Seven million will lose insurance under Obombacare

[ELVIS]

http://pamibe.com/wp-content/uploads/Obamacare-doctors-548x550.jpg

President Obama's health care law (http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2013/feb/5/obama-health-law-will-cost-7-million/) will push 7 million people out of their job-based insurance coverage — nearly twice the previous estimate, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.

CBO said that this year's tax cuts have changed the incentives for businesses and made it less attractive to pay for insurance, meaning fewer will decide to do so. Instead, they'll choose to pay a penalty to the government, totaling $13 billion in higher fees over the next decade.

But the non-partisan agency also expects fewer people to have to pay individual penalties to the IRS than it earlier projects, because of a better method for calculating incomes that found more people will be exempt.

Overall, the new health provisions are expected to cost the government $1.165 trillion over the next decade — the same as last year's projection.

With other spending cuts and tax increases called for in the health law, though, CBO still says Mr. Obama's signature achievement will reduce budget deficits in the short term.

During the health care debate Mr. Obama had said individuals would be able to keep their plans.



:elvis:

[Satan]

Why don't you mortals just put an end to all this dragonshit and just do the logical thing, with a medicare single payer for all system?

Healthcare should never be dependent on employment.

[SunisinuS]

I expect a full year of fear mongering and such....then Faux News will roll out "The lines for health care at hospitals around America" ect ect....then about 7 months in....boom...ooops..... just in time for 2016. Will be much rejoicing.

[jhale667]

Why don't you mortals just put an end to all this dragonshit and just do the logical thing, with a medicare single payer for all system?

Healthcare should never be dependent on employment.

:clap:

[Nitro Express]

We have to pass it so you can see what's in it. Enjoy suckers!

[SunisinuS]

Yea, only problem is that I have lived in countries that have it.... /shrug. Americans like to believe the biggest mouth pointing the other directing and guiding you by fear (I know...I am one), but proof is in the pudding...and even in Spain I got great healthcare without goofy US ruin your life rules. My bro was a doctor...me mum a nurse....and I worked in Insurance for a decade....so you can believe Rush...or you can believe the rest of the signers of the 1948 bill of rights. /shrug.

You don't want to pay for your Grandma falling down....either here or in Europe you will.....well...in the US...I as a taxpayer will pay for her emergency room visit (3k-9k plus) or a visit with a doctor who gives her a walker instead (1k).

Fools who think that the US system of healthcare benefit anyone but the healthcare system.....have a nother think(g) coming.

And Nitro...I remember thinking the conventional wisdom if this was all politics on Obama's part (wow....why wait until 2014 to GIVE PEOPLE "Stuff"?) was for the very REASON it needed to be thought about, find the problems, hook up the horses correctly, and allow the critics to find the problems.

To be honest...I think the Affordable Care Act was a quintessentially American nod to the best part of the Health Care System in the US (research and clinic trials) and the ability to have the market "feed" the basics of a God Damn sprained wrist. There IS NO GOVERMENT HEALTHCARE even after the Affordable Care Act.

Only House members and Senators given the best, and the GI given the boot....that is it is now. They should share no?

[vh rides again]

Yep
The average American will be fined about 98 bucks and a business owner 4000 bucks if they don't carry it.

With the current laws, all you will have to do is go get insurance when you get sick, they can't turn ya down.

Insurance companies will go broke within 5 years .

[SunisinuS]

Yep
The average American will be fined about 98 bucks and a business owner 4000 bucks if they don't carry it.

With the current laws, all you will have to do is go get insurance when you get sick, they can't turn ya down.

Insurance companies will go broke within 5 years .

Sorry...you are no Actuary. I did Insurance for 10 years and was honorably discharged.

You need a little math in your life to be in the biz.

I will consider any bet you make about the results.

Math is Fundamental.*

Follow the Footnote and answer the question please.

:jaw:

[vh rides again]

Sorry...you are no Actuary. I did Insurance for 10 years and was honorably discharged.

You need a little math in your life to be in the biz.

I will consider any bet you make about the results.

Math is Fundamental.*

Follow the Footnote and answer the question please.

:jaw:

I've owned my own business for 20 years.
My lawyer has read the laws regarding obamacare this last week and has told me where I stand.

When you and all your legal aids get done reading what was just released last week, get back to me.

Cause

You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground.

You don't own anything I would want in a bet.

[SunisinuS]

I've owned my own business for 20 years.
My lawyer has read the laws regarding obamacare this last week and has told me where I stand.

When you and all your legal aids get done reading what was just released last week, get back to me.

Cause

You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground.

You don't own anything I would want in a bet.*

I was in the business of Grocery Repair for twenty years so I would not know anything about being in the Insurance Business for ten. And BTW my other brother was an attorney....so every summer I used to "volunteer" to work going through ream after ream of divorce proceedings and other cases.

Ask any of your attorneys if they were in the Insurance Business.

So who's ass is in the ground now?

Again...any prognastification you want to make about how this shakes out....I am your Huckleberry.


Better batten down the hatches in beateeing off Iowa....as everyday down here is a rainy day...we don't save up.

This thread will not survive even 12 months...and then 16 months will roll around and I want you to try and find this again....as about then....CNN will post another "Distraction...cute Grandma walks down the street without falling down...all without selling her home or catering to her dickhead Plutocrat children or the TaxMan".

Btw again? "Insurance companies (whoever they are) will go broke in 5 years". You will not take a bet on your own words?

Close up Shop then. We do not need you. If you are not a person of your own words then, let life be passed to those that are.

[Nitro Express]

I think the Unaffordable Care and Screw the Patient Act will hit the skids. Like prohibition it's bad legislation. It was just rammed through as quick as possible and people did not know what they were getting. It was sold with a shit load of lies. Now it's going to bite into people's pocketbooks and the quality of the care will go down and people won't appreciate the intrusive meddling. It's just another scam.

You have to love paying a unsales tax. A tax on buying nothing. It's absurd. According the IRS the cheapest health plan for a family is around $20,000 a year. It probably doesn't cover shit. Then of course there will be political favoritism with the politically connected getting exemptions from the so called tax.

[ELVIS]

And the drone strikes for those who refuse to pay...

[ZahZoo]

I was in the business of Grocery Repair for twenty years so I would not know anything about being in the Insurance Business for ten.

Grocery Repair..? WTF?

Did you patch bruised bananas or were you in the body shop pounding out dented soup cans?

[Nickdfresh]

And the drone strikes for those who refuse to pay...

And bullshit hyperbole from conspiracy theorists...

Consider the source of this article, coming from the Moonie Times...

[ELVIS]

The "source" is the CBO, Dickforbrains...

[Nickdfresh]

The "source" is the CBO, Dickforbrains...

No, it's a stilted reading of CBO statistics, ElAIDsVirus...

[ELVIS]

Keep sucking Obomba's dick...

[SunisinuS]

In anycase....this is how successful insurance companies are approaching the whole thing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/business/florida-blue-and-other-health-insurers-prepare-for-new-regulations.html?src=me&ref=general

And ZZ that was a joke.... most Grocery Repair involves vegetable oil changes and and fixing flat Fryers.

And if you read the above article Nitro, you will see that not everyone shares your doom and gloom assesment. But, it is the law of the land now....and again...you are forced to pay for "Uninsured Motorists" currently and forced to carry car insurance by the government. Again, if you can explain why "unisured motorist" coverage is the best solution for a crappy real world problem (some people just refuse to get it and then run over other people), you might be able to then explain why paying taxes (as we do right now) for "Uninsured Chronic Emergency Room Visitors" is terrible public policy. It costs more when you just act like there is no problem.

[Nickdfresh]

Keep sucking Obomba's dick...

LOL From the Alex Jones chum nubbler...

[vh rides again]

I was in the business of Grocery Repair for twenty years so I would not know anything about being in the Insurance Business for ten. And BTW my other brother was an attorney....so every summer I used to "volunteer" to work going through ream after ream of divorce proceedings and other cases.

Ask any of your attorneys if they were in the Insurance Business.

So who's ass is in the ground now?

Again...any prognastification you want to make about how this shakes out....I am your Huckleberry.


Better batten down the hatches in beateeing off Iowa....as everyday down here is a rainy day...we don't save up.

This thread will not survive even 12 months...and then 16 months will roll around and I want you to try and find this again....as about then....CNN will post another "Distraction...cute Grandma walks down the street without falling down...all without selling her home or catering to her dickhead Plutocrat children or the TaxMan".

Btw again? "Insurance companies (whoever they are) will go broke in 5 years". You will not take a bet on your own words?

Close up Shop then. We do not need you. If you are not a person of your own words then, let life be passed to those that are.

Yes insurance companies are going to go broke, they have too much faith in Americans and this anti American president we have.

I don't have to buy insurance.

I will get fined a hundred dollars.

If I get sick I can go buy insurance and stick it to the insurance companies them dump it when they make payment,they can't deny me.

That is what is going to happen., and for the cash grab they have made the last four years, they deserve it.

I hope it's the end of insurance.

[Nickdfresh]

Yes insurance companies are going to go broke...

Which ones?

[Nickdfresh]

GOP Governors Deny The Poor Health Care In Opposing Obamacare's Medicaid Expansion

Posted: 12/28/2012 8:44 am EST
RUSTON, La. -- With no health insurance and not enough money for a doctor, Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.

Over decades, she made her living assisting elderly people in nursing homes in jobs that paid just above minimum wage and included no health benefits. So even as her feet swelled to such an extent that she could no longer stuff them into her shoes, and even as nausea, headaches and dizziness plagued her, she reached for the aspirin bottle or made do with a teaspoon of vinegar. She propped her feet up on pillows and hoped for relief.

"Before I got sick," she said, "I hadn't been to the doctor in 20 years."

