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Statisticians Study Who Was Helped Most By Obamacare
HughPickens.com writes We know that about 10 million more people have insurance coverage this year as a result of the Affordable Care Act but until now it has been difficult to say much about who was getting that Obamacare coverage — where they live, their age, their income and other such details. Now Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz report in the NYT that a new data set is providing a clearer picture of which people gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The data is the output of a statistical model based on a large survey of adults and shows that the law has done something rather unusual in the American economy this century: It has pushed back against inequality, essentially redistributing income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades. The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas. The areas with the largest increases in the health insurance rate, for example, include rural Arkansas and Nevada; southern Texas; large swaths of New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia; and much of inland California and Oregon.
Despite many Republican voters' disdain for the Affordable Care Act, parts of the country that lean the most heavily Republican (according to 2012 presidential election results) showed significantly more insurance gains than places where voters lean strongly Democratic. That partly reflects underlying rates of insurance. In liberal places, like Massachusetts and Hawaii, previous state policies had made insurance coverage much more widespread, leaving less room for improvement. But the correlation also reflects trends in wealth and poverty. Many of the poorest and most rural states in the country tend to favor Republican politicians.
Despite many Republican voters' disdain for the Affordable Care Act, parts of the country that lean the most heavily Republican (according to 2012 presidential election results) showed significantly more insurance gains than places where voters lean strongly Democratic. That partly reflects underlying rates of insurance. In liberal places, like Massachusetts and Hawaii, previous state policies had made insurance coverage much more widespread, leaving less room for improvement. But the correlation also reflects trends in wealth and poverty. Many of the poorest and most rural states in the country tend to favor Republican politicians.
The same number that Romneycare killed. remember, Obamacare is BASED ON good Ol' Mitt Romney, the GOP shining example's own Romney care that he put in place in his home state.
Are republicans so stupid that they can not see it's a Republican system? Because as a Democrat I wanted a system closer to Canadian Healthcare as it works.
Repubs made sure the insurance companies would be happy with it so they could get max profits. And that is what we got...... Romneycare.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
People hate Obama-care and like the Affordable Care Act.
Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, patients and employers have only had unneeded and unwanted intrusion, regulation and control into all their interrelationships. None of them benefit. The Government (i.e., "the people of the government" or the ruling class) are the only winners. Everyone else pays and loses at their expense.
Seriously? Insurance companies are part of the problem in health care, interfering with doctors, patients, and hospitals in providing/receiving care. They need to be regulated to doing their job (providing averaged risk assessment policies) and stay out of the hospitals and doctors business.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
"Not sure how well the mobile part works when you actually have to pay for the insurance"
ACA helps because when you switch jobs, you know that you can get reasonably priced insurance afterwards. And because the insurance companies can no longer use the job change to declare any current medical conditions "pre-existing" and deny you insurance.
Previously there are _many_ people trapped in jobs for the health insurance, because if they went to a startup or became an independent consultant they had to pay absurdly high rates for insurance. Or because they had any medical condition that the new insurance company didn't want to cover they'd be denied insurance completely if they change jobs.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Really? It was the formal GOP healthcare reform plan for 30 years or so, since Nixon, then Clinton, pretty much whenever healthcare reform came up, they proposed the market/exchange plan. And when Romney implemented it, the Republicans *loved* it, and acclaimed it as proof that Republican policies worked. And they advocated expanding it at the Federal level.
Republicans didn't distance themselves from this plan, or come up with the "states rights" spin until Obama endorsed doing what the Republicans were planning.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Because a single Republican governor implemented a similar system in a Democrat-controlled state, then automatically, this is a Republican plan that all (or even a majority of) Republicans across the nation supported? What a stupid statement! It completely flies in the face of actual facts.
Feel free to read the original source of the Romneycare idea:
http://healthcarereform.procon.org/sourcefiles/1989_assuring_affordable_health_care_for_all_americans.pdf
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Some of our previously insured patients seemed miffed because, just like before, medical care is expensive and the system is complicated. Some of them who used to blame the insurance companies now blame Obamacare.
I find the meme about poor states = conservative to be a bit annoying and misleading. While it is true that conservative states, especially Southern states, tend to have lower median incomes, they also have significantly lower costs of living. "Studies" like this one never adjust for purchasing power parity, and that oversight always makes me question anything else they have to say.
For example, according to Wikipedia's article on household income in the United States (alas, the numbers are a couple of years old), strongly Democrat Hawaii, which is the 5th wealthiest state by income, is actually dead last adjusted for cost of living. New York ranks 44th once incomes are adjusted for purchasing power parity. Virginia and Utah are the two wealthiest states in the U.S. by PPP income. Of course, Mississippi and West Virginia are still poor no matter how you slice it, but the correlation between political orientation and real income among states is weak at best.
This should not be surprising - local government politics in the U.S. look decidedly different from national politics. This is especially true for conservatives - many Republicans are comfortable with giving powers to local or state governments that they would abhor giving to the federal government, and moreover local elections frequently come down to personal, rather than party, politics. So judging the results of a state's internal, local elections and policymaking by how its citizens voted in a national election doesn't make that much sense, because those two things are imperfectly correlated.
