Gallup Poll– PRINCETON, N.J. — Americans’ views about the Affordable Care Act are more positive now than they were last fall, although overall attitudes remain more negative than positive. Half of Americans now disapprove of the 2010 law, while 44% approve — the narrowest gap since October 2013. By comparison, last November, just after the strong Republican showing in the midterm elections, 56% of Americans disapproved and 37% approved.
Following close to two years of reports of cost overruns on HealthCare.gov, increased premium prices and lost work hours since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., is introducing legislation to appoint a watchdog to oversee the health care law and ensure the protection of taxpayer dollars.
The legislation calls for the creation of a special inspector general for monitoring the Affordable Care Act, or SIGMA.
“The false, rosy claims of Obamacare have largely been debunked, and there’s a level of dissatisfaction all around,” Roskam said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “More time and more attention is in the oversight function. [The legislation] doesn’t reinvent the wheel in that it doesn’t use the same legislative architecture, but what will do is force disclosure, and the public then has choices about how it wants to move forward.”
Republican chairmen of four House subcommittees—Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, Tom Marino of Pennsylvania and Jim Jordan of Ohio—as well as Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Rep. Bill Flores of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, support the bill.
One primary goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to expand access to affordable health care. However, in the five years since the ACA’s passage, we have found that while more people have health insurance, they do not necessarily have access to affordable health care.
In order to pay for the subsidies that have facilitated the expansion of health insurance coverage, many recipients of federal funds were forced to accept payment reductions. Hospitals were faced with cuts of $260 billion over ten years.[1] These reductions came in the form of delayed payment updates for Medicare hospital services and reduced Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments meant to compensate hospitals for treating a high percentage of patients for whom the hospital is often inadequately reimbursed. The justification for the cuts to hospital payments was based on assumptions that, by increasing insurance coverage to millions of people, fewer individuals would go to the emergency room (ER) to receive care—where they would potentially be treated for free subject to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)[2]—and instead could seek care in non-hospital settings such as physician offices, outpatient clinics, urgent care centers, etc.
ObamaCare supporters have produced study after study warning of the devastation to come if the Supreme Court decides the IRS did in fact illegally extend health insurance subsidies to people in states operating under federal exchanges.
But the American Action Forum (AAF), a dynamic think tank led by former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, has produced new research that provides balance to what has been a one-sided debate. He shows how people in 37 states will be helped if the petitioners prevail in King v Burwell.
AAF estimates that more than 11 million people would be liberated from having to purchase expensive ObamaCare insurance and freed from the onerous penalties of the individual mandate, which cost those who don’t comply an average of $1,200 in fines this year. The study also finds that workers could earn nearly $1,000 more, and 1.2 million more people would join the workforce in federal exchange states if King prevails in the lawsuit.
In March, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the case that will decide whether the language of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) allows only those who purchase health insurance through state-established exchanges—not federal health exchanges—to qualify for federal subsidies. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Anthony Kennedy suggested that they may be forced to allow the subsidies for federal exchanges because limiting subsidies to state exchanges might unconstitutionally intrude on the federal-state relationship by coercing states into forming their own health-insurance exchanges. This federalism argument, however, is based on speculation leading to flawed legal reasoning. It shouldn’t determine the outcome the case.
The ACA’s statutory language seems to limit federal subsidies to people enrolled “through an Exchange established by the State under section 1311,” the ACA section directing states to establish health exchanges. The statute makes no mention of subsidies for enrollees on the federal exchanges authorized under a different ACA section, 1321. The plaintiffs in the case argue that this is no accident: Congress, they maintain, intended to encourage states to create their own exchanges by offering subsidies only to state-created exchanges.
Justice Sotomayor asked if interpreting the ACA to disallow federal-exchange subsidies would “intrude on the federal-state relationship, because then the states are going to be coerced into establishing their own exchanges.” Justice Kennedy, widely viewed as the Court’s swing vote, amplified the argument, suggesting that under “the standard of constitutional avoidance,” the plaintiffs’ interpretation might be prohibited because it could lead to unconstitutional coercion. “States are being told either create your own exchange, or we’ll send your insurance market into a death spiral,” he said.
Nearly a quarter of all people who bought Obamacare health plans still cannot afford the care they need, a leading advocate for President Obama’s healthcare law says.
Families USA, a group that often proposes improvements to the law, says high deductibles make healthcare unaffordable for many people, even though they now have insurance.
A survey released by the group Thursday found that nearly one in four adults shopping in the new insurance marketplaces bought plans with deductibles of $3,000 or more and 42 percent enrolled in plans with at least a $1,500 deductible.
It means many customers are forgoing needed health services because they cannot foot the bill.
“They could not afford tests or they could not afford various treatments or they could not afford the cost of medicines,” said Families USA President Ron Pollack. “The key culprit [is] high deductibles.”
The growth in health care spending has slowed down and President Obama wants America to know his health care law gets the credit. Or maybe the blame, because one reason for that slowdown is that people are spending more out of their own pockets. Health care actuaries say that when people have to spend more out of pocket for health care, they tend to spend less elsewhere. And when a third party—employers, health insurers or the government—insulates consumers from the cost of care they tend to spend more. – See more at: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=25652#sthash.KaaCV94L.3b1iR1LZ.dpuf
One of the key questions surrounding Obamacare is just how many people have been newly insured under the law. The answer is clouded by the fact that the White House and others have changed some rules of math for making these assessments.
For example, several years ago, the Obama administration fiddled with the Census Bureau’s definition of what it means to be “uninsured.” The new parameters, which were looser than the old factors, make it hard to construct comparisons between today’s figures for the total number of uninsured and the historical trends.
The Obama team also abruptly started to exclude uninsured illegal immigrants from the national tally on total number of uninsured Americans. Before Obamacare, these individuals were counted in that reporting, inflating the numbers. After Obamacare, these individuals didn’t get insurance, but suddenly didn’t get counted any more.
Now, a new analysis from the highly regarded managed care analyst at Goldman Sachs, Matthew Borsch, and his team, cast uncertainty on some of the recent data releases from the White House, and its network of academicians. In particular, the Goldman breakdown conflicts in some key ways with a recent analysis from RAND that was published in the journal Health Affairs and widely cited by the media.
One of the key questions surrounding Obamacare is just how many people have been newly insured under the law. The answer is clouded by the fact that the White House and others have changed some rules of math for making these assessments.
For example, several years ago, the Obama Administration fiddled with Census Bureau’s definition of what it means to be “uninsured.” The new parameters, which were looser than the old factors, make it hard to construct comparisons between today’s figures for the total number of uninsured and the historical trends.
The Obama team also abruptly started to exclude uninsured illegal immigrants from the national tally on total number of uninsured Americans. Before Obamacare, these individuals were counted in that reporting, inflating the numbers. After Obamacare, these individuals didn’t get insurance, but suddenly didn’t get counted any more.
Now, a new analysis from the highly regarded managed care analyst at Goldman Sachs, Matthew Borsch, and his team, cast uncertainty on some of the recent data releases from the White House, and its network of academicians. In particular, the Goldman breakdown conflicts in some key ways with a recent analysis from RAND that was published in the journal Health Affairs and widely cited by the media.
ObamaCare Facts– Go to this link to find the latest numbers and unbiased facts about how people are being effected by Obamacare and what their opinions are on the various aspects of the law.