After she collapsed last year and landed in in a local emergency room, doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and hypothyroid. They ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social Security disability benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She used her Medicaid card to secure needed prescription medications. Her ailments stabilized.

But this year, the state determined that the $819 a month she draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By the federal government's reckoning, her $9,800 annual income made her officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too well off to receive Medicaid.

This is how Johnson, 57, finds herself back amid the roughly 49 million Americans who lack health insurance. This is why she must again reach into her pocket to secure her prescription drugs, a supply that runs about $200 a month. That sum is beyond her, so she has gone more than four months without taking her pills on a regular basis. Once again, her feet are swelling and her chest is filling with fluid. Once again, she is confronted with the realization that a lifetime of labor does not entitle her to see a doctor any more than it enables her to gain crucial medications.

"It just doesn't seem right to me," she said. "It just doesn't seem fair."

Johnson is precisely the sort of person who is supposed to benefit from the national health care reform now known as Obamacare. The law championed by President Obama and enacted by Congress nearly three years ago includes a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. In place of the patchwork of eligibility levels now set by each state, one standard is to prevail everywhere: Individuals with annual incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line -- currently, $14,856 or less -- are supposed to be able to enroll.

Were the Obamacare expansion enacted today, some 17 million people would gain the right to coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance program, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Laura Johnson would be among them. But the policy does not take effect until 2014. And in several states, including Louisiana, it increasingly appears the policy may not take effect at all.

This is in large part because of a landmark Supreme Court decision earlier this year. The court affirmed Obamacare’s key mechanism -- the authority of the federal government to mandate that people buy some form of health insurance or pay penalties -- but the justices overturned another crucial provision: They decreed that states have the right to opt out of the Medicaid expansion, a step that would deprive people like Johnson of care.

Though Medicaid is jointly run and financed by the states and the federal government, Washington is obligated to cover the full costs of expanding the Medicaid rolls over the first three years. Even as the federal share gradually declines over subsequent years, by 2022 Washington would still be on the hook for 90 percent of the additional costs. But the court said states could turn down that federal money and continue to run their Medicaid programs as they do now, setting their own standards for eligibility.

Since that ruling, Republican governors in nine states -- Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana -- have indicated that this is what they intend to do.

Here in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, who now chairs the Republican Governors Association, has criticized the Medicaid expansion as a threat to taxpayers and an incursion on his state's right to set its own policies.

"That's crazy," said Johnson. "I don't understand why he's doing that. He's not thinking about poor people like us."

Jindal declined requests for comment. But in public statements, he has portrayed his opposition as a principled stand in favor of fiscal prudence. Yes, he says, the costs are to be borne by Washington initially, but the the states have to pick up a share.

"This is not free health care," Jindal said last summer during a conference call with reporters, adding that the Medicaid expansion would cost Louisiana $3.7 billion over the first decade.

Obamacare proponents dispute such accounting as both flawed and incomplete.

Expanding Medicaid nationally under Obamacare would increase total state costs by just 2.9 percent, or $76 billion in total between 2013 and 2022, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute and published by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The federal government would cover the rest of the roughly $1.03 trillion cost of expanding Medicaid during those years, according to the report. Some new state Medicaid spending would be offset by cutting existing state health programs for the poor.

In Louisiana, participating in the Medicaid expansion would cost the state an additional $1.8 billion over that timeframe, while the federal government would deliver $16.7 billion, the Urban Institute projects. Some 400,000 now-ineligible Louisiana residents would be able to enroll in Medicaid.

As some experts portray it, the benefits of adding uninsured people to Medicaid rolls spill over beyond the recipients. Even people who already have insurance effectively profit through reduced economic waste and by improving the overall health care system.

Uninsured people are more likely to be sick, are more likely to declare bankruptcy, are less productive at work and don't live as long, said John Lumpkin, the director of the health care group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a Princeton, N.J.-based research organization. These impacts effectively cost the economy as much $200 billion every year, he said, citing a 2008 study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

People who lack health insurance run the risk of winding up like Johnson: putting off care as their conditions worsen to the point that they can no longer work, removing their payroll and income taxes from government coffers while drawing on taxpayers for disability benefits. People in that situation effectively increase the costs of health care for everyone, say experts, because they eventually require emergency services, with the bill often picked up by state and federal taxpayers.

In 2010, hospitals nationwide delivered $39.3 billion in health care services for which they received no payment, according to the American Hospital Association, citing the last year for which data is available. Some of these costs are covered by taxpayer-funded programs that reimburse hospitals that have especially high rates of unpaid bills. The rest gets absorbed by the health care system, yeilding higher prices for patients.

The result: an American medical system characterized by extreme inefficiency.

"We have a health care system that has the best medical science in the world that delivers third-world health care to the vast majority of our population," Lumpkin said. "Our nation spends more per capita for health care, by far, than any of the other developed countries in the world. And when you compare outcomes based on any measurement of health or health care, we underperform."

Laura Johnson's son, Dustin, a 20-year-old college student, suffers from severe asthma and himself lacks health care, frequently landing in the emergency room. He offers his own sense of the accounting at work: In his view, people like him and his mother have simply been pushed beyond the ledgers of American life.

"Some of the people who can afford health insurance just kind of forget about people who can't," he said. "I don't think health care is something anyone should be denied. It's not anyone's choice to get sick."

OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Dianne Laird, 57, has experienced both sides of that divide.

Four years ago, as the American economy sank into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, she lost her job as an office manager in Texas. She lost her $42,000 annual salary along with her health coverage. At about the same time, her husband, Ron, 58, shuttered his kayak rental company in the face of declining business.

The Lairds found themselves part of a crowded group that no one chooses to join: people who lack health insurance.

In Texas, that group is especially large, numbering about 6.1 million. As of last year, Texas had the highest rate of residents who were uninsured -- 24 percent compared to 16 percent nationally, according to census data compiled by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Texas also claims distinction as a state with one of the more restrictive standards for Medicaid eligibility: It does not offer Medicaid to adults, regardless of their income, except some pregnant women, poor parents with children at home, and people with disabilities. A single parent, for instance, cannot enroll in Medicaid in Texas if they make more than 25 percent of the federal poverty line -- now, about $2,800 annually.

For a time, the Lairds scraped by on her unemployment benefits while she enrolled in community college, aiming to become a fitness instructor. They made a few dollars on the side selling peaches at a roadside stand and occasional housesitting. They sold their home to raise funds to pay their bills and they moved into a rental apartment.

About a year ago, Dianne got a part-time job teaching exercise classes at the YMCA, a job that pays less than she previously received in unemployment benefits. As a family, the Lairds are poor by the federal standard. But because they don't have children at home and have no disabilities, it doesn't matter how poor they are in Texas, so they have no health coverage.

"If something happens," Dianne Laird said, "then I'm going to have to deal with it."

That mindset has become something of a family trait. Elise, 22, the youngest of the Laird's three children, is a full-time student at nearby Texas State University, where she studies photography and mass communications. She lives on her own with her boyfriend and works part-time at an ice cream shop, sometimes bringing in extra money through photography and modeling jobs.

All told, Elise subsists on about $1,000 a month, supplemented by student loans. She is seeking to apply for food stamps.

"Everyone I know is at poverty," Elise said. "I don't know anyone that doesn't have two jobs, that isn't going to school, who isn't trying to better their lives."

Elise has had no health coverage since she turned 19, which made her too old for the Children's Health Insurance Program, a federal-state benefit similar to Medicaid. So far, she's avoided serious illness, but she feels a gnawing sense of vulnerability, combined with the knowledge that any health problem would be a financial calamity.

"It would be such an ineffable amount of money that it would just be like, 'Well, I can't pay you,'" she said.

Elise and her mother have come to rely on Lone Star Circle of Care, a network of community health centers in central Texas that provides basic medical care and charges on a sliding scale based on income. Elise and her mother visit the network's clinics for annual gynecologic exams, they said.

Given the clinic's mission as a provider to low-income people who lack other options, getting an appointment there sometimes takes a week, they say. The clinic is limited in the services it provides, so Dianne has yet to have a colonoscopy while skipping other basic services.

"I have ailments that I would like to get looked at," said Dianne. "I mean, my hip just kills me all the time."

In the spring, when Dianne broke her ankle, the clinic could not help, so she went to the emergency room at a local hospital, University Medical Center Brackenridge.

"There are no regular doctors that'll see you without you having to shell out cash," she said.

That visit resulted in a $2,500 bill. She has no inkling how she will pay it.

"I'm a month behind on my cell phone bill," Dianne said. "I have to pick and choose what is worthwhile paying right now, and so I choose the car payment, the roof over our head, the electricity, the water," she said.

The Medicaid expansion would relieve families like the Lairds from having to choose between basic health care services and electricity. But Gov. Rick Perry has staked out a strident position against the expansion, objecting to what he portrays as the worst dimension of Obamacare -- greater federal involvement in his state.

"Medicaid is a system of inflexible mandates, one-size fits-all requirements and wasteful, bureaucratic inefficiencies," Perry wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius earlier this year. The health care law's "unsound encroachments will find no foothold here," he declared.

Perry has also described the Medicaid expansion as a fiscal threat, questioning whether Washington can be relied upon to deliver its promised funding going forward.

Experts say such opposition masks the real cause of concern in states such as Texas and Louisiana: They fear what has become known as "the woodwork effect," with the Medicaid expansion serving to publicize the existence of the program, prompting a surge of people to enroll.

That surge would include not only people made eligible by Obamacare, but also people who have been eligible all along but perhaps had not known how to apply. Nationally, just 62 percent of people eligible for Medicaid are actually getting benefits, according to an estimate published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010.

While the federal government is obligated to cover the full costs of newly eligible people added to the Medicaid rolls, people who are already eligible would be governed by the existing split: The states on average absorb 43 percent of those costs.

