Finding Health Care

Image via WikipediaIn a new video, President Obama guides consumers through HealthCare.gov. He explains how provisions in the Affordable Care Act will help Americans find quality, affordable coverage, and how the new website works to make health care more accessible.

Here's the video of the session if you'd like to watch it:

Now that it is available, The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has announced a new interactive widget to assist consumers in figuring out their health care coverage options.

(The widget embed code is available to anyone who wishes to post it on their own website or blog. http://www.healthcare.gov/stay_connected.html, and click 'SHOW CODE' below appropriate widget)

Healthcare.gov, the official website and landing place for information regarding the Affordable Health Care Act, uses the tool to prompt visitors to fill out two fields:

• 1) select your state

• 2) choose from a drop down menu of options describing your health care situation

The “next step” button brings visitors to the insurance finder process.

It is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process that helps you search public and private health coverage options so you know where you stand.

Healthcare.gov is one of the requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act and lists the names of insurers and their health plans, along with links to insurers for more complete information.

The Healthcare.gov site also includes:

• a tool to compare care quality of hospitals, nursing homes, and dialysis facilities; and

• information on what the health care reform laws really mean.

Although it does not reflect the current changes, the 2010 book is here - Medicare and You Handbook - A Guide to Medicare online. :: Download Medicare & You 2010 - 124 pages (pdf). It provides information about Medicare in general.

In addition The Affordable Care Act protects existing guaranteed Medicare benefits and adds new benefits - from HealthCare.gov: http://www.healthcare.gov/foryou/seniors/index.html (YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X18Zax0XDus&feature=player_embedded)

“The new law strengthens Medicare, reduces fraud, and closes the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage known as the ‘donut hole.’ In 2018, seniors can expect to save on average almost $200 per year in premiums and over $200 per year in coinsurance compared to what they would have paid without the new law. The Affordable Care Act also takes a number of steps that improve health care for people with Medicare.”

In 2014, when the bulk of the health care legislation takes effect, additional websites will come online for the mandatory state-based insurance exchanges, making it easier for small business and people in the individual market to research health insurance options.

If you already have guaranteed Medicare, benefits you currently receive will remain the same. During open enrolment this fall, you will continue to have a choice between Original Medicare and a Medicare Advantage plan. Medicare will continue to cover your health costs the way it always has, and there are no changes in eligibility. But, there are some important benefits that you and your family can take advantage of starting this year. Look for more details in your Medicare and You Handbook, coming this fall.

Wondering how the latest reform changes will affect you? More detailed information from AARP: Answers to Your Questions About the New Health Care Law

Label: Health Care, Health Insurance, Medicare

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Health Insurance Reform

Senior's Matter – Vancouver by Stan Webb

The President points to outrageous premium hikes from health insurance companies, especially those already making massive profits, as further proof of the need for reform. Looking ahead to the coming bipartisan meeting on reform, the President urges members of Congress to come to the table in good faith to address the issue.

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Obama Health Care Plan Targets Insurers, Lacks Public Option ~ from Care2.com

posted by: Ann Pietrangelo

“President Obama released his proposed health care reform proposal on Monday, despite Republican demands to scrap the whole thing and start over with Thursday’s “bi-partisan” health care reform summit.

The White House frames its plan as an opening bid for the summit and sticks fairly closely to the Senate bill, but eliminating the sweetheart deals with individual states and easing the tax burden on high-end (cadillac) health plans.

Key provisions include:

• Providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today, helping over 31 million Americans afford health care who do not get it today – and makes coverage more affordable for many more.

• Setting up a new competitive health insurance market giving tens of millions of Americans the exact same insurance choices that members of Congress will have.

• Bringing greater accountability to health care by laying out commonsense rules of the road to keep premiums down and prevent insurance industry abuses and denial of care.

• Ending discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions.

• Reducing the deficit by $100 billion over the next ten years – and about $1 trillion over the second decade – by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse.

• Eliminating the Nebraska FMAP provision and providing significant additional Federal financing to all States for the expansion of Medicaid.

• Closing the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole” coverage gap.

• The threshold for the excise tax on the most expensive health plans will be raised from $23,000 for a family plan to $27,500 and will start in 2018 for all such plans.

• Improving insurance protections for consumers and creating a new Health Insurance Rate Authority to review and rein in unreasonable rate increases and other unfair practices of insurance plans.

There is nothing particularly surprising here. Certainly, targeting insurers with a Health Insurance Rate Authority is warranted, given the recent uproar over a 39 percent rate increase - (Care2 editorial comment on individual plans in California and some other states.

Absent from the President’s proposal was the public option that he has supported in the past, while the individual mandate remains. He has challenged Republicans to bring their own ideas to the table for Thursday’s “bi-partisan” summit.

As for this “bi-partisan” summit, I’ll believe it when I see it. Every conciliatory measure taken in an effort to win Republican support has been met with failure, from single-payer to public option to reining in insurers. Within minutes of the White House plan being posted online, the familiar battle cry of “massive government takeover” began. It’s all too predictable.

The summit may well prove to be just another round of partisan showmanship in a winner-take-all bout. Then again, there’s always reconciliation - (Care2 editorial comment).

The sad truth is that whatever health care reform might come to pass in the near future will fall woefully short. We will still have Americans going bankrupt or dying for lack of access to health care, and we will be forced to fight this fight all over again. Unless, of course, Washington can break the gridlock and put the country ahead of politics.

