Hat tip JJP’s rikyrah. Thank you!
While the GOP clowns presidential candidates are gathered in Washington surrounded by the religious Evangelical GRIFTERS attempting to destroy our health care system, invade our bodies, bedrooms, and define our relationships with focus on abortion, marriage rights, there is no mention of JOB CREATION, and the Democrats have gathered, broken down and delivered the TRUTH on how the GOP’s plans for Medicare/Medicare will affect their constituents.
DEMOCRATS BREAKDOWN THE IMPACT OF REPUBLICANS PLAN DISTRICT BY DISTRICT
*****CLICK HERE: to see the interactive map to see reports on the impact of REPUBLICAN Medicare/Medicaid changes in your community.
AP photo- Paul Ryan peddling his “CRAPTACULAR” Voucher Plan to seniors at a town hall
And 3 Chics is reposting this gem of an article:
More Solid Proof That Obamacare Is Working
May. 23 2011 – 1:17 pm
Recent data provided by the nation’s largest health insurance companies reveals that a provision of the Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare – is bringing big numbers of the uninsured into the health care insurance system.
And they are precisely the uninsured that we want– the young people who tend not to get sick.
The provision of the law that permits young adults under 26, long the largest uninsured demographic in the country, to remain on their parents’ health insurance program resulted in at least 600,000 newly insured Americans during the first quarter of 2011.
Wellpoint, the nation’s largest publicly traded health insurer with some 34 million customers, reports adding 280,000 new members in the first three months of 2011.
Add in the results of some of the other large health insurers including Aetna, who added just short of 100,000 newly insured to their customer base, Kaiser Permanente’s additional 90,000, and Highmark’s 72,000 new customers, and we begin to sense our health insurance pools are filling up with some badly needed young blood.
The Health & Human Services Department had estimated that the changes in the law would result in about 1.2 million new enrollees in 2011. However, according to Aaron Smith, the executive director of a Washington based non-profit that advocates for the young, it now looks as if that number will be exceeded.
This is very good news – particularly for those in the individual and small group markets that tend not to ‘self-insure’ as the larger corporations tend to do.
It is also very good news for those of us who write a large check every month for our health coverage.
For starters, every one of the young immortals we add to the rolls of the insured is one less young adult who will turn to the emergency room to fix a broken leg and then find themselves unable to pay the bill – leaving it to the rest of us to pay the tab.
And it gets better.
Because the under 26 crowd tends not to get sick, adding them to the insurance pools helps bring the very balance that was intended by the new law. The more healthy people available to pay for those in the pool who are ill (translation- the older people), the better the system works and the lower our premium charges should go.
One cannot help but notice that the health insurance companies turned in record profits for the first quarter of 2011 due, according the insurance companies, to fewer people seeking medical treatment.
When you add into their customer base a large number of people who are paying premiums but are less likely to get sick (the young adult demographic), this would be the expected result.
The question now is whether we allow the health insurance companies to hold onto the benefits of this reform by keeping the extra money they are pocketing or force them to hold the line on premiums as a result of their good fortune.
I’m betting that the policyholders, with the help of both state and federal governments, will win this battle.
Meanwhile, things continue to improve on the small business front where business owners are being heavily incentivized to offer health care benefits to employees.
As I wrote in January, there has been a significant uptick in small businesses taking advantage of the tax benefits offered by the ACA to provide health insurance to employees where they previously did not do so.
According to a Kaiser survey, there has been a 46% uptick in businesses with less than 10 employees offering health benefits as compared to last year.
That is a big number.
Further improving the outlook, the IRS has, in the past month, issued guidelines for small businesses which very much bolster the tax credits offered. Included in those guidelines are provisions that clarify that the tax credit will not be reduced by a state health care tax credit or subsidy (except in limited circumstances to prevent abuse of the credit); that small businesses can receive the credit not only for traditional health insurance coverage but also for add-on dental, vision, and other limited-scope coverage; and detailed guidance on how a small business can determine whether it is eligible and how large a credit it will receive.