"The state's complaint is, 'We said we would cover these people and now we're going to have to actually cover them and pay for them,'" said Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Marci Roe worries about the consequences of not paying for them. As executive director of the Volunteer Health Clinic in Austin, she witnesses every day the full dimension of the costs borne by people who live without health insurance.

"They lead sicker lives," she said. "It affects their ability to work, their ability to go to school, to basically support themselves."

WHY DID YOU WAIT SO LONG?

Laura Johnson's working life traces the arc of an American economy that has for decades replaced jobs that paid middle-class wages and provided health insurance with low-wage service sector positions that lack benefits.

Johnson was raised in the town of Homer, La., about 35 miles southeast of here. Her father worked as a machine operator at a plywood company. He came home with dirt under his fingernails and aching joints, but also a paycheck large enough to allow his wife to stay home and look after their seven children. His earnings included health coverage and a retirement savings program.

After high school, Johnson enrolled at Grambling State University, a historically African-American university, where she studied to be a teacher. In her junior year, her father died, felled by heart trouble at 45. Devastated, she fell into depression.

"I loved my daddy more than life itself," she said, recalling how she would ride around in his truck while he made his rounds. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. My dad was my world."

She dropped out of school and moved to Washington, D.C., where she moved in with an aunt who thought a change of scenery might help her transcend her grief. There, she worked in a department store.

But after a year, Johnson's mother persuaded her to return to Louisiana in the hopes that she would resume her studies. She came home but could not find the motivation to return to classes. Instead, she took a job as a dietician at a nursing home, planning the meals, earning about $1,000 a month, she says.

"I just didn’t want to go back to school," she said. "It was the beginning of a downward spiral. I feel like I should have gone back to college and my life would be better."

Over the subsequent decades, Johnson attended to elderly people in nursing homes and in private residences, delivering meals and medication, emptying bedpans and changing seats.

Most of those jobs paid minimum wage. None included health insurance.

"It didn't bother me," she said, "because I never was sick."

But as the years passed, the minor ailments to which a person can grow accustomed burgeoned into life-threatening conditions. Her feet and ankles swelled, and so did her face, in what her doctors would later conclude was a likely manifestation of thyroid problems. Her left side felt increasingly heavy.

Even as pain and worry became constant, she did not consult a doctor for two simple reasons: She didn't have health insurance, and she didn't have money.

At her last job before she collapsed, she was bringing home about $400 every other week, she says. The rent on her brick-faced apartment on the edges of town ran $575 a month. Her utilities absorbed another $300 a month.

"I just lived paycheck to paycheck," she said. "How you going to go to the doctor with no money?"

In her town in northern Louisiana, Johnson did not lack for company. Nurtured more than a century ago by cotton farming, Ruston is home today to some 22,000 people -- more than a third of them living at or below poverty, according to census data. Its compact downtown is dotted by markers of inadequate finance, from the payday lenders and pawn shops that dominate the strip malls, to discount grocery outlets and fast-food joints.

When the pain got so bad that she could not handle it, Johnson lay on her couch and watched television (mostly soap operas) and consulted a book on home remedies. That's where she learned about vinegar treatments. ("It brings your blood pressure down," she says.) That's where she read that dabbing rubbing alcohol on her temples might limit her headaches, while a little lemon juice could be used for dizziness. For kidney troubles, she says, baking powder and water are thought to do the trick.

On a muggy morning in May 2011, she felt so faint that she could not get herself to work, the pressure in her chest having become unbearable.

"It felt like something was smothering my heart," she said. "I was terrified. It was very traumatic."

Her sister drove her to the emergency room at the E.A. Conway Medical Center, a half-hour drive to the east in the town of Monroe. The hospital -- part of the Louisiana State University health care system, which specializes in care for low-income people -- occupies a five-story brick building next to a juvenile prison ringed by razor wire. Nearly half of the patients at the medical center are enrolled in Medicaid, and 38 percent have no insurance, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

System-wide, the LSU hospital chain derived nearly half of its 2011 revenues from state and federal funds that reimburse facilities that treat large numbers of people who fail to pay their bills, according to its latest annual report. At E.A. Conway, nearly two-thirds of the revenues came from these sources, according to the report.

The medical staff put Johnson on a ventilator and ran a battery of tests.

The doctors found a substantial quantity of fluid around her heart, which was severely enlarged, she says. They determined that her blood pressure was so high that she was at severe risk of a stroke.

"The doctor asked me, 'Why did you wait so long to come in?'" Johnson recalled. "He told me my body was almost getting ready to shut down. And I'm thinking in my head, 'I didn't come because I don't have any insurance.'"

She spent eight days in the hospital, she says, and she never received a bill. It was clear enough that she could not pay.

A hospital spokeswoman declined to discuss the cost of Johnson's care, citing patient confidentiality restrictions, but estimated that the typical stay there runs upwards of $1,000 a day.

Johnson’s doctors discharged her with strict instructions not to go back to work, she says, and with a voluminous list of prescriptions.

Her son, Dustin, went online and filled out her Medicaid application. Soon, she had in hand a Medicaid card. She took it to the pharmacy and brought home the shelf-full of pills the doctors ordered, while surrendering minimal co-pays -- typically just a dollar or two. She made regular follow-up visits to the doctors, who adjusted her medications when her stomach bothered her or when she felt dizzy.

Her health stabilized. Her pain receded.

But this past spring, another letter came from the state, this one informing her that her disability payment put her over the income threshold for Medicaid.

So ended her subsidized trips to the pharmacy.

Forced to fend for herself, she has instead frequented a local Walmart, where she is able to purchase the pills that she needs a few at a time, but never enough for a full course. She visits a community nonprofit pharmacy for the poor that provides her some of her needed medication, but not all.

In short, she takes what pills she can get when she is able to afford them, an ad hoc arrangement that has seen her symptoms return with a vengeance.

She recently paid $25 to visit a subsidized clinic where a doctor warned her that her kidney is now failing -- probably because of the effects of her medication. She could soon require dialysis. Should that come to pass, she has no idea what she will do.

Not for the first time -- and probably not for the last -- she diagnosed her own condition in starkly simple terms.

"I don't have insurance," she said. "I don't have any money. I pray to God I get my Medicaid back. I pray every day, because I've got no insurance for anything."

LINK (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/gop-obamacare-medicaid_n_2347933.html)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that Laura Johnson paid $575 in weekly rent; that figure is in fact her monthly rent.

[SunisinuS]

Yes insurance companies are going to go broke, they have too much faith in Americans and this anti American president we have.

If I get sick I can go buy insurance and stick it to the insurance companies them dump it when they make payment,they can't deny me.



First off. Try that with Automobile Insurance. There is nothing so far in the law that I see that says you will defraud anymore than trying to defraud Auto Insurance. If you are scamming it....you will not be accepted....no where does it say "Pre-existing Condition of being a Criminal shall be covered."

Second, yup you get rid of Insurance: "History of insurance

Main article: History of insurance

In some sense we can say that insurance appears simultaneously with the appearance of human society."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance


Good luck with that buddy....can you eradicate the world's 2nd oldest profession after that?


Third, calling Benjamin Franklin Unamerican (he started the first fire insurance company in the US....practically invented it) is pretty shitty of you, seems like he did a bit more for the nation than you have.

[fifth element]

Yep
The average American will be fined about 98 bucks and a business owner 4000 bucks if they don't carry it.

With the current laws, all you will have to do is go get insurance when you get sick, they can't turn ya down.

Insurance companies will go broke within 5 years . :lmao: insurance companies go broke in 5 years? no way in hell.
Insurance companies will be around long after you are dead and buried, and most will be making plenty of money, as they are now.

Selling health insurance to the average consumer at affordable prices will do nothing but make most of them rich. (Oh, yeah, that and to allow those of us who cannot now afford insurance to be able to go to the doctor and dentist when we need to WITHOUT going broke.)
:jaw:

[Hardrock69]

...you are forced to pay for "Uninsured Motorists" currently and forced to carry car insurance by the government.

Uh no. It is not required by law to carry Uninsured Motorist coverage.

[fifth element]

First off. Try that with Automobile Insurance. There is nothing so far in the law that I see that says you will defraud anymore than trying to defraud Auto Insurance. If you are scamming it....you will not be accepted....no where does it say "Pre-existing Condition of being a Criminal shall be covered."

Second, yup you get rid of Insurance: "History of insurance

Main article: History of insurance

In some sense we can say that insurance appears simultaneously with the appearance of human society."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance


Good luck with that buddy....can you eradicate the world's 2nd oldest profession after that?


Third, calling Benjamin Franklin Unamerican (he started the first fire insurance company in the US....practically invented it) is pretty shitty of you, seems like he did a bit more for the nation than you have.

:amen:

[ELVIS]

So what's to keep people from choosing to carry no insurance at all and just paying the tax penalty ??

[ELVIS]

GOP Governors Deny The Poor Health Care In Opposing Obamacare's Medicaid Expansion

Posted: 12/28/2012 8:44 am EST
RUSTON, La. -- With no health insurance and not enough money for a doctor, Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.

Over decades, she made her living assisting elderly people in nursing homes in jobs that paid just above minimum wage and included no health benefits. So even as her feet swelled to such an extent that she could no longer stuff them into her shoes, and even as nausea, headaches and dizziness plagued her, she reached for the aspirin bottle or made do with a teaspoon of vinegar. She propped her feet up on pillows and hoped for relief.

"Before I got sick," she said, "I hadn't been to the doctor in 20 years."

After she collapsed last year and landed in in a local emergency room, doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and hypothyroid. They ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social Security disability benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She used her Medicaid card to secure needed prescription medications. Her ailments stabilized.

But this year, the state determined that the $819 a month she draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By the federal government's reckoning, her $9,800 annual income made her officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too well off to receive Medicaid.

