Tag Archives: health care reform

America’s future: too frail to work, too poor to retire will become the “new normal”

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Here’s the scariest thing you’ll read today:

We are on the precipice of the greatest retirement crisis in the history of the world. In the decades to come, we will witness millions of elderly Americans, the Baby Boomers and others, slipping into poverty. Too frail to work, too poor to retire will become the “new normal” for many elderly Americans.

That dire prediction, which I wrote two years ago, is already coming true. Our national demographics, coupled with indisputable glaringly insufficient retirement savings and human physiology, suggest that a catastrophic outcome for at least a significant percentage of our elderly population is inevitable. With the average 401(k) balance for 65 year olds estimated at $25,000 by independent experts—$100,000 if you believe the retirement planning industry—the decades many elders will spend in forced or elected “retirement” will be grim.

According to the author, the impending crisis will happen in ‘waves’ to a majority of elderly Americans:

  • Wave 1: Retirees Come Back To Work
  • Wave 2: Workers Delay Full Retirement
  • Wave 3: Full Retirement Is Unachievable
  • Wave 4: Drowning

While you reflect on how irresponsible it is to not save for retirement, take a moment to reflect on Paul Ryan’s budget (and the 95% of Republican House members who voted for it) – along with all the slicing and dicing they want to do to the social safety net, health care reform, and Medicare in order to provide more tax relief to the wealthy.

Be sure to consider all the jobs that are not being created right now because of the conservative hangups on spending cuts and the deficit. Issues which, when a Republican is in office, members of this specific political party aren’t concerned about at all. Maybe it’s time we willingly spent our taxes on infrastructure and people instead of exponentially expanding our military industrial complex each year, quit paying to have other countries blown up and rebuilt for the profit of a few.

Then consider: how are people with the low-wage Bain Capital replacement jobs, or people who are unemployed, supposed to find some money to put in a “retirement account”? Maybe they should forego eating a few times a month. Or maybe they could just save all those tax breaks they get for private jets or dancing horses. It would be irresponsible if they don’t, right?

The battle of Romney 2010 and Romney 2012: health care for the uninsured

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2012 Romney on Health Care for the Uninsured:

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

2010 Romney on Health Care for the Uninsured:

“Look, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility, particularly if they are people who have sufficient means to pay their own way.”

(video of pre- and post- Etch-a-Sketch Romneys here)

Source: The Huffington Post (via: destroythegop)

Romney: You’re 45, have a heart condition, and want insurance? You can’t play the game like that.

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…

Pre-existing condition? Tough shit.

con-tem-plate: Mitt Romney on Leno: 

“If they’re 45 years old and they show up and they say I have a heart condition and I want insurance? You can’t play the game like that.”

I know plenty of people who have pre-existing conditions. This is exactly why we need the individual mandate. The Republican spokesperson goes on and on about how this is a hard problem to solve. Well, guess what? It’s already been solved, and it called Obamacare! Obamacare is the first pass at helping real life healthcare issues just like this. Under Romney, sorry, you’re out of luck.

Is this man for real? His glib answer just came out without any thought. Cold, compassionless, heck, no intelligence either.

Jay Leno does a great job, and all it took was a simple follow-up question.

Mitt’s own wife, Anntoinette, has a pre-existing condition. But neither of them have been without health insurance (or the money to pay for the very best medical treatment) a day in their privileged, silver-spoon fed lives.

Romneybot is unable to compute a life without a lot of money. FFS, apparently Ann still has PTSD from having to “eat tuna” and sell some stock when they were in college. These two would fall apart if they had to live our lives for a couple of weeks!

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The Mitt Romney interview on MTP: inside the mind of David Gregory

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Think Progress: an excerpt from the interview:

MITT ROMNEY: Well, I want to maintain defense spending at the current level of the GDP. I don’t want to keep bringing it down as the president’s doing. This sequestration idea of the White House, which is cutting our defense, I think is an extraordinary miscalculation in the wrong direction.

DAVID GREGORY: Republican leaders agreed to that deal to the extend the debt ceiling.

MITT ROMNEY: And that’s a big mistake. I thought it was a mistake on the part of the White House to propose it. I think it was a mistake for Republicans to go along with it.