Health care reform is working, folks – and we have yet to get to the really big benefits which kick in come 2014.
Now that we are seeing some decidedly positive results, I am reminded of the GOP criticism that was leveled at the health care reform effort back when the issue was on the front burner of the national consciousness.
Once we get past the August 2009 era of the townhall meetings where the Republicans were pitching the false “death panel” narrative to great effect, we see that there are two primary challenges lodged against the law- the cuts to Medicare and the health insurance mandates.
Today, the GOP is pursuing the Ryan budget plan that would destroy Medicare as we know it, turning it into a voucher program that has no chance of keeping up with the rising costs of medical care and leaving seniors to face a future of inadequate and unavailable health care.
It is no secret that polling reveals that Americans are very much not in favor of Ryan’s plan.
So much is this the case, the health care issue that played such a large role in handing the House of Representatives over to the GOP last November, is now the very same issue that has become the focal point of the special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District where polling shows Democrat Kathy Hochul is leading Republican Jane Corwin in what has long been a safe GOP seat.
The reason Hochul may emerge victorious?
The GOP’s anti-Medicare plan.
The irony is exquisite.
As for the health insurance mandates, reviewing the field of the major GOP presidential contenders, some interesting data begins to emerge.
Newt Gingrich – for mandated health insurance before he was against it (although he may have already switched positions again this morning.)
Jon Huntsman – for mandated health insurance before he was against it. Indeed, mandates were a vital part of the health care reform Huntsman pushed as Governor of Utah before the GOP majority in the state legislature put the brakes on the idea.
Mitt Romney- as the true father of Obamacare, clearly he was for mandates before he was against them.
Only Tim Pawlenty appears to be in the clear on the topic.
The time has arrived for even the most critical to take another look at health care reform. Facts and figures don’t lie – if accurately presented.
And while the full jury won’t be in for a few more years, maybe the time has come for average Americans more interested in what is best for their country rather than grinding a political axe, to reconsider their views.
I think you’ll like what you see. Source
FACTS folks, get the facts, test them, and then decide which plans would benefit you and your families.
Ametia:
Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?
1) When you see both the actuarial charts about the future of Medicare/Social Security AND the predictions that they are both going to go insolvent (SS in 2042 and Medicare in 2020 – with BOTH numbers inching closer than these dates due to the high rates of unemployment) do you think that these PREDICTIONS are a lie?
2) If Paul Ryan had never proposed his cuts and thus never had any “angry White people” at his meetings would the ultimate fate of Medicare/Social Security have changed at all? (Clarified question – WHY do you seem pacified after having assigned an enemy to fight against on an issue and in doing so you believe that if you defeat the enemy that the problem will go away?)
3) You mention the young adults who are under 26 and now allowed to stay on their parents health insurance. You also admit that the biggest benefit that they offer is the ability at RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION as they pay in but don’t use as many services. This leaves more money to be redistributed for use by more sickly segments of the demographic. What happens as the drain in resources outward goes beyond the less than 26 year old who’s parents are paying in? With more than 40 million people uninsured that span of people between 18 and 26 was not the key drain on the system.
4) The biggest criticism that I have for “people who think like you” is really beyond this present battle. I have watched as the Progressive-Fundamentalist has taken over more key “human resource development institutions” with the dangled promises of how Black people will benefit in the process. Yet – as the research that I will soon publish will show – the percentage of Black physicians created has NOT BUDGED despite this increase. The nation of Chile is heralded because they have chosen to invest in physicians rather than MRI machines and fancy drugs. It seems to me that you and others are more interested in building up large national “income redistribution pools” than you can point to a track record in which you move beyond “the struggle” into delivering actual benefit for our community by showing evidence of ORGANIC UPLIFT.
