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of poor black men with syphilis were left untreated to observe the natural course of the disease, a study that began in 1932 and was not halted by the United States Public Health Service until 1972.
On The Fly: The Doctor Will See You ... When Her Boss Says She Can
I did something very liberating last week; unfortunately, it was liberating with a dash of stupid. After waiting 75 minutes for my appointment to see the doctor, I got mad and walked out. Before I exited, I politely announced to the receptionist that my time was valuable and that I could not waste any more of it waiting for an appointment that was scheduled four weeks in advance. I asked for a form to transfer my medical records to another practice, and -- get this -- I insisted that the receptionist validate my parking. That alone elevated me to Norma Rae status in the packed waiting room.
Now I understand that medical emergencies arise and sometimes, especially during flu season, doctors' offices get backed up because they are trying to squeeze patients in. I actually would have been happy if the wheezing, sneezing, coughing germ-factory seated across from me had been brought into an exam room ahead of me. But that's not what happened here.
What happened here is that my doctor is a repeat-offender who is guilty of spending more time with each patient then the medical corporation she works for wants her to. She practices medicine like we are still living in 1950; she lingers with each patient long after she's done with her physical exam and I half expect to see her grab a little black bag and run out to make a house call if someone needs her to.
My doctor is easily capable of spending 30 to 45 minutes in an exam room with a patient. But that hasn't stopped the front office from scheduling her for 10 or 15-minute appointments (they wouldn't tell me which). So by lunch and then again by the end of the day, she is generally running about an hour late. Every day; twice most days. Every time I make an appointment, it's the same story -- the same hour-plus wait.
Tech firm is behind glitchy healthcare exchange; shares rise anyway
By Chad Terhune12:42 PM PDT, October 18, 2013
| advertisement |
CGI Group Inc., the Canadian tech firm behind the problem-plagued online federal insurance exchange, is showing that all publicity must be good publicity -- at least among investors.
The company's shares are trading near all-time highs despite continued errors and glitches that have slowed Obamacare enrollment at the HealthCare.gov website to a trickle.
CGI Federal, a unit of the Montreal-based parent company, was the lead contractor on building the federal exchange that serves 36 states. California and 13 other states have built their own online marketplaces and they have generally fared better than the federal shopping site.
Since enrollment in the federal exchange opened Oct. 1, shares of CGI are up 3% and the company's stock has soared 56% year to date. CGI shares were relatively unchanged in Friday trading.
Open enrollment in the exchanges runs through March 31, but consumers have to sign up by Dec. 15 if they want coverage starting Jan. 1 under the Affordable Care Act.
For now, many health policy experts have placed much of the blame for the glitches on the Obama administration for taking too long to make key decisions about the exchange and for failing to test it sooner. But CGI is bound to come under increased scrutiny as computer problems continue to persist.
"The greatest threat to Obamacare right now is a computer system the Obama administration continues to defend," said Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consulting firm in Virginia.
A spokesman for CGI couldn't be immediately reached for comment.
For the nine months ending June 30, CGI reported more than $7 billion in revenue and profit of about $300 million. The company, founded in 1976, says it's the fifth-largest information technology firm worldwide.
Even reformers don’t like Obamacare: a conversation with Dr. Quentin Young
By Phil Kadner
Southtown Star (Chicago), Oct. 17, 2013
The Republicans are right. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a mess.
The Democrats are right. The nation desperately needed health care reform, and millions of Americans had no insurance.
Obamacare became what it is today because of both political parties and pressure from the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical manufacturers and the public.
Reasonable people should have been able to hammer out a workable compromise. But these are not reasonable times. People are for things or against them.
And even the “winners” sometimes feel like “losers.”
Dr. Quentin Young falls into one of those groups, maybe both.
Young, 90, is the chairman and co-founder of the Health and Policy Research Group and has been battling for a single-payer, universal health care system for more than 30 years.
“It’s what every other modern industrialized country in the world has,” Young told me during a telephone conversation on Wednesday. “Health care is a human right, and I don’t understand why people in this country still refuse to accept that. In every other nation, that’s how they look at it.”
Chairman of medicine at Cook County Hospital from 1972 to 1981, Young was president of the American Public Health Association in 1988 and knew President Barack Obama before he became a U.S. senator.
“Back then, he favored single-payer health care,” Young said. “I don’t know what happened, but something changed his mind. By the time he was president he no longer was an advocate of single-payer health insurance, and that was a mistake.
“There are 16 million to 20 million poor people in this country who will not be covered by the Affordable Care Act. You can go broke or die without health insurance.
“Sixty-two percent of people who file for personal bankruptcy in this country go bankrupt not because they can’t manage their money, but because of an illness in their family.”