Did Gregory point out that Romney’s running mate, Lyin’ Paul Ryan, voted for those cuts in defense spending? WHAT DO YOU THINK? And, as Think Progress points out, Paul Ryan is also crticizing the sequestor on the campaign trail. THE ONE HE VOTED FOR. These two are a perfectly matched team.

Kevin Drum: Mitt Romney doesn’t hate Obamacare quite as much as he’s been telling the tea partiers for the past year:

“Of course there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place,” he said in an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. ”One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage.” Romney also said he would allow young adults to keep their coverage under their parents’ health-insurance.

Under normal circumstances, I’d write a long post about how ridiculous this is. If you guarantee that people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, people will game the system by getting coverage only when they get sick. To avoid that, you have to create a stable risk pool for insurers by mandating that everyone maintain coverage all the time. And if you have a mandate, then you need to subsidize poor people, which in turn means you have to have a funding source for the subsidies. More here.

Like I said, that’s what I’d do under normal circumstances. But host David Gregory didn’t bother asking Romney about any of these pesky details, and I guess I can hardly blame him since Romney wouldn’t have answered. This is just another one of Romney’s secret plans, like which tax loopholes he’ll close, how he’ll win the war in Afghanistan, and who will pay the price if Medicare costs rise faster than his growth cap. Romney has diligently refused to answer any of these questions, and he’s even been fairly honest about why: if he explained all this stuff, some of the answers would be unpopular and the Obama campaign would point that out.

Think Progress: No follow up on the secret tax loophole closure plan either:

GREGORY: Give me an example of a loophole you will close?

ROMNEY: Well I can tell you that people at the high end, high-income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions. Those numbers are going to come down. Otherwise they’d get a tax break, and I want to make sure people understand, despite what the Democrats said at their convention, I am not reducing taxes on high-income taxpayers. I’m bringing down the rate of taxation, but also brigning down deductions and exemptions at the high end so that the revenues stay the same, the taxes people pay stay the same — middle income people are going to get a break, but at the high end the tax coming in stays the same…

Romney’s plan, in reality, would provide the very richest Americans a $264,000 tax break. It also maintains current tax rates on investments that are otherwise set to expire at the end of the year, and it eliminates the estate tax, paid by only the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans.

Romney is apparently arguing that he will raise enough revenue through the elimination of tax loopholes that benefit the rich to totally offset the tax cut he provides them, though an analysis from the Tax Policy Center found that to be a mathematical impossibility. There simply isn’t enough revenue to be generated through the closure of those loopholes to offset the massive cost of Romney’s plan, and even if it was possible, Romney again declined to provide host David Gregory a single loophole he would favor closing.

Another Romney counterattack fail: Romney spokesperson vs. Mitt Romney

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Here’s that Priorities USA ad, featuring Joe Soptic, who lost his job and his health insurance because of Bain Capital (and his wife subsequently died of cancer):


…

“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care. There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama’s economy.” — Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul, yesterday, counterattacking a Priorities USA ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care.

This kind of problem is something that “Obamacare” — aka the Affordable Care Act, based on Romneycare — is trying to remedy.

Oh, what was that you said last month, Governor Romney?

Is health care non-essential, Vice President Biden?

gifsfln: Mitt Romney vs. Joe Biden at the NAACP Conference.

Joe Soptic would have been better off in Massachusetts, back when Romney felt one way about universal health care. He feels differently now though. Like education, Mitt Romney thinks we should only get as much health care as we can afford. I kind of think a $77,000 tax deduction on a horse is non-essential. But that’s just me.

Plot twist: Romney defends Romneycare while still opposing Obamacare, rightwing heads explode

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Brian Beutler discusses the plot twist that occurred yesterday in the Romney campaign narrative — and the absurd contradiction in messaging that Andrea Saul offered in Romney’s defense to a new Priorities USA ad (links and emphasis below are mine):

The background here is a new Priorities USA ad, which tells the story of a man, Joe Soptic, who lost his job — and thus his health insurance — after Bain bought out his plant. Years later his wife died of what may have been a preventable death of cancer.