Sorry - that turned out to be a bit long and off topic, but I have a problem trusting articles like this that purport to investigate a fairly complicated and nuanced issue while also making such offhand implicit assumptions.
Lets look at the history of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Back in 2008, then-presidential nominee Barack Obama ran a campaign with healthcare reform as one of its central issues. He advocated for universal healthcare but opposed an individual mandate. However, after input from experts that claimed that government-guaranteed healthcare would encourage too many free-riders, Obama decided to include an individual mandate as a central part of his healthcare reform efforts.
The individual mandate is largely credited as an idea by the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation as an alternative to a system in which the government pays for healthcare. It required each person to pay for their own healthcare and was proposed by Republicans during the Clinton era as a free-market solution that embodies the tenant of personal responsibility that Republicans claim to hold.
Once adopted by the Democrats and proposed in a bill on September 17, 2009, the Republicans staunchly opposed the measure. The Republicans, some of whom have been around long enough to have supported a similar bill during the Clinton administration, claimed that the individual mandate was an unconstitutional assault on freedom.
After 3 weeks of debate and town hall meetings, the bill passed through the House of Representatives and was sent to the Senate. The Democrats attempted to gain the support of moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Bob Bennet, Mike Enzi, and Chuck Grassley. However, the moderate Republicans found themselves subject to intense pressure by the party to fall in line and oppose any healthcare reform effots.
The bill continued to be opposed by conservatives in the Senate who claimed that the bill's "public option" was a deal-breaker. The public option was government-run healthcare insurance that would be available to people alongside private health insurance in the market. Conservatives claimed that the public option would put private insurance out of business because the government is under no pressure to compete or turn a profit. After over 3 months of debate, the public option was dropped from the bill. Senator Grassley was quoted as saying:
"No public option. No play-or-pay. No things that are going to lead to any rationing of health care. No interference with the doctor-patient relationship," says Grassley. "About the only place we haven't made progress along the lines of what Republicans are wanting on the bill is in tort reform."
Despite this, it still took several last-minute concessions for conservatives to get the bill passed through the Senate on December 24, 2009, with support from independents and conservative Democrats to overcome the Republican threat of fillibuster.
The bill languished in the House of Representatives for 3 more months. In order to gets the admendments made to the bill back in the House, the Democrats had to win support from pro-life Representatives who worried that the bill would allow federal funds to be used to pay for abortions. To assuage anti-abortion politicians' fears, Barack Obama signed an executive order on March 21, 2010 to affirm that no federal funds could or would be used to fund abortions. The amendments were finally passed through the House and signed into law by Obama on March 23, 2010 (over 6 months after being proposed).
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
...The fact that many of the (very optimistically estimated) number of those who were added to O-Care rolls did not want or feel they needed it should be considered as well.
I personally know several people who were able to get insurance under Obamacare but didn't have it before. Not one says that they "did not want or feel they needed" insurance. What they say is, "Thank God, this is saving my life."
However, even if what you said was true: what you are implying is that there is a body of people who previously were saying "I don't want or need insurance, because if I get sick I'll go to a hospital that is legally is not allowed to turn me away, and the taxpayers will pay for it," -and they are now paying for their own health care. That's a win for the taxpayers.
In other cases, such as ones I am very familiar with, previously covered spouses were forced to move to their own plan if their work provider had coverage available. This means that although a new health care subscriber can now be counted, that person was already covered
That's not the way the number of uninsured is counted. That would count as a wash: neither an addition nor a reduction to the number of uninsured.
... More often than not, it is the large urban populations that shift state's support bias to liberal, and it is those same urban areas that hold the most desperate and dependent populations of the truly underprivileged.
Sorry, the belief that poverty is an urban phenomenon is another myth. It's a myth that's pervasive among liberals and conservatives, but simply not true. There are actually more poor and underprivileged people in rural America. You're right about urban areas being liberal and rural conservative, but wrong about being able to attribute that to "dependent populations of truly underprivileged": the greatest use of food stamps, as a percentage of population, in poor rural areas, not urban areas.
.... Its not that hard to play with numbers to make any point you want.
But you don't have to do that, because it's even easier to simply say "Those numbers don't support my political bias, so they are wrong."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Not a single dime.
Who Gets an Exemption From Obamacare?
How About a National Obamacare Waiver?
To date, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has approved 1,372 Obamacare waivers, covering 3.1 million Americans. Yesterday, The Daily Caller reported that among HHS’s most recent round of 204 Obamacare waivers, “38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.” That’s right: Nearly 20 percent of exemptions from Pelosi’s crowning health care achievement were doled out in her backyard.
If that’s not enough irony for you, try this waiver on for size: On Monday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that Nevada—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home state—received a partial statewide Obamacare waiver, too. If you’re keeping score, Reid was Pelosi’s counterpart in the Senate fighting to get Obamacare passed into law. Now his state will be one of three to get a waiver from the law’s requirements, while the rest of America suffers.
ObamaCare's Secret Mandate Exemption
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell