What we learned from the election

[bonnie]

Yep, adults who can't or won't act like adults get to be on their parents' health insurance. Wonderful!!!

Millions will now have insurance and millions will now not have what they had because of it.

That is spelled fairness.

I would be highly disappointed in our sons if they had come to their father and I to continue to ensure them to age 26.

They could vote,die on a battlefield,marry,have families,hold down jobs and their father and I should continue to care for them? Don't think so.

Thankfully they all grew up to be responsibile adults

[bonnie]

Originally Posted By: bonnie

...

For instance,Obamacare has improved ?????

Easy...

People with existing conditions.

Allowed parents to keep kids on insurance longer.

Millions more will have access to health care.

Insurance companies are made up of insured. The "freebies" will be paid by the insured,that's us.

Just as any government handout is not at the expense of the government,it is at the expense of the taxpayer.Those that support and pay for those that don't

[bonnie]

Easy...

People with existing conditions.

Allowed parents to keep kids on insurance longer.

Millions more will have access to health care.

A heartfelt thank you to Obama for savings Obama style

By Jake Tapper

@jaketapper

Devin Dwyer

@devindwyer

Sep 25, 2012 1:19pm

Rising Health Costs Undermine Obama Pledge to Curb Trend

ht healthcare reform bill nt 110323 wmain Rising Health Costs Undermine Obama Pledge to Curb Trend

President Barack Obama's signature on the health insurance reform bill at the White House, March 23, 2010. President Obama promised the legislation would help reduce health insurance premiums, but growth has continued. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Two new independent studies of health insurance premiums and health care spending indicate both are rising at an accelerated pace, despite President Obama’s 2008 promise to contain those costs and his pledge that his health care legislation would reduce premiums.

Spending on health care rose 4.6 percent in 2011 — up $4,500 per person, on average — according to the nonpartisan Health Care Cost Institute. That’s up from a 3.8 growth rate in 2010.

Health insurance premiums for individuals and families also climbed year-over-year, up 3 percent ($186) on average for an individual and 4 percent ($672) on average for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

During Obama’s term, between 2009 to 2012, premiums have climbed $2,370 for the average family with an employer-provided plan – a rate faster than the during the previous four years under President George W. Bush, according to Kaiser.

Investor’s Business Daily’s John Merline was first to note the difference in premiums climbing faster under Obama than the previous four years under Bush.

Experts point to rising health care costs as the driver of increased individual spending and higher premiums.

During the 2008 campaign and health care reform debate in 2009, President Obama said repeatedly that his plan would bend the cost curve downward, ultimately saving the average family $2,500 per year.

At a rally in Virginia in June 2008, Obama said: “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.”

“We’ll do it by investing in disease prevention, not just disease management; by investing in a paperless health care system to reduce administrative costs; and by covering every single American and making sure that they can take their health care with them if they lose their job,” he said at the time. “We’ll also reduce costs for business and their workers by picking up the tab for some of the most expensive illnesses.

“We won’t do all this twenty years from now, or ten years from now,” he said. “We’ll do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States.”

And in a debate with Sen. John McCain in October 2008: “The only thing we’re going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year,” he said.

Obama and Democrats enacted the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. “Obamacare,” in March 2010, including many of the projected cost-saving measures that were hailed before voters.

Many of those cost-savings have yet to be realized.

President Obama explained in response to a question from ABC News at a Sept. 2010 press conference that “bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do.”

“I said at the time, it wasn’t going to happen tomorrow, it wasn’t going to happen next year. It took us decades to get into a position where our health care costs were going up 6, 7, 10 percent a year. And so our goal is to slowly bring down those costs,” he said.

Obama added, “as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins, that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that. We didn’t think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free, but that the long-term trend in terms of how much the average family is going to be paying for health insurance is going to be improved as a consequence of health care.”

Last year, I asked White House deputy chief of staff Nancy-Ann DeParle about that $2,500 in savings the president pledged. She insisted families will see that savings seven years after the president said it would be achieved — by 2019.