His particular story doesn’t perfectly illustrate the problems with the country’s safety net. But far from suggesting Romney killed anybody (as his outraged supporters claim) it neatly exposes an enduring source of middle class uncertainty. If you get very sick almost anywhere in America, and then your employer goes out of business, or lays you off, you’re already running out of options. Romneycare fixed this problem in Massachusetts. Obamacare is designed to fix it for the rest of the country.

Enter the Romney campaign, which notes quite correctly that Romney’s mandated, subsidized health care system might have saved Soptic’s wife if she’d lived in Massachusetts. But if that’s such a good thing, then unless President Romney’s going to recommend that all sick and laid off people move to New England, his pledge to repeal Obamacare just falls apart.

Because of Andrea Saul’s response to that Priorities USA ad, Ann Coulter shambled onto the set of The Sean Hannity Cartoon Hour wearing her rage face to screech a little bit about the ad, but mainly to screech at “moron” Andrea Saul and the Romney campaign:

“Anyone who donates to Mitt Romney, and I mean the big donors, ought to say if Andrea Saul isn’t fired and off the campaign tomorrow, they are not giving another dime, because it is not worth fighting for this man if this is the kind of spokesman he has…

There’s no point in you doing your show [Sean Hannity], there’s no point in going to the convention and pushing for this man if he’s employing morons like this. This ad is the turning point and she has nearly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat! She should be off the campaign.”

It will be interesting to see where Romney goes from here. With his business “experience” and personal wealth being examined and attacked and questioned at every turn, now the shrillest exploding heads on Fox are threatening mutiny (on a ship they never wanted to be on) because he needs to score some points on an achievement, which Romneycare was.

But as Benjy Sarlin at TPM notes, “By trying to reclaim Romney’s health care law as part of his political resume, however, Romney is now inviting the issue back into the campaign. If he wants Americans to elect him based on his Massachusetts reforms, it’s only logical to ask him why he doesn’t want them for everyone.”

Thanks to Obamacare…

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image: ericmortensen


image: questionall

Maybe someday we’ll have a healthcare system that costs less and works as well as the other industrialized nations of the world — and maybe Obamacare is the first step towards that day. From NY Daily News:

“A study of 13 industrialized countries released Thursday showed Japan spends the least on health care, while the United States spends the most without providing superior care for the money. The United States spent nearly $8,000 per person in 2009 on health care services, more than Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden or Switzerland.

“[...] ”Rather than containing costs by restricting access, Japan instead sets health care prices to keep total health spending within a budget allotted by the government.” In contrast, the US system is beleaguered by higher prices, more readily accessible technology and widespread obesity. The United States had among the highest rates of potentially preventable deaths due to asthma and diabetes-linked amputations, and showed average rates of in-hospital deaths from heart attack and stroke, it said. Common prescription drugs cost one third more in the United States compared to Canada and Germany, and were more than double that paid for the same drugs in Australia, Britain, France, the Netherlands and New Zealand. “It is a common assumption that Americans get more health care services than people in other countries, but in fact we do not go to the doctor or the hospital as often,” said study author David Squires, senior research associate at The Commonwealth Fund.”

Obviously the U.S. health care system was broken by all the CEOs who want huge bonus checks each year. They treat health care, medicine, hospital stays, and medical treatments like any other commodity such as oil, pork bellies, or flat-screen TVs. Their only concern is profit.

Mitt Romney praises Israel’s socialized health care system

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Buzzfeed: “Romney, who championed the Massachusetts health care mandate, but is an opponent of the federal mandate passed by President Barack Obama, marveled at how little Israel spends on health care relative to the United States.

“Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? eight percent,” Romney told donors at a fundraiser at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, speaking of a health care system that is compulsory for Israelis and funded by the government. “You spend eight percent of GDP on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18% of our GDP on health care. Ten percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military — our military which is four percent — four percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to find and manage our health care costs.”

“[...] Romney has explained that he opposes ObamaCare because what worked in Massachusetts may not work for other states. Highlighting the success of the Israeli system — in a country that enjoys one of the highest life expectancy rates in the world — could complicate matters for Romney at home.”

Americans should have the same health care system — I agree! It seems very similar to Great Britain’s NHS (and other civilized countries), and the idea ”it doesn’t matter who you are, you will get treated the same in terms of health care.” Look at this:

Rights of the Insured under the National Health Insurance Law

-—Every Israeli citizen is entitled to health care services under the National Health Insurance Law.