This is how Johnson, 57, finds herself back amid the roughly 49 million Americans who lack health insurance. This is why she must again reach into her pocket to secure her prescription drugs, a supply that runs about $200 a month. That sum is beyond her, so she has gone more than four months without taking her pills on a regular basis. Once again, her feet are swelling and her chest is filling with fluid. Once again, she is confronted with the realization that a lifetime of labor does not entitle her to see a doctor any more than it enables her to gain crucial medications.

"It just doesn't seem right to me," she said. "It just doesn't seem fair."

Johnson is precisely the sort of person who is supposed to benefit from the national health care reform now known as Obamacare. The law championed by President Obama and enacted by Congress nearly three years ago includes a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. In place of the patchwork of eligibility levels now set by each state, one standard is to prevail everywhere: Individuals with annual incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line -- currently, $14,856 or less -- are supposed to be able to enroll.

Were the Obamacare expansion enacted today, some 17 million people would gain the right to coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance program, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Laura Johnson would be among them. But the policy does not take effect until 2014. And in several states, including Louisiana, it increasingly appears the policy may not take effect at all.

This is in large part because of a landmark Supreme Court decision earlier this year. The court affirmed Obamacare’s key mechanism -- the authority of the federal government to mandate that people buy some form of health insurance or pay penalties -- but the justices overturned another crucial provision: They decreed that states have the right to opt out of the Medicaid expansion, a step that would deprive people like Johnson of care.

Though Medicaid is jointly run and financed by the states and the federal government, Washington is obligated to cover the full costs of expanding the Medicaid rolls over the first three years. Even as the federal share gradually declines over subsequent years, by 2022 Washington would still be on the hook for 90 percent of the additional costs. But the court said states could turn down that federal money and continue to run their Medicaid programs as they do now, setting their own standards for eligibility.

Since that ruling, Republican governors in nine states -- Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana -- have indicated that this is what they intend to do.

Here in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, who now chairs the Republican Governors Association, has criticized the Medicaid expansion as a threat to taxpayers and an incursion on his state's right to set its own policies.

"That's crazy," said Johnson. "I don't understand why he's doing that. He's not thinking about poor people like us."

Jindal declined requests for comment. But in public statements, he has portrayed his opposition as a principled stand in favor of fiscal prudence. Yes, he says, the costs are to be borne by Washington initially, but the the states have to pick up a share.

"This is not free health care," Jindal said last summer during a conference call with reporters, adding that the Medicaid expansion would cost Louisiana $3.7 billion over the first decade.

Obamacare proponents dispute such accounting as both flawed and incomplete.

Expanding Medicaid nationally under Obamacare would increase total state costs by just 2.9 percent, or $76 billion in total between 2013 and 2022, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute and published by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The federal government would cover the rest of the roughly $1.03 trillion cost of expanding Medicaid during those years, according to the report. Some new state Medicaid spending would be offset by cutting existing state health programs for the poor.

In Louisiana, participating in the Medicaid expansion would cost the state an additional $1.8 billion over that timeframe, while the federal government would deliver $16.7 billion, the Urban Institute projects. Some 400,000 now-ineligible Louisiana residents would be able to enroll in Medicaid.

As some experts portray it, the benefits of adding uninsured people to Medicaid rolls spill over beyond the recipients. Even people who already have insurance effectively profit through reduced economic waste and by improving the overall health care system.

Uninsured people are more likely to be sick, are more likely to declare bankruptcy, are less productive at work and don't live as long, said John Lumpkin, the director of the health care group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a Princeton, N.J.-based research organization. These impacts effectively cost the economy as much $200 billion every year, he said, citing a 2008 study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

People who lack health insurance run the risk of winding up like Johnson: putting off care as their conditions worsen to the point that they can no longer work, removing their payroll and income taxes from government coffers while drawing on taxpayers for disability benefits. People in that situation effectively increase the costs of health care for everyone, say experts, because they eventually require emergency services, with the bill often picked up by state and federal taxpayers.

In 2010, hospitals nationwide delivered $39.3 billion in health care services for which they received no payment, according to the American Hospital Association, citing the last year for which data is available. Some of these costs are covered by taxpayer-funded programs that reimburse hospitals that have especially high rates of unpaid bills. The rest gets absorbed by the health care system, yeilding higher prices for patients.

The result: an American medical system characterized by extreme inefficiency.

"We have a health care system that has the best medical science in the world that delivers third-world health care to the vast majority of our population," Lumpkin said. "Our nation spends more per capita for health care, by far, than any of the other developed countries in the world. And when you compare outcomes based on any measurement of health or health care, we underperform."

Laura Johnson's son, Dustin, a 20-year-old college student, suffers from severe asthma and himself lacks health care, frequently landing in the emergency room. He offers his own sense of the accounting at work: In his view, people like him and his mother have simply been pushed beyond the ledgers of American life.

"Some of the people who can afford health insurance just kind of forget about people who can't," he said. "I don't think health care is something anyone should be denied. It's not anyone's choice to get sick."

OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Dianne Laird, 57, has experienced both sides of that divide.

Four years ago, as the American economy sank into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, she lost her job as an office manager in Texas. She lost her $42,000 annual salary along with her health coverage. At about the same time, her husband, Ron, 58, shuttered his kayak rental company in the face of declining business.

The Lairds found themselves part of a crowded group that no one chooses to join: people who lack health insurance.

In Texas, that group is especially large, numbering about 6.1 million. As of last year, Texas had the highest rate of residents who were uninsured -- 24 percent compared to 16 percent nationally, according to census data compiled by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Texas also claims distinction as a state with one of the more restrictive standards for Medicaid eligibility: It does not offer Medicaid to adults, regardless of their income, except some pregnant women, poor parents with children at home, and people with disabilities. A single parent, for instance, cannot enroll in Medicaid in Texas if they make more than 25 percent of the federal poverty line -- now, about $2,800 annually.

For a time, the Lairds scraped by on her unemployment benefits while she enrolled in community college, aiming to become a fitness instructor. They made a few dollars on the side selling peaches at a roadside stand and occasional housesitting. They sold their home to raise funds to pay their bills and they moved into a rental apartment.

About a year ago, Dianne got a part-time job teaching exercise classes at the YMCA, a job that pays less than she previously received in unemployment benefits. As a family, the Lairds are poor by the federal standard. But because they don't have children at home and have no disabilities, it doesn't matter how poor they are in Texas, so they have no health coverage.

"If something happens," Dianne Laird said, "then I'm going to have to deal with it."

That mindset has become something of a family trait. Elise, 22, the youngest of the Laird's three children, is a full-time student at nearby Texas State University, where she studies photography and mass communications. She lives on her own with her boyfriend and works part-time at an ice cream shop, sometimes bringing in extra money through photography and modeling jobs.

All told, Elise subsists on about $1,000 a month, supplemented by student loans. She is seeking to apply for food stamps.

"Everyone I know is at poverty," Elise said. "I don't know anyone that doesn't have two jobs, that isn't going to school, who isn't trying to better their lives."

Elise has had no health coverage since she turned 19, which made her too old for the Children's Health Insurance Program, a federal-state benefit similar to Medicaid. So far, she's avoided serious illness, but she feels a gnawing sense of vulnerability, combined with the knowledge that any health problem would be a financial calamity.

"It would be such an ineffable amount of money that it would just be like, 'Well, I can't pay you,'" she said.

Elise and her mother have come to rely on Lone Star Circle of Care, a network of community health centers in central Texas that provides basic medical care and charges on a sliding scale based on income. Elise and her mother visit the network's clinics for annual gynecologic exams, they said.

Given the clinic's mission as a provider to low-income people who lack other options, getting an appointment there sometimes takes a week, they say. The clinic is limited in the services it provides, so Dianne has yet to have a colonoscopy while skipping other basic services.

"I have ailments that I would like to get looked at," said Dianne. "I mean, my hip just kills me all the time."

In the spring, when Dianne broke her ankle, the clinic could not help, so she went to the emergency room at a local hospital, University Medical Center Brackenridge.

"There are no regular doctors that'll see you without you having to shell out cash," she said.

That visit resulted in a $2,500 bill. She has no inkling how she will pay it.

"I'm a month behind on my cell phone bill," Dianne said. "I have to pick and choose what is worthwhile paying right now, and so I choose the car payment, the roof over our head, the electricity, the water," she said.

The Medicaid expansion would relieve families like the Lairds from having to choose between basic health care services and electricity. But Gov. Rick Perry has staked out a strident position against the expansion, objecting to what he portrays as the worst dimension of Obamacare -- greater federal involvement in his state.

"Medicaid is a system of inflexible mandates, one-size fits-all requirements and wasteful, bureaucratic inefficiencies," Perry wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius earlier this year. The health care law's "unsound encroachments will find no foothold here," he declared.

Perry has also described the Medicaid expansion as a fiscal threat, questioning whether Washington can be relied upon to deliver its promised funding going forward.

Experts say such opposition masks the real cause of concern in states such as Texas and Louisiana: They fear what has become known as "the woodwork effect," with the Medicaid expansion serving to publicize the existence of the program, prompting a surge of people to enroll.

That surge would include not only people made eligible by Obamacare, but also people who have been eligible all along but perhaps had not known how to apply. Nationally, just 62 percent of people eligible for Medicaid are actually getting benefits, according to an estimate published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010.

While the federal government is obligated to cover the full costs of newly eligible people added to the Medicaid rolls, people who are already eligible would be governed by the existing split: The states on average absorb 43 percent of those costs.

"The state's complaint is, 'We said we would cover these people and now we're going to have to actually cover them and pay for them,'" said Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Marci Roe worries about the consequences of not paying for them. As executive director of the Volunteer Health Clinic in Austin, she witnesses every day the full dimension of the costs borne by people who live without health insurance.

