Maybe some on the left will need medicalcare after reading through Michael Moore’s ghastly truth about the Affordable Care Act. But he’s got a point. Obamacare is awful.
That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of blaming companies like Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec, or health insurance chief executives like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009, for the sky-high price of American health care, the president’s Democratic supporters bought into the myth that it was all those people going to get free colonoscopies and chemotherapy for the fun of it.
I believe Obamacare’s rocky start — clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could — is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. …NYT,editorial
Moore is right. But Obamacare is a very useful thin edge of wedge, an effective foot in the door that will eventually open to allow universal health coverage. Moore is right, but he’s focusing on the need to punish Big Commercial Healthcare, from Novartis to UnitedHealth, for their greed.
We do, but we also need to figure out how to pay for those who can’t pay for their own health care. At the very least, Obamacare faces that problem head on. And, as Moore concedes, it’s a major step in civilizing our health care. It outlaws private insurance’s awful practice of dumping policy holders when they got sick.
And then there’s the leadership Vermont is exhibiting even as the rest of us carp and sigh over Obamacare.
All eyes are on Vermont’s plan for a single-payer system, starting in 2017. If it flies, it will change everything, with many states sure to follow suit by setting up their own versions. That’s why corporate money will soon flood into Vermont to crush it. The legislators who’ll go to the mat for this will need all the support they can get: If you live east of the Mississippi, look up the bus schedule to Montpelier.
So let’s get started. Obamacare can’t be fixed by its namesake. It’s up to us to make it happen. ...NYT,editorial
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There’s been a change in Obamacare in 2014.
The US supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday night granted Roman Catholic-affiliated groups a temporary exemption from a part of the Obamacare healthcare law that requires employers to provide insurance policies covering contraception.
She issued an order that stops the US government enforcing the so-called contraception mandate against Baltimore-based Little Sisters of the Poor and Illinois-based Christian Brothers Services, plus related entities.
A lawyer for other Catholic groups that had asked the supreme court to act in three other cases on Tuesday said lower courts had issued temporary injunctions similar to Sotomayor’s, meaning the high court had no need to act. …Guardian