Obama’s Vote-Getting Tactics Struggle to Find the Uninsured
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The hunt for the uninsured in Broward County got underway one recent afternoon when 41 canvassers, armed with electronic maps on Samsung tablets, set off through working-class neighborhoods to peddle the Affordable Care Act door to door. Four hours later, they had made contact with 2,623 residents and signed up exactly 25 people.
Many of their targets, people identified on sophisticated computer lists generated in Washington as unlikely to have health insurance, had moved away. Some were not home. Many said they already had insurance through Medicare, their parents or a job. A few were hostile at the mere mention of President Obama’s health care law.
“We’re going to repeal that,” one man said gruffly as he shut the door in the face of a canvasser, Nancy Morwin, 58, a retired social worker.
Such are the limits of microtargeting the uninsured as groups supporting the Obama administration take to the streets on behalf of the president’s most important domestic initiative. The nationwide effort is modeled on Mr. Obama’s successful voter turnout machines in 2008 and 2012, but in this case the task of finding Americans without health insurance and signing them up is a painfully slow grind.
Doctors Train to Spot Signs of A.D.H.D. in Children
Jerry, 9 years old, dissolved into his Game Boy while his father described his attentional difficulties to the family pediatrician. The child began flitting around the room distractedly, ignoring the doctor’s questions and squirming in his chair — but then he leapt up and yelled: “Freeze! What do you think is the problem here?”
Nine-year-old Jerry was in fact being played by Dr. Peter Jensen, one of the nation’s most prominent child psychiatrists. On this Sunday in January in New York, Dr. Jensen was on a cross-country tour, teaching pediatricians and other medical providers how to properly evaluate children’s mental health issues — especially attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which some doctors diagnose despite having little professional training.
Because the disorder became a widespread national health concern only in the past few decades, many current pediatricians received little formal instruction on it, sometimes only several hours, during their seven years of medical school and residency. But the national scarcity of child psychiatrists has placed much of the burden for evaluating children’s behavioral problems on general pediatricians and family doctors, a reality that Dr. Jensen and others are trying to address through classes that emphasize role-playing exercises and spirited debate.Increasing concern about the handling of the disorder has raised questions about the training doctors receive before diagnosing the condition and prescribing stimulants like Adderall or Concerta, sometimes with little understanding of the risks. The medications can cause sleep problems, loss of appetite and, in rare cases, delusions.
Restaurant's healthcare surcharge draws strong responses
The owners of Republique on La Brea have added a 3% fee to every bill to pay for insurance for every employee. But not all patrons are biting.
Steve Lopez
9:42 PM PST, February 18, 2014
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I had breakfast at Republique on La Brea Avenue on Tuesday, and here's how the tab broke down:
Cafe Americano — $3.25
Quiche — $5
Tax — 0.77
Surcharge Healthy LA — 0.25
The last item is the one creating a little controversy at the new high-end restaurant in the old Campanile space. The owners are adding a 3% fee to every bill, which they say will pay for healthcare insurance for all their employees, from hostesses and bartenders to dishwashers and potato peelers.
"This is offensive," snapped one Yelper, who called the fee "a 3% surcharge for Obamacare."
Bill Chait, one of the owners, said most customers have been fine with the charge. But I found one breakfast diner with a bit of indigestion over the fee.
"I don't like it, and there are several reasons," said Cari, a writer who didn't want to share her last name.
Cari said she doesn't appreciate an extra tax that's added without sufficient explanation, and she has no way of knowing whether the restaurant will use the extra money for the stated cause.
"This is a very expensive restaurant. It's $4 for a cup of tea. A glass of wine is in the $20 range," said Cari, who asked her server if the charge could be removed from her bill. And she told me she resented having to have such a conversation.
But Anne Gabriele, dining with her friend Elizabeth Wilson, had a different take.
"Personally, I think if this allows people to have healthcare who couldn't have it before, it's a good thing," said Gabriele, an oboist in the L.A. Philharmonic. "We all have to share a burden. If you're at a restaurant where you're spending $5 on a cup of coffee, you can spare 3%."
Well put. Here in Los Angeles, a living laboratory of income inequality, the City Council and the hotel industry should take a close look at what Republique is doing. Tuesday's council pitch to raise the minimum wages at large hotels to $15-plus an hour is in for a nasty scrum, but is a compromise possible? Say, a somewhat smaller wage increase along with a healthcare surcharge?
At Republique, Chait and co-owner Walter Manzke, the chef, said they gave long consideration to the surcharge, knowing it might drive away some business. But they were motivated by two primary factors.
Under the Affordable Care Act, companies with 50 or more full-time employees will eventually have to provide health insurance. Some employers are expected to get around the requirement by using more part-timers. But Chait and Manzke said they want all 80 of their employees to be full time because it's good for the employees and good for the restaurant in the long run.
But the bigger motivator, the owners said, was the income inequality that exists in restaurants.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lopez-surcharge-20140219,1144,7724146,print.column
MaineCare application asks personal questions, such as where a child was conceived
DHHS says questions on the form have a purpose and are not meant to intrude, but others object.
By Joe Lawlor jlawlor@pressherald.com
Staff Writer
Staff Writer
Single parents applying online for MaineCare coverage are being asked personal questions – such as whether their child was conceived in Maine and why the absent parent no longer lives in the home – as part of the application.