"They lead sicker lives," she said. "It affects their ability to work, their ability to go to school, to basically support themselves."

WHY DID YOU WAIT SO LONG?

Laura Johnson's working life traces the arc of an American economy that has for decades replaced jobs that paid middle-class wages and provided health insurance with low-wage service sector positions that lack benefits.

Johnson was raised in the town of Homer, La., about 35 miles southeast of here. Her father worked as a machine operator at a plywood company. He came home with dirt under his fingernails and aching joints, but also a paycheck large enough to allow his wife to stay home and look after their seven children. His earnings included health coverage and a retirement savings program.

After high school, Johnson enrolled at Grambling State University, a historically African-American university, where she studied to be a teacher. In her junior year, her father died, felled by heart trouble at 45. Devastated, she fell into depression.

"I loved my daddy more than life itself," she said, recalling how she would ride around in his truck while he made his rounds. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. My dad was my world."

She dropped out of school and moved to Washington, D.C., where she moved in with an aunt who thought a change of scenery might help her transcend her grief. There, she worked in a department store.

But after a year, Johnson's mother persuaded her to return to Louisiana in the hopes that she would resume her studies. She came home but could not find the motivation to return to classes. Instead, she took a job as a dietician at a nursing home, planning the meals, earning about $1,000 a month, she says.

"I just didn’t want to go back to school," she said. "It was the beginning of a downward spiral. I feel like I should have gone back to college and my life would be better."

Over the subsequent decades, Johnson attended to elderly people in nursing homes and in private residences, delivering meals and medication, emptying bedpans and changing seats.

Most of those jobs paid minimum wage. None included health insurance.

"It didn't bother me," she said, "because I never was sick."

But as the years passed, the minor ailments to which a person can grow accustomed burgeoned into life-threatening conditions. Her feet and ankles swelled, and so did her face, in what her doctors would later conclude was a likely manifestation of thyroid problems. Her left side felt increasingly heavy.

Even as pain and worry became constant, she did not consult a doctor for two simple reasons: She didn't have health insurance, and she didn't have money.

At her last job before she collapsed, she was bringing home about $400 every other week, she says. The rent on her brick-faced apartment on the edges of town ran $575 a month. Her utilities absorbed another $300 a month.

"I just lived paycheck to paycheck," she said. "How you going to go to the doctor with no money?"

In her town in northern Louisiana, Johnson did not lack for company. Nurtured more than a century ago by cotton farming, Ruston is home today to some 22,000 people -- more than a third of them living at or below poverty, according to census data. Its compact downtown is dotted by markers of inadequate finance, from the payday lenders and pawn shops that dominate the strip malls, to discount grocery outlets and fast-food joints.

When the pain got so bad that she could not handle it, Johnson lay on her couch and watched television (mostly soap operas) and consulted a book on home remedies. That's where she learned about vinegar treatments. ("It brings your blood pressure down," she says.) That's where she read that dabbing rubbing alcohol on her temples might limit her headaches, while a little lemon juice could be used for dizziness. For kidney troubles, she says, baking powder and water are thought to do the trick.

On a muggy morning in May 2011, she felt so faint that she could not get herself to work, the pressure in her chest having become unbearable.

"It felt like something was smothering my heart," she said. "I was terrified. It was very traumatic."

Her sister drove her to the emergency room at the E.A. Conway Medical Center, a half-hour drive to the east in the town of Monroe. The hospital -- part of the Louisiana State University health care system, which specializes in care for low-income people -- occupies a five-story brick building next to a juvenile prison ringed by razor wire. Nearly half of the patients at the medical center are enrolled in Medicaid, and 38 percent have no insurance, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

System-wide, the LSU hospital chain derived nearly half of its 2011 revenues from state and federal funds that reimburse facilities that treat large numbers of people who fail to pay their bills, according to its latest annual report. At E.A. Conway, nearly two-thirds of the revenues came from these sources, according to the report.

The medical staff put Johnson on a ventilator and ran a battery of tests.

The doctors found a substantial quantity of fluid around her heart, which was severely enlarged, she says. They determined that her blood pressure was so high that she was at severe risk of a stroke.

"The doctor asked me, 'Why did you wait so long to come in?'" Johnson recalled. "He told me my body was almost getting ready to shut down. And I'm thinking in my head, 'I didn't come because I don't have any insurance.'"

She spent eight days in the hospital, she says, and she never received a bill. It was clear enough that she could not pay.

A hospital spokeswoman declined to discuss the cost of Johnson's care, citing patient confidentiality restrictions, but estimated that the typical stay there runs upwards of $1,000 a day.

Johnson’s doctors discharged her with strict instructions not to go back to work, she says, and with a voluminous list of prescriptions.

Her son, Dustin, went online and filled out her Medicaid application. Soon, she had in hand a Medicaid card. She took it to the pharmacy and brought home the shelf-full of pills the doctors ordered, while surrendering minimal co-pays -- typically just a dollar or two. She made regular follow-up visits to the doctors, who adjusted her medications when her stomach bothered her or when she felt dizzy.

Her health stabilized. Her pain receded.

But this past spring, another letter came from the state, this one informing her that her disability payment put her over the income threshold for Medicaid.

So ended her subsidized trips to the pharmacy.

Forced to fend for herself, she has instead frequented a local Walmart, where she is able to purchase the pills that she needs a few at a time, but never enough for a full course. She visits a community nonprofit pharmacy for the poor that provides her some of her needed medication, but not all.

In short, she takes what pills she can get when she is able to afford them, an ad hoc arrangement that has seen her symptoms return with a vengeance.

She recently paid $25 to visit a subsidized clinic where a doctor warned her that her kidney is now failing -- probably because of the effects of her medication. She could soon require dialysis. Should that come to pass, she has no idea what she will do.

Not for the first time -- and probably not for the last -- she diagnosed her own condition in starkly simple terms.

"I don't have insurance," she said. "I don't have any money. I pray to God I get my Medicaid back. I pray every day, because I've got no insurance for anything."

LINK (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/gop-obamacare-medicaid_n_2347933.html)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that Laura Johnson paid $575 in weekly rent; that figure is in fact her monthly rent.

Wow, that's a big post...

[ELVIS]

GOP Governors Deny The Poor Health Care In Opposing Obamacare's Medicaid Expansion

Posted: 12/28/2012 8:44 am EST
RUSTON, La. -- With no health insurance and not enough money for a doctor, Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial.

Over decades, she made her living assisting elderly people in nursing homes in jobs that paid just above minimum wage and included no health benefits. So even as her feet swelled to such an extent that she could no longer stuff them into her shoes, and even as nausea, headaches and dizziness plagued her, she reached for the aspirin bottle or made do with a teaspoon of vinegar. She propped her feet up on pillows and hoped for relief.

"Before I got sick," she said, "I hadn't been to the doctor in 20 years."

After she collapsed last year and landed in in a local emergency room, doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and hypothyroid. They ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social Security disability benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She used her Medicaid card to secure needed prescription medications. Her ailments stabilized.

But this year, the state determined that the $819 a month she draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By the federal government's reckoning, her $9,800 annual income made her officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too well off to receive Medicaid.

This is how Johnson, 57, finds herself back amid the roughly 49 million Americans who lack health insurance. This is why she must again reach into her pocket to secure her prescription drugs, a supply that runs about $200 a month. That sum is beyond her, so she has gone more than four months without taking her pills on a regular basis. Once again, her feet are swelling and her chest is filling with fluid. Once again, she is confronted with the realization that a lifetime of labor does not entitle her to see a doctor any more than it enables her to gain crucial medications.

"It just doesn't seem right to me," she said. "It just doesn't seem fair."

Johnson is precisely the sort of person who is supposed to benefit from the national health care reform now known as Obamacare. The law championed by President Obama and enacted by Congress nearly three years ago includes a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. In place of the patchwork of eligibility levels now set by each state, one standard is to prevail everywhere: Individuals with annual incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line -- currently, $14,856 or less -- are supposed to be able to enroll.

Were the Obamacare expansion enacted today, some 17 million people would gain the right to coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance program, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Laura Johnson would be among them. But the policy does not take effect until 2014. And in several states, including Louisiana, it increasingly appears the policy may not take effect at all.

This is in large part because of a landmark Supreme Court decision earlier this year. The court affirmed Obamacare’s key mechanism -- the authority of the federal government to mandate that people buy some form of health insurance or pay penalties -- but the justices overturned another crucial provision: They decreed that states have the right to opt out of the Medicaid expansion, a step that would deprive people like Johnson of care.

Though Medicaid is jointly run and financed by the states and the federal government, Washington is obligated to cover the full costs of expanding the Medicaid rolls over the first three years. Even as the federal share gradually declines over subsequent years, by 2022 Washington would still be on the hook for 90 percent of the additional costs. But the court said states could turn down that federal money and continue to run their Medicaid programs as they do now, setting their own standards for eligibility.

Since that ruling, Republican governors in nine states -- Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana -- have indicated that this is what they intend to do.

Here in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, who now chairs the Republican Governors Association, has criticized the Medicaid expansion as a threat to taxpayers and an incursion on his state's right to set its own policies.

"That's crazy," said Johnson. "I don't understand why he's doing that. He's not thinking about poor people like us."

Jindal declined requests for comment. But in public statements, he has portrayed his opposition as a principled stand in favor of fiscal prudence. Yes, he says, the costs are to be borne by Washington initially, but the the states have to pick up a share.

"This is not free health care," Jindal said last summer during a conference call with reporters, adding that the Medicaid expansion would cost Louisiana $3.7 billion over the first decade.

Obamacare proponents dispute such accounting as both flawed and incomplete.