Controlling medical costs is a key to providing national health care, as far as Young is concerned, and the Affordable Care Act isn’t going to do that.
“From 1950 until now, the cost of health care in this country increased from $22 billion to $2.7 trillion,” he said. “You can’t sustain that. Every other (advanced) nation controls its health care costs through single-payer health insurance, their governments, but we don’t so we’re paying more and we’re getting less.”
According to the World Health Organization, the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608) and more on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product (17.9 percent) than any other nation in 2011. That was before Obamacare.
“And one of the reasons we spend more is that billions of dollars are made by private health insurance companies. That does nothing to improve the health of the average American,” Young said. “It’s just profit for the companies that provide health insurance.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2013/october/even-reformers-don’t-like-obamacare-a-conversation-with-dr-quentin-young
Southtown Star (Chicago), Oct. 17, 2013
The Republicans are right. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a mess.
The Democrats are right. The nation desperately needed health care reform, and millions of Americans had no insurance.
Obamacare became what it is today because of both political parties and pressure from the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical manufacturers and the public.
Reasonable people should have been able to hammer out a workable compromise. But these are not reasonable times. People are for things or against them.
And even the “winners” sometimes feel like “losers.”
Dr. Quentin Young falls into one of those groups, maybe both.
Young, 90, is the chairman and co-founder of the Health and Policy Research Group and has been battling for a single-payer, universal health care system for more than 30 years.
“It’s what every other modern industrialized country in the world has,” Young told me during a telephone conversation on Wednesday. “Health care is a human right, and I don’t understand why people in this country still refuse to accept that. In every other nation, that’s how they look at it.”
Chairman of medicine at Cook County Hospital from 1972 to 1981, Young was president of the American Public Health Association in 1988 and knew President Barack Obama before he became a U.S. senator.
“Back then, he favored single-payer health care,” Young said. “I don’t know what happened, but something changed his mind. By the time he was president he no longer was an advocate of single-payer health insurance, and that was a mistake.
“There are 16 million to 20 million poor people in this country who will not be covered by the Affordable Care Act. You can go broke or die without health insurance.
“Sixty-two percent of people who file for personal bankruptcy in this country go bankrupt not because they can’t manage their money, but because of an illness in their family.”
Controlling medical costs is a key to providing national health care, as far as Young is concerned, and the Affordable Care Act isn’t going to do that.
“From 1950 until now, the cost of health care in this country increased from $22 billion to $2.7 trillion,” he said. “You can’t sustain that. Every other (advanced) nation controls its health care costs through single-payer health insurance, their governments, but we don’t so we’re paying more and we’re getting less.”
According to the World Health Organization, the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608) and more on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product (17.9 percent) than any other nation in 2011. That was before Obamacare.
“And one of the reasons we spend more is that billions of dollars are made by private health insurance companies. That does nothing to improve the health of the average American,” Young said. “It’s just profit for the companies that provide health insurance.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2013/october/even-reformers-don’t-like-obamacare-a-conversation-with-dr-quentin-young
Insurers stumble into latest Obamacare glitch
| |
| People who can’t or don’t want to sign up for Obamacare through the troubled federal website have the option of enrolling directly with an insurance company — but there’s a glitch. The insurers haven’t yet been able to make a key connection with the IT infrastructure for federal exchanges. And without that connection, they can’t help millions of people who may be eligible for federal subsidies to purchase insurance. It’s the flip side of the problems consumers are facing as they try to get in the front door of Healthcare.gov. The health plans can’t get in the back door. Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s website, for instance, explains the problem to wanna-be shoppers — and asks consumers to keep checking back if they think they’re eligible for financial help. (PHOTOS: Obamacare online glitches: 25 great quotes) “Rest assured we are working closely with the government to be able to connect you to the Federally Facilitated Marketplace as soon as possible,” the notice reads. “Check back frequently for access; we continue to make progress every day.” Aetna spokesman Matt Wiggin said that the only way to shop for insurance with subsidies is through Healthcare.gov right now. “For individuals who come to our site to shop and are interested in subsidies, we direct them to the federal exchange,” Wiggin said. Even before HealthCare.gov’s balky rollout, HHS gave insurers the so-called “direct enrollment” option, which lets customers largely avoid the federal website and sign up for coverage through an insurers’ website. (Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO's guide to the Affordable Health Act) The insurers’ systems are supposed to be able to ping the federal data hub, the massive portal linking together federal agencies to determine whether a person qualifies for financial assistance and how much. Health insurance industry consultant Bob Laszewski said the problem is “typical” for the insurers he’s talked with. Many of the insurers don’t want to talk publicly about the problems, as they are still trying to work through them with federal health officials. http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=4279B0D2-FED1-4BAE-BB6E-659220E39BAD |
No comments:
Post a Comment