How do you rationalize the growing fiscal insolvency of this nation with the lack of “increase” among our people? Despite “Winning” in the arena that you and others have us to focus upon our people appear to keep on losing ground – this even in places where there are no “Evil Republicans” to pull us down off of the vehicle that our people ride on.
Where on this post did you read I wanted the issue of medicare to go away? Take your talking points elsewhere; we aren’t buying them here.
Hey Constructive Feedback..our resident troll! :)
BWA HA HA HA Trollie boy/girl can keep that nonsense on his/her own site.
SouthernGirl2:
What is a “Troll”?
When this blog gets “fist bumps” from people who agree with you – it seems that you don’t label them “Trolls”.
When I ask my favorite “Obama Pom Pom Girls” a series of structured questions – instead of answering them – I get called a “Troll”.
Ametia:
Do you mind parsing through my post and highlighting the part that is “NONSENSE”?
I see below that you are able to use HTML tags. Why not put the
“nonsense” in strike throughso I can clarify my “nonsense” for your understanding.OR should I accept that you are not really interested in a discussion – only unilateral Tweets that go beyond the 140 character limit?
BWA HA HA HA HA
Be nice! I sort of like you! :)
June 4, 2011, 9:43 am Fatal Fatalism
Our current economic discourse is pervaded by fatalism. Leave aside the people who insist that somehow Obama has destroyed capitalist incentives by passing Mitt Romney’s health care plan and threatening to raise tax rates to Clinton-era levels. Even among people who should be sensible, you hear many assertions that run something like this: historically, recovery from financial crisis is usually slow, so we have to accept a slow recovery this time around too. Actually, that’s more or less what Obama has been saying.
This fatalism is deeply destructive — because there’s no good reason we need to experience many years of high unemployment. What historical experience shows isn’t that there’s no answer to post-crisis slumps, it only shows that most governments have responded to such slumps with the same kind of fatalism and learned helplessness we’re showing now. (Hey, Greg, I have first dibs on that!)
We are not, after all, suffering from supply-side problems. We don’t have high unemployment because workers lack the necessary skills, or are stuck in the wrong industries or the wrong locations; the hypothesis that we’re mainly suffering structural unemployment has been repeatedly shot down by evidence. This is a demand-side slump; all we need to do is create more demand.
So why is this slump, like most slumps following financial crises, so protracted? Because the usual tools for pumping up demand have reached their limits. Normally we respond to demand-side slumps by cutting short-term nominal interest rates, which the Fed can move through open-market operations. But we now have severely depressed private demand thanks to the housing bust and the overhang of consumer debt, so even a zero rate isn’t low enough.
So what’s the right response? Should we just throw up our hands, and say that having 12 million or so adults who should be working out of work, and roughly $1 trillion per year of output we should be producing not getting produced, is just a fact of life? Or should we be using unconventional policies to deal with an abnormal situation?
The answer seems obvious. We should be using fiscal stimulus; we should be using unconventional monetary policy, including raising the inflation target; we should be pursuing aggressive measures to reduce mortgage debt. Not doing these things means accepting huge waste and hardship.
But, say the serious people, there are risks to doing any of these things. Well, life is full of risks. But it’s simply crazy to put a higher weight on the possibility that the invisible bond vigilantes might manifest themselves, or the inflation monster emerge from its secret cave, over the continuing reality of enormous human and economic damage from doing nothing.
The truth is that we have nothing to fear but fear itself — fear and complacency — the two things we have to fear are — amongst our fears ….
Anyway, seriously, the fatalism that has overtaken economic debate is a terrible thing. It is, indeed, the main enemy of prosperity.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
This video can’t be posted enough. Old grandmas & grandpas go out of the nursing homes and over the cliffs, with the GOP’s plans for medicare/medicaid plans.
LMAO @ CRAPTACULAR!
Good Post! You rock, Ametia
LOL We can’t have the Affordable Care Act working for the hard working Americans now can we?
It’s working, and the GOP want to destroy what’s working by decimating MEDICARE/MEDICAID.