Expanding Medicaid nationally under Obamacare would increase total state costs by just 2.9 percent, or $76 billion in total between 2013 and 2022, according to research conducted by The Urban Institute and published by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The federal government would cover the rest of the roughly $1.03 trillion cost of expanding Medicaid during those years, according to the report. Some new state Medicaid spending would be offset by cutting existing state health programs for the poor.

In Louisiana, participating in the Medicaid expansion would cost the state an additional $1.8 billion over that timeframe, while the federal government would deliver $16.7 billion, the Urban Institute projects. Some 400,000 now-ineligible Louisiana residents would be able to enroll in Medicaid.

As some experts portray it, the benefits of adding uninsured people to Medicaid rolls spill over beyond the recipients. Even people who already have insurance effectively profit through reduced economic waste and by improving the overall health care system.

Uninsured people are more likely to be sick, are more likely to declare bankruptcy, are less productive at work and don't live as long, said John Lumpkin, the director of the health care group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a Princeton, N.J.-based research organization. These impacts effectively cost the economy as much $200 billion every year, he said, citing a 2008 study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

People who lack health insurance run the risk of winding up like Johnson: putting off care as their conditions worsen to the point that they can no longer work, removing their payroll and income taxes from government coffers while drawing on taxpayers for disability benefits. People in that situation effectively increase the costs of health care for everyone, say experts, because they eventually require emergency services, with the bill often picked up by state and federal taxpayers.

In 2010, hospitals nationwide delivered $39.3 billion in health care services for which they received no payment, according to the American Hospital Association, citing the last year for which data is available. Some of these costs are covered by taxpayer-funded programs that reimburse hospitals that have especially high rates of unpaid bills. The rest gets absorbed by the health care system, yeilding higher prices for patients.

The result: an American medical system characterized by extreme inefficiency.

"We have a health care system that has the best medical science in the world that delivers third-world health care to the vast majority of our population," Lumpkin said. "Our nation spends more per capita for health care, by far, than any of the other developed countries in the world. And when you compare outcomes based on any measurement of health or health care, we underperform."

Laura Johnson's son, Dustin, a 20-year-old college student, suffers from severe asthma and himself lacks health care, frequently landing in the emergency room. He offers his own sense of the accounting at work: In his view, people like him and his mother have simply been pushed beyond the ledgers of American life.

"Some of the people who can afford health insurance just kind of forget about people who can't," he said. "I don't think health care is something anyone should be denied. It's not anyone's choice to get sick."

OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Dianne Laird, 57, has experienced both sides of that divide.

Four years ago, as the American economy sank into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, she lost her job as an office manager in Texas. She lost her $42,000 annual salary along with her health coverage. At about the same time, her husband, Ron, 58, shuttered his kayak rental company in the face of declining business.

The Lairds found themselves part of a crowded group that no one chooses to join: people who lack health insurance.

In Texas, that group is especially large, numbering about 6.1 million. As of last year, Texas had the highest rate of residents who were uninsured -- 24 percent compared to 16 percent nationally, according to census data compiled by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Texas also claims distinction as a state with one of the more restrictive standards for Medicaid eligibility: It does not offer Medicaid to adults, regardless of their income, except some pregnant women, poor parents with children at home, and people with disabilities. A single parent, for instance, cannot enroll in Medicaid in Texas if they make more than 25 percent of the federal poverty line -- now, about $2,800 annually.

For a time, the Lairds scraped by on her unemployment benefits while she enrolled in community college, aiming to become a fitness instructor. They made a few dollars on the side selling peaches at a roadside stand and occasional housesitting. They sold their home to raise funds to pay their bills and they moved into a rental apartment.

About a year ago, Dianne got a part-time job teaching exercise classes at the YMCA, a job that pays less than she previously received in unemployment benefits. As a family, the Lairds are poor by the federal standard. But because they don't have children at home and have no disabilities, it doesn't matter how poor they are in Texas, so they have no health coverage.

"If something happens," Dianne Laird said, "then I'm going to have to deal with it."

That mindset has become something of a family trait. Elise, 22, the youngest of the Laird's three children, is a full-time student at nearby Texas State University, where she studies photography and mass communications. She lives on her own with her boyfriend and works part-time at an ice cream shop, sometimes bringing in extra money through photography and modeling jobs.

All told, Elise subsists on about $1,000 a month, supplemented by student loans. She is seeking to apply for food stamps.

"Everyone I know is at poverty," Elise said. "I don't know anyone that doesn't have two jobs, that isn't going to school, who isn't trying to better their lives."

Elise has had no health coverage since she turned 19, which made her too old for the Children's Health Insurance Program, a federal-state benefit similar to Medicaid. So far, she's avoided serious illness, but she feels a gnawing sense of vulnerability, combined with the knowledge that any health problem would be a financial calamity.

"It would be such an ineffable amount of money that it would just be like, 'Well, I can't pay you,'" she said.

Elise and her mother have come to rely on Lone Star Circle of Care, a network of community health centers in central Texas that provides basic medical care and charges on a sliding scale based on income. Elise and her mother visit the network's clinics for annual gynecologic exams, they said.

Given the clinic's mission as a provider to low-income people who lack other options, getting an appointment there sometimes takes a week, they say. The clinic is limited in the services it provides, so Dianne has yet to have a colonoscopy while skipping other basic services.

"I have ailments that I would like to get looked at," said Dianne. "I mean, my hip just kills me all the time."

In the spring, when Dianne broke her ankle, the clinic could not help, so she went to the emergency room at a local hospital, University Medical Center Brackenridge.

"There are no regular doctors that'll see you without you having to shell out cash," she said.

That visit resulted in a $2,500 bill. She has no inkling how she will pay it.

"I'm a month behind on my cell phone bill," Dianne said. "I have to pick and choose what is worthwhile paying right now, and so I choose the car payment, the roof over our head, the electricity, the water," she said.

The Medicaid expansion would relieve families like the Lairds from having to choose between basic health care services and electricity. But Gov. Rick Perry has staked out a strident position against the expansion, objecting to what he portrays as the worst dimension of Obamacare -- greater federal involvement in his state.

"Medicaid is a system of inflexible mandates, one-size fits-all requirements and wasteful, bureaucratic inefficiencies," Perry wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius earlier this year. The health care law's "unsound encroachments will find no foothold here," he declared.

Perry has also described the Medicaid expansion as a fiscal threat, questioning whether Washington can be relied upon to deliver its promised funding going forward.

Experts say such opposition masks the real cause of concern in states such as Texas and Louisiana: They fear what has become known as "the woodwork effect," with the Medicaid expansion serving to publicize the existence of the program, prompting a surge of people to enroll.

That surge would include not only people made eligible by Obamacare, but also people who have been eligible all along but perhaps had not known how to apply. Nationally, just 62 percent of people eligible for Medicaid are actually getting benefits, according to an estimate published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010.

While the federal government is obligated to cover the full costs of newly eligible people added to the Medicaid rolls, people who are already eligible would be governed by the existing split: The states on average absorb 43 percent of those costs.

"The state's complaint is, 'We said we would cover these people and now we're going to have to actually cover them and pay for them,'" said Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Marci Roe worries about the consequences of not paying for them. As executive director of the Volunteer Health Clinic in Austin, she witnesses every day the full dimension of the costs borne by people who live without health insurance.

"They lead sicker lives," she said. "It affects their ability to work, their ability to go to school, to basically support themselves."

WHY DID YOU WAIT SO LONG?

Laura Johnson's working life traces the arc of an American economy that has for decades replaced jobs that paid middle-class wages and provided health insurance with low-wage service sector positions that lack benefits.

Johnson was raised in the town of Homer, La., about 35 miles southeast of here. Her father worked as a machine operator at a plywood company. He came home with dirt under his fingernails and aching joints, but also a paycheck large enough to allow his wife to stay home and look after their seven children. His earnings included health coverage and a retirement savings program.

After high school, Johnson enrolled at Grambling State University, a historically African-American university, where she studied to be a teacher. In her junior year, her father died, felled by heart trouble at 45. Devastated, she fell into depression.

"I loved my daddy more than life itself," she said, recalling how she would ride around in his truck while he made his rounds. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. My dad was my world."

She dropped out of school and moved to Washington, D.C., where she moved in with an aunt who thought a change of scenery might help her transcend her grief. There, she worked in a department store.

But after a year, Johnson's mother persuaded her to return to Louisiana in the hopes that she would resume her studies. She came home but could not find the motivation to return to classes. Instead, she took a job as a dietician at a nursing home, planning the meals, earning about $1,000 a month, she says.

"I just didn’t want to go back to school," she said. "It was the beginning of a downward spiral. I feel like I should have gone back to college and my life would be better."

Over the subsequent decades, Johnson attended to elderly people in nursing homes and in private residences, delivering meals and medication, emptying bedpans and changing seats.

Most of those jobs paid minimum wage. None included health insurance.

"It didn't bother me," she said, "because I never was sick."

But as the years passed, the minor ailments to which a person can grow accustomed burgeoned into life-threatening conditions. Her feet and ankles swelled, and so did her face, in what her doctors would later conclude was a likely manifestation of thyroid problems. Her left side felt increasingly heavy.

Even as pain and worry became constant, she did not consult a doctor for two simple reasons: She didn't have health insurance, and she didn't have money.

At her last job before she collapsed, she was bringing home about $400 every other week, she says. The rent on her brick-faced apartment on the edges of town ran $575 a month. Her utilities absorbed another $300 a month.

"I just lived paycheck to paycheck," she said. "How you going to go to the doctor with no money?"

In her town in northern Louisiana, Johnson did not lack for company. Nurtured more than a century ago by cotton farming, Ruston is home today to some 22,000 people -- more than a third of them living at or below poverty, according to census data. Its compact downtown is dotted by markers of inadequate finance, from the payday lenders and pawn shops that dominate the strip malls, to discount grocery outlets and fast-food joints.