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February 22, 2010 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - “The White House unveiled President Barack Obama's plan to overhaul the health insurance system on Monday that it said would provide coverage for 31 million uninsured Americans and set up federal monitoring of private insurers' rate increases. You can read the President’s 11-page proposal in its entirety at: The Whitehouse Blog – “Putting Americans In Control of Their Health Care” ... [http://www.whitehouse.gov/health-care-meeting/proposal

The plan would cost $950 billion, but would also cut costs enough that it would not only be paid for, but would reduce the budget deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years and $1 trillion over the second decade, White House officials told reporters in a conference call.

They stopped short of saying the White House would support pushing the plan through the Senate without Republicans if the Republicans to try to prevent it from coming to a vote.

But Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the plan was designed to survive any such procedural moves. "The president wants and believes that ... people deserve an up-or-down vote on health reform and this package is designed to provide the flexibility to achieve that if the Republican Party decides to filibuster," he said.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Eric Beech)”

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VP Biden Sets the Record Straight on Medicare

September 23, 2009 | 5:04

Travel with the Vice President as he reminds seniors that those who have always defended Medicare would never do anything to jeopardize the plan or those who rely on it. September 23, 2009 (public domain) [http://www.whitehouse.gov/video/VP-Biden-Sets-the-Record-Straight-on-Medicare]

Backlinks: The Whitehouse Blog [http://www.whitehouse.gov/]; Care2.com [http://www.care2.com/]; MS Maze [http://www.msmaze.com/].

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Health Care Reform - Sheldon Whitehouse (RI-D) to Republicans: There Will Be A Reckoning

Download from Care2 post by: Tracy Viselli


http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ID/217151&start=6427&end=7370

"In a powerful speech from the Senate floor Sunday, Sheldon Whitehouse (RI-D), took his Republican colleagues to task for their "no-holds barred mission of propaganda, obstruction and fear." Whitehouse concluded: "There will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth."

Thanks go to the AmSpecBlog and Robert Stacy McCain for providing a transcription of the speech audio. Here are some key excerpts:

"[Republicans have engaged in] a campaign of falsehood about death panels and cuts to Medicare benefits and benefits for illegal aliens and bureaucrats to be parachuted in between you and your doctor. Our colleagues terrify the public with this parade of imagined horrors. They whip up concerns and anxiety about socialized medicine and careening deficits and then they tell use the public is concerned about the bill."

McCain objects to Whitehouse quoting from Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which the Pulitzer Prize winning historian examines how traditional conservative politics was influenced, to its detriment, by conservative fringe movements like the John Birch Society and McCarthyism in the 1950s. It shouldn't surprise any conservative today that Hofstadter's warnings come to mind in light of recent political events, or that they ignore the historical warnings at their own peril:

"Vindictive passions often arise, [Hofstadter] points out, when an aggrieved minority believes that America has been taken away from them their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. Does that sound familiar . . . in this health debate? . . . [Hofstadter] wrote of the dangers of an aggrieved right-wing minority with the power to create what he called a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible."

Notably, Whitehouse also lambasted Republicans for abusing senate employees--a reference to a Republican delay tactic that forced the Senate clerk to read all 767 pages of an entire single payer amendment on the floor of the Senate until its sponsor, Bernie Sanders, withdrew the amendment:

“We see it in bad behavior. We see it in the long hours of reading by the clerks our Republican colleagues have forced. We see it in Christmases and holidays ruined by the Republicans for our loyal and professional Senate employees. It’s fine for me. It’s fine for the president. We signed up for the his job, but why ruin it for all the employees condemned by the Republicans to be here?”

Whitehouse concluded his speech this way:

“Our colleagues are behaving in this way – unprecedented, malignant and vindictive – because they are desperate to avoid that day of judgment, frantic and desperate now and willing to strange and unprecedented things, willing to do anything, even throw our troops at war in the way of that day of reckoning. If they can cause this bill to fail, the truth will never stand up as a living reproach to the lies that have been told. . . . But when the bill passes and this program actually comes to life . . . there will come a day of judgment, and our Republican friends know that. That, Mr. President, is why they are terrified.”

If conservatives keep missing the point, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Visit this link to see the full CSPAN video of Sheldon Whitehouse's speech. It begins at minute 107 (use the sliders to begin the video there)."

Health Care Reform

President Obama health care reform speech in front of a joint session of Congress will be remembered for two things:

1. The President made a clear moral case for health care reform with a strong appeal of bipartisan action.

2. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina behaved like an ass, yelling out "lie" as the president disputed claims that his plan would provide coverage to illegal immigrants.

The reaction to the speech from around the blogosphere and news media was very positive. CNN is reporting that 2/3 of watchers favor Obama's proposals-- a very positive reaction indeed.

Obama did four key things in the speech.

• He made the moral case for health care reform, referencing Senator Ted Kennedy many times throughout (read the Kennedy's letter to the president here), saying:

"We are the only advanced democracy on Earth – the only wealthy nation – that allows such hardships for millions of its people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone."

• He made the reasonable case for bipartisanship saying:

"This is the plan I’m proposing. It’s a plan that incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight – Democrats and Republicans. And I will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead. If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open.....

But those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here – people of both parties – know that what drove him was something more. His friend, Orrin Hatch, knows that. They worked together to provide children with health insurance. His friend John McCain knows that. They worked together on a Patient’s Bill of Rights. His friend Chuck Grassley knows that. They worked together to provide health care to children with disabilities."

• He demonstrated that he will no longer suffer fools:

"But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.

Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it most. And more will die as a result. We know these things to be true."

• And he provided the Congressional Progressive Caucus the cover it needs to pass a plan with a strong public option:

"Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business. They provide a legitimate service, and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors. I just want to hold them accountable. The insurance reforms that I’ve already mentioned would do just that. But an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange."

See the full video and text of the Obama health reform speech here.

You can see the Obama health care reform plan here.

For more on the speech and the future of health care policy:

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