“Many of the changes in the Affordable Care Act are starting this year, and in succeeding years,” DeParle told ABC News, “and by 2019 we estimate that the average family will save around $2,000.”

DeParle said that the “big increases that occurred (in 2010) were probably driven by insurance plans overestimating what the impact would be and maybe trying to take some profits upfront before some of the changes in the Affordable Care Act occur.”

Administration officials say they never claimed health care costs would go down, only that they would grow at a slower rate than they would have without the Affordable Care Act.

“It is clear that in recent years health care cost growth has slowed,” Health and Human Services department spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt told ABC News. “In the ten years before the health care law was passed, health care costs increased at 8.7 percent per year on average, according to the independent Kaiser Family Foundation. This study showed a rate of increase of 3.8 percent in 2010 and 4.6 percent in 2011, while in a separate study, the Kaiser Family Foundation recently estimated a rate of increase of 4.0 percent in 2012, illustrating that overall health-care cost growth has significantly slowed in recent years.”

Families are already enjoying savings through curtailed insurance premium growth under the law – compared to what premiums would be without it – officials say. They also point to tax credits and other provisions that are estimated to save middle-income families who purchase private insurance through new exchanges as much as $2,300 per year in 2014.

-Jake Tapper and Devin Dwyer

U

[Dr. Shane]

Originally Posted By: bonnie

...

For instance,Obamacare has improved ?????

Easy...

People with existing conditions.

Allowed parents to keep kids on insurance longer.

Millions more will have access to health care.

Those are all good things but they come at what cost?

Now every American has to buy health insurance. If they do not, they will be breaking the law. Understand, that means there is now a cost for citizenship. Citizenship isn't a free inheritance gained by being born here but must be paid for month after month for as long as one shall live. From the cradle to the grave each American must purchase health insurance for be found guilty of violating the law. American citizenship now has a price tag on it.

The policy really demonstrate Obama's failure. Obamacare is a boom for the insurance industry. It is exactly what the insurance companies all hoped and dreamed for. The single-payer system would have been much better and was Obama's goal. He failed to get that because he failed. Insurance companies were obviously offering Democratic congressmen and senators more than Obama could. He failed to convince those in his own party of the advantages of a single-payer system.

[Tom Wetmore]

A failure because it was the Republican alternative...

Strange how much loathing of their own idea resulted once it was passed into law. It was a great idea to them until a Democrat agreed to it. The plan backfired on the party of "no compromise" since the primary objective of no compromise was to make Obama a failure. Ironic that their whole plan and this idea of theirs is now a failure...

And that captures perfectly the root of the problem...

[bonnie]

A failure because it was the Republican alternative...

Strange how much loathing of their own idea resulted once it was passed into law. It was a great idea to them until a Democrat agreed to it. The plan backfired on the party of "no compromise" since the primary objective of no compromise was to make Obama a failure. Ironic that their whole plan and this idea of theirs is now a failure...

And that captures perfectly the root of the problem...

The republicans wrote 2,000 pages of mandate,new taxes,and invasions of privacy and that is where these 2000 pages came from?

[bonnie]

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590), occasionally dubbed 'ObamaCare', was signed into law by Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. It was the result of a roughly 11-month campaign by the Democratic Party to pass sweeping healthcare changes. Despite a Supermajority held during much of this time, which prevented Republicans from having the votes necessary to stop bills, 40 Pro-Life Democrats in the House united under their leader, Bart Stupak, to stall the House bill until it finally included the Pro-Life Stupak amendment (November 8, 2009). However, the Senate then refused to pass the House bill, tabling it indefinitely, and passed its own bill in December 2009 so the abortion agenda could be reinserted into healthcare. The two bills were then combined in a complicated process called 'Reconciliation', but the bill had to go back to the House for approval. Bart Stupak ultimately settled for an Executive Order from Barack Obama, essentially a presidential promise that abortion would not be funded in the bill, after which he and roughly half the Pro-Life Democrats voted in favor of the Reconciliation process, narrowly passing the bill. The other half of Pro-Life Democrats voted against the bill, several with strong misgivings.

Background

Obama during the 2008 elections had campaigned on healthcare reform, promising that the negotiations would not be behind closed doors, but televised publicly on C-Span.[1] He had also promised Planned Parenthood on July 17, 2007, that "reproductive care" would be central to the coming healthcare bill, and that he believed it important for Planned Parenthood to be part of the system[2]:

”

Supermajority

On April 28, 2009, the 2008 Wall Street Journal's prediction of a 'Liberal Supermajority'[4] proved correct; as the defection of Senator Arlen Specter from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party put the Democrats on the verge of one of the rarest blessings in politics, a Supermajority - complete control of the House, Senate, and Presidency so that they wouldn't need a single Republican vote to pass bills.[5] Senator Bernie Sanders then urged the Democrat party to pursue single-payer healthcare reform.[6] On May 16, 2009, Barack Obama urged Congress to pass health care reform within the year, stating, "Our businesses will not be able to compete; our families will not be able to save or spend; our budgets will remain unsustainable unless we get health care costs under control".[7] On July 1, 2009, Al Franken was finally declared the winner of his election (narrowly winning by 312 votes[8]), giving the Democrats their desired Supermajority, and a clear path towards healthcare reform which Republicans would be powerless to stop.[9] Nevertheless, sickness of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd along with several other facts led to question marks about the supermajority's strength.[10] Democrats maintained this Supermajority until February 5, 2010, when Republican Scott Brown was sworn in to replace deceased Senator Edward Kennedy.[11]

Locking Out Republicans, Literally

Democrats were so confident that the 2008 elections displayed American backing for the Democratic Party that in October 2009 they even changed the door locks for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to keep Republicans from meeting when Democrats weren't present.[12] The debacle occurred because Republicans were trying to launch an investigation into corruption by Democrat Senators Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd for receiving special VIP loans from Countrywide Financial.[13] Democrats canceled the meeting by secretly leaving before the meeting was to begin, and a GOP staffer caught this on videotape, set it to the tune of "Hit the Road, Jack", and posted it on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s minority webpage for the press. Committee Chairman Sen. Edolphus Towns and the Democrats then had the locks changed in retaliation.[14]

Public Option Removed

On July 8, 2009, Barack Obama met with hospital lobbyists and struck a deal with the hospital industry to remove the public option in exchange for the industry's support of the bill, while also reducing costs for hospitals under the plan.[15]

“ "Not to worry, Jim Messina, the deputy White House chief of staff, told the hospital lobbyists, according to White House officials and lobbyists briefed on the call. The White House was standing behind the deal, Mr. Messina told them, capping the industry’s costs at a maximum of $155 billion over 10 years in exchange for its political support... Several hospital lobbyists involved in the White House deals said it was understood as a condition of their support that the final legislation would not include a government-run health plan paying Medicare rates — generally 80 percent of private sector rates — or controlled by the secretary of health and human services. 'We have an agreement with the White House that I’m very confident will be seen all the way through conference,' one of the industry lobbyists, Chip Kahn, director of the Federation of American Hospitals, told a Capitol Hill newsletter."

”

In November 2009, an amendment proposed by Dennis Kucinich to let states have single-payer healthcare systems without insurance industry lawsuits was stripped from the healthcare bill because Nancy Pelosi said it would break Obama's promise to let people keep their current insurance plans if they liked them.[17] Kucinich expressed frustration with the move, stating, "They took single-payer off the table right at the beginning, because the table was set by insurance companies."[18] On March 25, 2010, Obama claimed the public option wasn't included "Because we couldn"t get it through Congress, that's why." He also on December 22, 2009 erroneously[19] claimed that he hadn't campaigned on a public option.[20] Following Obama's claim, a liberal group, The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, began airing television ads accusing Obama of breaking his promise of a single-payer healthcare plan.[21]

Obama breaking his promises isn't possible is it?

[bonnie]

Wonder why the senate,congress and our "my brother's keeper" resident didn't embrace and accept this plan for themselves and their families as a show of faith and belief in their own words?