—Every resident has a right to register as a member of an HMO of his/her choice, free of any preconditions or limitations stemming from his/her age or the state of his/her health.

—Every resident has a right to receive, via the HMO of which he or she is a member, all of the services included in the medical services basket, subject to medical discretion, and at a reasonable quality level, within a reasonable period of time and at a reasonable distance from his/her home.

—Each member has a right to receive the health services while preserving the member’s dignity, privacy and medical confidentiality.

—Every Israeli resident has the right to transfer from one HMO to another.

—Each member has a right to select the service providers, such as doctors, caregivers, therapists, hospitals and institutes, from within a list of service providers who have entered into an agreement with the HMO to which the member belongs, and within the arrangements in place for the selection of the service providers, and which the HMO publishes from time to time.

—Each member has a right to know which hospitals and institutes, and other service providers, are included in the agreement with the HMO, and what are the selection processes at the HMO.

—Each member has a right to see and to receive a copy of the HMO regulations.

—Each resident has a right to receive from the HMO complete information concerning the payment arrangements in place in the HMO for health services as well as the HMO’s plans offered for additional health services (CIP).

—Each member has a right to complain with the Public Inquiries commissioner at the medical institute that treated the member, to the person in charge of investigating member complaints at the HMO of which s/he is a member, or to the complaints commissioner for the national health insurance law in the Ministry of Health.

—Each member has a right to file suit at the district labor court.

Is the upholding of Obamacare REALLY better for Mitt Romney?

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“The 2012 elections are now primarily a fight over whether health insurance is a right or a privilege, which is to say, a fight for decency.” — Jonathan Chait

Alec MacGillis says this was not the better outcome for Mitt Romney: “Romney has been in a bind on health care all campaign, given that he signed into the law the model for Obamacare. But a ruling against the law would have allowed Romney to lambast it on the court’s terms—as an unconstitutional overreach… And, crucially, it will now fall to Romney himself to lead the argument against Obamacare, and to the extent that he takes up this charge, it will bring into focus, as never before, just how compromised he is on this front. [...] And when he does so, when he makes the case for doing away with Obamacare, and Obama in turn makes the case for keeping it (“forward, not back”), Romney will be doing, as John Dickerson notes, exactly what he didn’t want to do this election: he will be turning it into a choice between two approaches, rather than a referendum on the incumbent who couldn’t even make sure his biggest achievement passed constitutional muster. No, this is not good for Mitt.”


via: questionall 

And John Dickerson agrees, wondering if this gives the President back his mojo: “Twice in Romney’s statement responding to the ruling, he said, “This is a choice” when talking about the electoral conditions created by the court’s action. The president has been trying to get people to see the election as a choice for months—a choice between two candidates and their plans is preferable than a referendum on his record. [...] If voters see health care as a matter of which candidate will look out for them, then Obama has the advantage. He leads Romney by 31 points in the latest Pew poll when respondents were asked, “Who connects more with ordinary Americans?” In this fight, the president may have an unlikely ally in Chief Justice Roberts. By upholding the law and authoring the decision, he lent an extra measure of validation.” 


via: christopherstreet

And Nate Cohn doesn’t think it helps either candidate at this point, but argues: “With belated validation from the Supreme Court, Obama could be tempted to resell the bill. Will Obama attempt to capitalize on the law’s newfound legitimacy, to the extent that the Supreme Court offers any? Prior to the Supreme Court’s hearings, the Obama campaign seemed to embrace the ObamaCare label, perhaps indicating their intention to promote the bill once legal issues were resolved. While it might seem unstrategic for Obama to return attention to an unpopular proposal, a resell could produce better results than the initial attempt, if for no other reason than the absence of an on-going partisan debate in Congress. Perhaps more importantly, Obama is better positioned to promote the law against Mitt Romney, who enacted a similar health reform scheme in Massachusetts. Romney’s previous measures will complicate his ability to credibly challenge the ACA and particularly the individual mandate. In that respect, Santorum was surely correct.”