From a scroll-down menu of possible reasons that the other parent left home, the Maine- Care applicant can choose “unwed parenthood, divorce, abandonment, death, separation, incarceration” and others.
Department of Health and Human Services spokesman John Martins said the questions are not meant to intrude on privacy, but are needed to determine whether child support is owed and whether paternity needs to be established. The questions are included in the online questionnaire for single mothers and fathers on the Maine.gov website, and they include no direct references to child support or paternity.
“We’re just trying to do a job and collect the information that needs to be collected,” Martins said.
Child support payments do not count as income for a Maine- Care applicant, but they could affect other public assistance benefits that the applicant might request, Martins said.
He said the federal government requires states to gather child-support information from Medicaid applicants, although federal rules do not dictate how the states must word the questions. MaineCare, the state’s name for its Medicaid program, is funded with state and federal money.
But several lawmakers said the questions unnecessarily infringe on applicants’ privacy.
Which companies pay to play with ALEC?
Posted Feb. 18, 2014, at 1:53 p.m.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has attracted considerable attention in recent years for its role as a forum for companies to lobby state legislators. Operating since 1973, ALECdescribes itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership of America’s state legislators, members of the private sector and the general public” and is not registered as a lobbying group.
But the group has also been characterized by The New York Times as a “stealth business lobbyist” and as a “bill laundry” for corporate policy ideas by Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Companies pay hefty dues to ALEC for the opportunity to draft model bills that are circulated to state legislators, attend annual meetings and sponsor events with those legislators.
Hundreds of ALEC bills, focused on privatizing state services, lowering environmental, labor and corporate regulations, and weakening labor unions, are introduced and enacted across the states each year. ALEC bills privatizing prison and educational services and introducing voter identification requirements have been introduced in Maine’s Legislature in recent years.
Which companies decide to invest the time and money to participate in ALEC? This question is especially puzzling in light of the negative publicity ALEC received after the group was tied to the controversial “stand-your-ground” self-defense law cited in the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. Many companies left ALEC after being bombarded with phone calls and boycotts, though a majority of ALEC corporate members remained in the group.
Other companies have joined the group since the Martin incident. Many in the media and in advocacy groups were surprised when the otherwise progressive Google joined ALEC. What explains these corporate decisions about whether to “pay to play” with ALEC?
According to my ongoing research, three factors explain which companies participate in ALEC. First, larger companies are much more likely to participate compared to smaller companies, likely because bigger firms have more resources to invest in political activities. This is reflected in the list of ALEC’s top sponsors, which include corporate behemoths such as AT&T, Pfizer and Altria.
Second, firms that are more engaged in other traditional political activities — such as lobbying on Capitol Hill or participating in other business associations — are more likely to join ALEC.
And finally, firms that have strong interests in the sort of legislative priorities pursued by ALEC were more likely to join the group. For instance, firms with poorer environmental and product safety records — like oil producer Exxon — are more likely to join ALEC, as are firms engaged in tax controversies with federal and state governments.
If those factors explain why firms join ALEC, what explains why firms leave the group? To answer that question I examined which factors best predicted whether a firm left ALEC in the wake of the Trayvon Martin episode. One of the strongest predictors was if a firm was in a consumer-facing industry, such as restaurants, stores or manufacturers of consumer products. Firms that were not in such industries — those that mainly sold their products to other businesses — were much more likely to stay in ALEC. This is why Walmart, Amazon and Coca-Cola all rushed to distance themselves from ALEC after the controversy had started.
A Crusader on What Ails Artists
PITTSBURGH — Beer bottles clinked and indie-rock classics played overhead at a gallery opening here on a Friday night recently, as one artist after another chatted with Julie Sokolow, a filmmaker and health care advocate who has documented the Pittsburgh scene in detail.
There was Eanna Holton, who makes horror masks and props and recalled spending the last five years paying off a $10,000 surgery bill for her toddler. China Horrell, her co-worker, had a pulmonary embolism that cost more than $100,000 to treat. And Daniel McCloskey, a comic-book artist, told of being uninsured when he smashed his teeth in a bicycle accident last year, at a cost of more than $22,000.
These are among the dozens of stories Ms. Sokolow, 26, has collected over the past two years, showing how the lives of Pittsburgh artists are intertwined with their struggles over the costs of medical coverage. Her online video series, “Healthy Artists,” has chronicled the experiences of more than 40 painters, poets and musicians — talented, ambitious and often with a painful story of medical debt — and drawn the attention of national media figures like Michael Moore.
“Everyone in America has a health care story,” said Ms. Sokolow, whose project has culminated in a new 30-minute documentary, “Healthy Artists: The Movie.”
Ms. Sokolow’s films — made on a shoestring budget and uploaded to YouTube — are also a microcosm of the national health care debate as it relates to the young creative class, a group that is disproportionately underinsured. And while her survey of Pittsburgh’s scene is unusual, it is also an example of grass-roots approaches around the country, like the O+ Festival in Kingston, N.Y., and San Francisco, where performers are paid in free health care.
According to one survey last year, 43 percent of artists lacked health insurance, more than double the national average for the uninsured.
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