When the pain got so bad that she could not handle it, Johnson lay on her couch and watched television (mostly soap operas) and consulted a book on home remedies. That's where she learned about vinegar treatments. ("It brings your blood pressure down," she says.) That's where she read that dabbing rubbing alcohol on her temples might limit her headaches, while a little lemon juice could be used for dizziness. For kidney troubles, she says, baking powder and water are thought to do the trick.

On a muggy morning in May 2011, she felt so faint that she could not get herself to work, the pressure in her chest having become unbearable.

"It felt like something was smothering my heart," she said. "I was terrified. It was very traumatic."

Her sister drove her to the emergency room at the E.A. Conway Medical Center, a half-hour drive to the east in the town of Monroe. The hospital -- part of the Louisiana State University health care system, which specializes in care for low-income people -- occupies a five-story brick building next to a juvenile prison ringed by razor wire. Nearly half of the patients at the medical center are enrolled in Medicaid, and 38 percent have no insurance, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

System-wide, the LSU hospital chain derived nearly half of its 2011 revenues from state and federal funds that reimburse facilities that treat large numbers of people who fail to pay their bills, according to its latest annual report. At E.A. Conway, nearly two-thirds of the revenues came from these sources, according to the report.

The medical staff put Johnson on a ventilator and ran a battery of tests.

The doctors found a substantial quantity of fluid around her heart, which was severely enlarged, she says. They determined that her blood pressure was so high that she was at severe risk of a stroke.

"The doctor asked me, 'Why did you wait so long to come in?'" Johnson recalled. "He told me my body was almost getting ready to shut down. And I'm thinking in my head, 'I didn't come because I don't have any insurance.'"

She spent eight days in the hospital, she says, and she never received a bill. It was clear enough that she could not pay.

A hospital spokeswoman declined to discuss the cost of Johnson's care, citing patient confidentiality restrictions, but estimated that the typical stay there runs upwards of $1,000 a day.

Johnson’s doctors discharged her with strict instructions not to go back to work, she says, and with a voluminous list of prescriptions.

Her son, Dustin, went online and filled out her Medicaid application. Soon, she had in hand a Medicaid card. She took it to the pharmacy and brought home the shelf-full of pills the doctors ordered, while surrendering minimal co-pays -- typically just a dollar or two. She made regular follow-up visits to the doctors, who adjusted her medications when her stomach bothered her or when she felt dizzy.

Her health stabilized. Her pain receded.

But this past spring, another letter came from the state, this one informing her that her disability payment put her over the income threshold for Medicaid.

So ended her subsidized trips to the pharmacy.

Forced to fend for herself, she has instead frequented a local Walmart, where she is able to purchase the pills that she needs a few at a time, but never enough for a full course. She visits a community nonprofit pharmacy for the poor that provides her some of her needed medication, but not all.

In short, she takes what pills she can get when she is able to afford them, an ad hoc arrangement that has seen her symptoms return with a vengeance.

She recently paid $25 to visit a subsidized clinic where a doctor warned her that her kidney is now failing -- probably because of the effects of her medication. She could soon require dialysis. Should that come to pass, she has no idea what she will do.

Not for the first time -- and probably not for the last -- she diagnosed her own condition in starkly simple terms.

"I don't have insurance," she said. "I don't have any money. I pray to God I get my Medicaid back. I pray every day, because I've got no insurance for anything."

LINK (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/gop-obamacare-medicaid_n_2347933.html)

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that Laura Johnson paid $575 in weekly rent; that figure is in fact her monthly rent.


See how big it is ??

Huge cherry picked bullshit agenda post...

[Hardrock69]

So what's to keep people from choosing to carry no insurance at all and just paying the tax penalty ??

Nothing. It's only 98 bucks. :gulp:

[SunisinuS]

Nothing. It's only 98 bucks. :gulp:

For the year. Then the following year...gets a bit bigger...and then stabalizes 4 years in.

By that time most people will say...wow...I am working...I could have health insurance for the same amount I am paying in penalties....nah....let's just leave the Us and get "Free Healthcare" in Costa Rica like Rush....or wherever he promised he was going....sad though....just like Mitch Mc....he said his number 1 job was to make Obummer a 1 term president...and yet...he still wants to run on his own failed record then.

Vote for Mitch! He will make sure that Obama is only a 2 term president! It is his number 1 job!

[fifth element]

Thank you NickFresh for posting an article that so many of us can relate to. As an epileptic (and working at a job that does not cover health care), I have been required to find (somehow, someway) on my almost minimum wage salary, an extra $162.00 out of my pocket to pay for my medication. (that amount is AFTER applying the States "pharmacy insurance" to the origional amount). and then the doctor wants me to come see her 2-3 times a year just for the privelege of having those prescriptions written. I make too much money (what a laugh) to be on Medicaid, am too young to be on Medicare.

so, "needs must when the devil drives" . I am looking forward to 2014.






Oh, btw....Fuck you, Elvis. :fucku: :tool:

[Hardrock69]

Elvis posted that because he is upset he won't be able to have Medicaid anymore.

[SunisinuS]

Uh no. It is not required by law to carry Uninsured Motorist coverage.

You know you are right, only certain states modify that rule, which is why part of the act to is to allow all insurance companies access to all states.

Thanks HR69!

[Hardrock69]

I would not have mentioned it, but my insurance policy has such coverage as optional.

Though I do carry it. Too many people on the streets who are drunk, or cannot drive, and do not carry insurance.

[vh rides again]

Thank you NickFresh for posting an article that so many of us can relate to. As an epileptic (and working at a job that does not cover health care), I have been required to find (somehow, someway) on my almost minimum wage salary, an extra $162.00 out of my pocket to pay for my medication. (that amount is AFTER applying the States "pharmacy insurance" to the origional amount). and then the doctor wants me to come see her 2-3 times a year just for the privelege of having those prescriptions written. I make too much money (what a laugh) to be on Medicaid, am too young to be on Medicare.

so, "needs must when the devil drives" . I am looking forward to 2014.






Oh, btw....Fuck you, Elvis. :fucku: :tool:

Just quit your job and go on welfare.

Be one of the entitled .

[Nitro Express]

Just quit your job and go on welfare.

Be one of the entitled .

I think that is the plan. Destroy people's means to take care of themselves and drive them to depend on the government. Of course as soon is voting no longer matters and they have a full on police state, they will cut back on what people get from the government drastically.

It's nothing more than a few rich fucks trying to steal everything. Put yourself in their place and play dictator. What would you do? Exactly what is going on now.

[vh rides again]

First off. Try that with Automobile Insurance. There is nothing so far in the law that I see that says you will defraud anymore than trying to defraud Auto Insurance. If you are scamming it....you will not be accepted....no where does it say "Pre-existing Condition of being a Criminal shall be covered."

Second, yup you get rid of Insurance: "History of insurance

Main article: History of insurance

In some sense we can say that insurance appears simultaneously with the appearance of human society."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance


Good luck with that buddy....can you eradicate the world's 2nd oldest profession after that?


Third, calling Benjamin Franklin Unamerican (he started the first fire insurance company in the US....practically invented it) is pretty shitty of you, seems like he did a bit more for the nation than you have.

Whatever pal, set aside some money for your parents cause they are going to need it in their old age.

This shit has been tried all over the world, it doesn't work.

Do you even know how much insurance costs a week ?

I'll bet you don't have a fucking clue, and judging from the time you spend on here, I doubt you even have a fucking job to pay for health insurance .

Do you think that a god damn person making minimum wage can afford to fork out a hundred dollars a week for some shit insurance with a 5000 dollar deductible ?

How many people in this country make minimum wage?

I'll answer that for you, a fucking ton of them and that's not even the ones that are layed off, haven't worked in years.

Nobody is going to buy health insurance , and it's a fucking god damned lie about being affordable, AINT going to happen, ITS TOO FUCKING EXSPENSIVE.

Run your mouth all you want, I live in the real world and I know what it takes to carry health insurance , it's a rough fucking road and of you don't make a good wage, your going to be handing over a LARGE chunk of YOUR income to pay for something you might use .

Ain't gonna happen.

[SunisinuS]

Just quit your job and go on welfare.

Be one of the entitled .

Better yet....DIE and decrease the surplus population.

[SunisinuS]

Whatever pal, set aside some money for your parents cause they are going to need it in their old age.

This shit has been tried all over the world, it doesn't work.

Do you even know how much insurance costs a week ?

I'll bet you don't have a fucking clue, and judging from the time you spend on here, I doubt you even have a fucking job to pay for health insurance .

Do you think that a god damn person making minimum wage can afford to fork out a hundred dollars a week for some shit insurance with a 5000 dollar deductible ?

How many people in this country make minimum wage?

I'll answer that for you, a fucking ton of them and that's not even the ones that are layed off, haven't worked in years.

Nobody is going to buy health insurance , and it's a fucking god damned lie about being affordable, AINT going to happen, ITS TOO FUCKING EXSPENSIVE.

Run your mouth all you want, I live in the real world and I know what it takes to carry health insurance , it's a rough fucking road and of you don't make a good wage, your going to be handing over a LARGE chunk of YOUR income to pay for something you might use .

Ain't gonna happen.

Live long and prosper VH Rides Again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_healthcare

[Nickdfresh]

Just quit your job and go on welfare.

Be one of the entitled .

From the baller that can't afford health insurance...

BTW, still waiting for which insurance companies are going under...

[Nickdfresh]

Wow, that's a big post...

Sorry, hope I didn't hurt your little pin-head...

[FORD]

See how big it is ??

Huge cherry picked bullshit agenda post...

Well, then let me narrow it down for you.....

Your governor, Piyush Jindal, who just last week said he wanted the Republicans to stop being "the party of the stupid" is endorsing some of the STUPIDEST and inhuman policies in the history of this country.