“This is now a time for the American People to make a choice. You can choose whether to have a larger and larger government making intrusions into your life… Or whether instead you want to return to a time where Americans have their own choice in health care.” — Mitt Romney on ACA ruling.

A response from tenderstatue: Mittens, you and I must have different definitions of choice, because in my world “go bankrupt trying to pay medical pills or go without treatment” IS NOT A FUCKING CHOICE.  

Passage of ACA means tax hikes? Hardly — millions will receive tax cuts and credits.

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Think Progress notes “…there is no massive tax hike: few people will ever pay the penalty, and those who do will pay less than the amount of the payroll tax increase that Republicans nearly allowed to occur.

“In addition, according to a report from Families USA, 28.6 million Americans, most of them middle-class, will receive tax cuts under the bill due to entering health care exchanges and receiving affordability credits.

“[...] In addition to these tax credits and the fact that more than 30 million Americans will have new access to health insurance, the health care law will help create millions of jobs.”

think-progress: Why Obamacare is good for the economy.

granholmtwr: What does health care reform mean for you? (Really good stuff) SCOTUS decision is a victory for America.

Fun with the ACA: Bill O’Reilly’s apology

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via: paxamericana

Back in March, Bill O’Reilly made a bold prediction about the Supreme Court’s health care decision. Coincidentally, Laura Ingraham filled in for him last night onThe O’Reilly Factor.

In related news, Boston.com reports that “Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. said Thursday that its board has approved a plan to split into two companies, one containing struggling newspaper and book publishing businesses and the other comprising faster-growing entertainment operations.” Guess which company, news or entertainment, Fox “News” falls under? That’s right: ENTERTAINMENT.

Happy Supreme-Court-Ruling-on-Obamacare Day!

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SCOTUSblog – We expect the health care decision to be announced at roughly 10:15a.  1045a-1p ET – live coverage and analysis. http://www.scotusblog.com/cover-it-live/

“Many expect an activist Supreme Court will strike down part or all of health reform. If they strike down the mandate, the Supreme Court will be paving the way to a single-payer system, or back to the old broken health care system.” — Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), quoted by TPM.

Medicare for all. Let’s do that.

If Clarence Thomas rules against ACA, he’ll be RICH!

via: phroyd

image: politicalcartoons.com

“Scalia’s cafeteria constitutionalism, in which he picks and chooses the laws he ideologically agrees with and ignores the ones he doesn’t, was never on better display than in Monday’s SCOTUS decisions. In the world according to Scalia, Arizona has the rights to patrol its own borders associated with a sovereign state, but Montana must bow to federal power when it comes to obeying Citizens United (the state’s 100-year-old campaign finance law was enacted free its citizens from the corrupt control of mining interests). Or as Harold Meyerson put it in the Washington Post, “You’re sovereign when Scalia agrees with you; you’re nothing when he doesn’t.” — Joan Walsh, Thanks, Antonin Scalia – Salon.com

 
 
 

erosum: Rachel Maddow on “Obamacare”

They did the right thing:

“Hindsight is always 20-20, but last time I checked almost every president since Teddy Roosevelt tried to do something on health care and wasn’t able to do it. It was the right thing to do, and sometimes you don’t get a second chance to do the right thing.” — Former North Carolina Rep. Bob Etheridge

“Republicans did a great job of misinforming … and scaring the American people. So did the insurance companies, and the fact is when you explain provisions of the bill, the American people support it. …I’m embarrassed for Congress that they didn’t pass health care reform long before we did. Far too many people in Congress think that they are there to get reelected and that’s unfortunate. We’re there to work for the American people, and that’s what we did. We passed a measure that allows millions of Americans to be insured. It allows people with pre-existing [conditions] to get covered.” — Former Ohio Rep. Steve Driehaus

“You have to vote with your conscience and do what’s right. In my district, I had 350,000 who had no health insurance. I came from a migrant family, and I knew the seriousness of not having insurance and people dying because they couldn’t go to the doctor. It was the right thing to do, and if I had to do it again, I would do it again. It was now or never.” — Former Texas Rep. Solomon Ortiz

— Politico spoke to Democrat lawmakers who fought to pass the Affordable Care Act — and who were voted out as a result.  The consensus?  No regrets.