Tag: Obamacare

With the Affordable Care Act’s future in doubt, evidence grows that it has saved lives

Washington Post logoDETROIT — Poor people in Michigan with asthma and diabetes were admitted to hospitals less often after they joined Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. More than 25,000 Ohio smokers got help through the state’s Medicaid expansion that led them to quit. And around the country, patients with advanced kidney disease who went on dialysis were more likely to be alive a year later if they lived in a Medicaid-expansion state.

Such findings are part of an emerging mosaic of evidence that, nearly a decade after it became one of the most polarizing health-care laws in U.S. history, the ACA is making some Americans healthier — and less likely to die.

The evidence is accumulating just as the ACA’s future is, once again, being cast into doubt. The most immediate threat arises from a federal lawsuit, brought by a group of Republican state attorneys general, that challenges the law’s constitutionality. A trial court judge in Texas ruled late last year that the entire law is invalid, and an opinion on the case is expected at any time from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The case could well put the ACA before the Supreme Court for a third time.

View the complete September 30 article by Amy Goldstein on The Washington Post website here.

Undermining Medicaid: How Block Grants Would Hurt Beneficiaries

Center for American Progress logoPresident Donald Trump and his congressional allies have repeatedly tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).1 Various repeal bills have included provisions to slash Medicaid funding by eliminating the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and restructuring the remaining program through block grants or per-capita caps.2 By placing caps on federal Medicaid spending, these programs would either reduce enrollees’ benefits or tighten eligibility requirements. Now, after failing to implement these reforms legislatively, the Trump administration is bypassing Congress to cut federal Medicaid expenditures and dismantle key Medicaid expansion provisions of the ACA.

In January, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma was reported to be considering drastic changes to Medicaid’s rules that would allow states to adopt structures similar to block grants or per-capita caps using the Medicaid waiver authority—a mechanism to make alterations to Medicaid services without legislative approval.3 Since then, she has continued to express support for capping federal Medicaid payments to the states.4

Block grants and per-capita caps threaten health care access for the almost 75 million low-income and disabled people enrolled in the program.5 This issue brief outlines the ways in which the administration is encouraging states to use waivers to adopt these alternative funding approaches, thus undermining Medicaid and ignoring the will of voters, who overwhelmingly oppose such programs.6

View the complete August 7 article by Tarun Ramesh on the Center for American Progress website here.

Stand up, stop Republican attacks on Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act is back in court this month thanks to yet another Republican lawsuit against the popular health care law.

That may sound banal to many Americans. Republican attacks on the ACA have become a fixture of modern politics. It can be easy to dismiss this latest incident as just more political theater and grandstanding, but we do so at our peril.

These continued Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act are well-funded and more dangerous than many people realize. Recent history has shown that, while the Affordable Care Act has weathered Republican attacks, several have come disturbingly close to eliminating the law and others have severely wounded it.

View the complete July 29 commentary by DFL Chair Ken Martin on The Saint Cloud Times website here.

Attack on the ACA

Center for American Progress logoUndermining Protections for LGBTQ Patients and Language Accessibility Requirements

The Trump administration is proposing to undermine strong and clear protections against discrimination in health care by giving health care providers, pharmacy benefit managers, and insurers a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people and many others. The existing rule implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as the Health Care Rights Law, was promulgated by the Obama administration in 2016 after a rigorous six-year process. The rule characterized discrimination based on sex stereotyping and gender identity as impermissible sex discrimination under the law. It also prohibited insurance providers using the marketplace from discriminating against protected characteristics, provided strong language access and notice requirements, and established many other critical patient protections.

The Trump administration incorrectly claimed that an injunction against limited provisions of the rule necessitated promulgating a new rule, but the proposal’s expansive decimation of existing protections reveals that this is just the administration’s latest effort to undermine the ACA at the cost of patient care. In addition to erasing the existing regulation’s explicit protections for LGBTQ people, the proposed rule would also: Continue reading “Attack on the ACA”

Federal judge upholds Trump’s expansion of non-ACA health plans

Axios logoA D.C. federal judge upheld Friday the Trump administration’s expansion of insurance plans that don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act — a key part of its health care agenda.

The big picture: The Department of Health and Human Services last year allowed consumers to keep barebones, lightly regulated “short-term” health insurance for up to three years — longer than than the Obama administration had allowed. HHS does have the legal authority to change those limits as it sees fit, Judge Richard Leon ruled today.

View the July 19 article by Sam Baker on the Axios website here.

Repealing ACA would be a catastrophic blow

In what now seems to be a time-honored tradition, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are once again trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This week, the popular health care law that’s working for millions of Americans is back in the courts again thanks to a Republican-backed lawsuit.