[Nitro Express]

From the baller that can't afford health insurance...

BTW, still waiting for which insurance companies are going under...

The ones who didn't write the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. and bribe the politicians to pass it. Let's call it the health insurance monopoly act while don't we? You have to understand this is no longer a government by the people and for the people. It's a government of by the corporation and for the corporation. So guess what. The more government programs you liberals celebrate the more powerful you make the corporations and the rich 1% you claim you are going after.

Nice job suckers!

[vh rides again]

From the baller that can't afford health insurance...

BTW, still waiting for which insurance companies are going under...

LOL

Fuck off turd

I quit trying to reason with your Jane Fonda wanna be ass a couple years ago, obamas thinking is right up your alley, try getting up before noon today so you can go look for a job.

[vh rides again]

LOL

Fuck off turd

I quit trying to reason with your Jane Fonda wanna be ass a couple years ago, obamas thinking is right up your alley, try getting up before noon today so you can go look for a job.

Or just stay put at your computer and let me go to work for your entitled Obama loving ass, I'll thank all my guys workin for ya today.

[vh rides again]

The ones who didn't write the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. and bribe the politicians to pass it. Let's call it the health insurance monopoly act while don't we? You have to understand this is no longer a government by the people and for the people. It's a government of by the corporation and for the corporation. So guess what. The more government programs you liberals celebrate the more powerful you make the corporations and the rich 1% you claim you are going after.

Nice job suckers!

These guys don't care, they couldn't.

This shit doesn't even apply to them, they don't work, don't have family's to fork out a car payments worth of money
For an insurance policy that will cost them an additional 5 k to even use.

There's a reason so many Americans don't have insurance, they simply can't afford it, not enough money.

It's crazy

[ZahZoo]

Or just stay put at your computer and let me go to work for your entitled Obama loving ass, I'll thank all my guys workin for ya today.

Over compensating... trying to get the last word in while quoting yourself...

[Nickdfresh]

LOL

Fuck off turd

I quit trying to reason with your Jane Fonda wanna be ass a couple years ago, obamas thinking is right up your alley, try getting up before noon today so you can go look for a job.

LOL Me wake up for a job? Says the cunt who can't afford health insurance...

[jhale667]

Over compensating... trying to get the last word in while quoting yourself...

Yeah, that wasn't pathetic or anything...at all...

[Nitro Express]

These guys don't care, they couldn't.

This shit doesn't even apply to them, they don't work, don't have family's to fork out a car payments worth of money
For an insurance policy that will cost them an additional 5 k to even use.

There's a reason so many Americans don't have insurance, they simply can't afford it, not enough money.

It's crazy

Too many Americans want something for nothing. They want the government to provide everything but fail to see that's just slavery. Once you give the politicians that kind of power they have you. They can cut your food off, they can kick you out of your home, they can turn the power off. Then of course the US is already broke. In fact this business of running up huge debts and then borrowing from the Federal Reserve allows the Federal Reserve to come back later and say we are seizing all assets as debt payment. They can't do that until they have a police state and that is why Ben Bernake is trying to keep things going long-enough until they can hold a gun to our heads and then they take everything. That's their plan.

The problem is they seem to be having a hard time getting their armed thugs on the streets. It's nazi shit. Talk to anyone who lived in Germany as a kid when it went down over there. Some of them still are alive.

[vh rides again]

Yeah, that wasn't pathetic or anything...at all...

I'll yell you what pathetic is

17,000 posts

You should be ashamed of yourself for wasting all that time.

But it all worked out in the end . you have a president that will provide everything you need, he'll I bet you even have one of them kick ass Obama phones, Jesus Christ your pathetic.

[Nickdfresh]

I'll yell you what pathetic is

17,000 posts

You should be ashamed of yourself for wasting all that time.

But it all worked out in the end . you have a president that will provide everything you need, he'll I bet you even have one of them kick ass Obama phones, Jesus Christ your pathetic.

He posts while at work, like some of us. We don't all work digging out cowshitholes in Iowa...

[PETE'S BROTHER]

He posts while at work, like some of us. We don't all work digging out cowshitholes in Iowa...

some of us wish we could...

[vh rides again]

LOL Me wake up for a job? Says the cunt who can't afford health insurance...

Turd
If you had every dime I've paid insurance companies over the years, you could retire like I will when I'm 50.

Just keep counting on your 600 dollar ss check Obama promises it'll be there for you.

I'll be thinking about you when I'm fishing in the gulf.

NOT.

[vh rides again]

He posts while at work, like some of us. We don't all work digging out cowshitholes in Iowa...

What's your job?

There's no fucking way you guys work, does sarge pay you guys to argue all fucking day?

You guys post every 5 minutes. If you guys have jobs , you should be arrested for theft, cause you sure as fuck aren't making anyone any money sitting in here.

Ahh that's right, you are entitled to waste your employers time.

What a fucking miserable little asshole you are.

[jhale667]

This shit doesn't even apply to them, they don't work


And WHAT is with the standard teabilly fantasy that everyone who disagrees with them doesn't work? You're probably the one on da welfare!

[jhale667]

What's your job?

There's no fucking way you guys work, does sarge pay you guys to argue all fucking day?

You guys post every 5 minutes. If you guys have jobs , you should be arrested for theft, cause you sure as fuck aren't making anyone any money sitting in here.


Some of us have jobs that allow us the time to post. Sorry if you don't.
And it's a safe bet by your grade-school -level posting style, betting your job - IF YOU HAVE ONE - ain't all that...

[Nickdfresh]

Turd
If you had every dime I've paid insurance companies over the years, you could retire like I will when I'm 50.

Just keep counting on your 600 dollar ss check Obama promises it'll be there for you.

I'll be thinking about you when I'm fishing in the gulf.

NOT.

You're already 50, and you're not retired yet! :biggrin:

So, why is the baller guy whose going to retire when he's "50" pissing all over himself about Obamacare?

I fucking don't get it!

[ELVIS]

Hey fail, I found you a new avatar...

http://lh6.ggpht.com/-lEm4tlO3f1M/UGpHB4CUzCI/AAAAAAAAAg0/xdckVLhvPj0/pax_taco%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800


:elvis:

[Nickdfresh]

What's your job?

There's no fucking way you guys work, does sarge pay you guys to argue all fucking day?

You guys post every 5 minutes. If you guys have jobs , you should be arrested for theft, cause you sure as fuck aren't making anyone any money sitting in here.

Ahh that's right, you are entitled to waste your employers time.

What a fucking miserable little asshole you are.

http://blog.opentable.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Cry-Baby.jpg

I don't post every five minutes actually, I have been on a lot more than usual the last couple of days however...

[vh rides again]

And WHAT is with the standard teabilly fantasy that everyone who disagrees with them doesn't work? You're probably the one on da welfare!

I'm not really up to par on goings on in here, but I'm starting to get the picture now.

I've been wondering how you guys could possibly make excuses for this miserable administration and act like nothing is wrong, like everything is fine in the United States .

I get it now, you guys want to live this way, it's your best shot at not ending up on the streets , your going to suck off the tax payers tits till there's nothing left.

Nick ratted ya out man, he summed everything up for me.

Your entitled to waste your employers time while getting 17000 posts.

Yep they owe ya. Entitlement strikes again.

Have a good day guys, I have better shit to do.

[jhale667]

http://blog.opentable.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Cry-Baby.jpg

:hee:


Hey, at least now he has a loser partner in WHINE since EL-fucktard showed up!

[jhale667]

Have a good day guys, I have better shit to do.

NO YOU DON'T. :lol: Lying sack of shit!

[ELVIS]

Yep they owe ya. Entitlement strikes again.

Have a good day guys, I have better shit to do.

Nobody owes or owns me...

I post on my own time...

[jhale667]

You get owned daily on your own time, cuntspiracy theorist....

[Nickdfresh]

Nobody owes or owns me...

I post on my own time...


That's because you're floated by your wife's family...

[chefcraig]

Nobody owes or owns me...

I post on my own time...

Say what ya will about ELVIS, yet the guy is in here daily throwing his hat in the ring and willing to duke it out. That in and of itself is dedication, folks. And no, I'm not being sarcastic here.

Good for you, dude. I believe we agree on things once or twice a year. Whatever.

Thanks for helping me pay attention.

cc

[jhale667]

That's because you're floated by your wife's family...

Oh, BURN!!! :lol:

Sent from my BlackBerry 9800 using Tapatalk

[Va Beach VH Fan]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-young/obamacare-medicare-change_b_2639095.html

Obamacare Medicare Changes Saved Almost $6 Billion On Drugs: Report
Posted: 02/07/2013 3:41 pm

Health care reform may have been suffered some bruises at the hands of Congress and the Supreme Court that could shorten its reach and Medicare may face cuts during the next round of budget negotiations between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans.

But one part of Obamacare appears to be working as intended: Older Americans and people with disabilities are paying less for their prescription drugs under Medicare. According to a report issued Thursday by the Obama administration, health care reform has saved 6.1 million people more than $5.7 billion.

Specifically, the health care reform law closes the notorious "donut hole" in the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Since President George W. Bush introduced pharmacy coverage to Medicare in a 2003 law, the drug benefit came with a gap during which some Medicare beneficiaries had to pay the full cost for their medications. Obamacare started offering more help for prescription expenses in 2010 and by 2020, the donut hole will be no more.

The report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also includes updated information about Medicare premiums, beneficiaries' use of the program's preventive medicine coverage, and other matters.

Giving older people cheaper medicines was supposed to help win their support for health care reform. Unfortunately for Obama, that hasn't really worked out. An October poll conducted by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation revealed 39 percent of voters aged 65 or older thought they'd be worse off under the health care reform law and just 25 percent thought they'd be better off.

[ELVIS]

There wont be any Obombascare in 2020...