In an unusual twist, Trump’s Department of Justice announced they will not be defending the federal health care law, which is usually part of the department’s responsibilities. Instead, Trump is siding with Republicans in an effort to have the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional, which would jeopardize the health insurance of over one million Minnesotans.

Here are just a few of the disastrous consequences of eliminating the Affordable Care Act: Continue reading “Repealing ACA would be a catastrophic blow”

So You Want to Overturn Obamacare. Here Are Some Things That Would Be Headaches.

New York Times logoPeople would lose insurance, but workplace lactation rooms, menu calorie information and entire government programs would also be affected.

It’s not just that 21 million people would probably lose health insurance, or that 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions would lose their protection. Those effects would be the major focus of attention if the Affordable Care Act were to be struck down.

But the law was much, much broader, affecting a wide range of health programs, even some areas you might not think of as related to health. Overturning the entire law would mean all of its parts, in theory, would go away at once.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court heard arguments from 18 Republican-led states and the Justice Department that the law should be invalidated. In some ways, that echoes arguments made to the courts in 2012, before much of the law was first put in. Repealing it then would have been a big deal. But doing so now, after so many of its provisions have unspooled, would be much trickier and more consequential.

View the complete July 10 article by argo Sanger-Katz on The New York Times website here.

If the ACA Is Repealed Under Texas v. Azar, Millions Will Lose Health Insurance Coverage

Center for American Progress logoTo download the table that shows increases in the number of uninsured people by congressional district, click here.

The lawsuit brought by Republican state officials to overturn the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA), Texas v. Azar,continues to work its way through the U.S. legal system. In December 2018, a right-wing district court judge in Texas sided with opponents of the law, finding that the entire ACA should be struck down. Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit will hear oral arguments and decide whether to overturn the district court’s partisan decision. Worryingly, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals also appears to be questioning whether the defenders of the ACA have standing to intervene in the earlier ruling. Regardless of how the court rules, the odds are high that the case will then be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. For the foreseeable future, the ACA is in danger.

If the lawsuit ultimately succeeds, it would have devastating consequences for nearly every American who has health coverage, whether through their employer, the individual market, Medicare, or Medicaid. The Urban Institute estimates that overturning the ACA would result in almost 20 million more Americans being uninsured and would lower federal health care spending by $135 billion in 2019 alone. In this column, the Center for American Progress estimates the increase in the number of uninsured people by congressional district that would occur if the ACA were struck down.

Background on Texas v. Azar

Texas v. Azar is a politically charged attempt to repeal the ACA. In February 2018, Texas and 19 other states filed a lawsuit arguing that the ACA is unconstitutional. Their widely panned legal argument claimed that because the Republican-sponsored Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the individual mandate penalty, it rendered the rest of the ACA invalid.

View the complete July 9 article by Emily Gee and Charles Gaba on the Center for American Progress website here.

Mom asks Minnesota Sen. Karin Housley to stop blaming her diabetic son for his death

In 2017, Alec Smith turned 26, aging out of the Obamacare rule that he could get his health insurance through his parents’ policy.

He had Type 1 diabetes and needed insulin to manage it. But he didn’t have the money for a high deductible plan. He also didn’t have the $1,300 he needed each month to pay for insulin out of pocket. So he tried to ration it until his next paycheck. He would end up dying a month later.

This session, the Minnesota House passed the Alec Smith Emergency Insulin Act, which would levy a fee on pharmaceutical manufacturers to pay for emergency supplies of insulin for people who couldn’t afford it. Its success was short-lived. It died in the final moments courtesy of the Republican-controlled Senate, with 33 senators voting in favor and 34 against.

It was a surprising demise for a bill that originally had bipartisan support. Some lawmakers have been calling it a mere omission or oversight in the eleventh hour of the special session. In a debrief last week, Sen. Karin Housley (R-St. Mary’s Point) called the incident a “debacle” and “disappointing.”

View the complete June 4 article by Hannah Jones on The CityPages website here.

GOP blew Obamacare repeal, not us, former CBO director says

Keith Hall said if anyone is to blame for Republicans’ failure to repeal the health care law, it’s Republicans themselves

Outgoing Congressional Budget Office Director Keith Hall held his fire when the agency was under attack in 2017 for estimating that a repeal of the 2010 health care law would throw millions of people off health insurance.

Now that he is leaving the agency, he can speak more freely. In an interview in his office last week, Hall said if anyone is to blame for Republicans’ failure to repeal the health care law, it’s Republicans themselves.

“I made a real decision not to, in real time, defend our work because I really do think of us as referees or umpires,” said Hall, a Republican. He said the agency’s job is to provide its best analysis and let it stand on its own.

View the complete June 3 article by Paul M. Krawzak on The Roll Call website here.