Happy Birthday, Health Care Reform—Don’t Let Republicans Spoil the Party
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Today is the first anniversary of the landmark Affordable Care Act that has already helped tens of millions of Americans acquire or receive better health care and that has reined in health insurance companies’ most abusive practices.
Yet congressional Republicans keep trying to repeal health care reform. What are they against? Take a look at just some of the Affordable Care Act’s benefits the repeal would destroy.
- Millions of seniors are receiving free preventive care, such as mammograms and colonoscopies, and relief from skyrocketing prescription drug prices—such as getting $250 if they reach the “donut hole” and a 50 percent discount on brand-name drugs.
- For small businesses, job-creating tax credits are available to help cover their employees. More small businesses are now providing coverage.
- Adult children can stay on their parents’ health plans until they’re 26, which provides much needed access to care and peace of mind in this tough economy.
- The Affordable Care Act ends unconscionable abuses like dropping you because you fall ill or because you made a mistake in your paperwork. It bans the practice of denying your care or charging you more for having a pre-existing condition—about 129 million people. It also ends annual and lifetime caps on coverage.
- For the first time ever, the insurance companies are being held accountable, capping how much they can charge, limiting excessive profits and putting the brakes on bloated compensation for CEOs.
First Anniversary Approaches for Health Care Reform Law
The Affordable Care Act turns one year old Wednesday and hundreds of events are scheduled around the country to mark the health care reform law’s anniversary and fight back against Republican attempts to repeal the law.
Health Care for American Now (HCAN) Executive Director Ethan Rome says:
One year later, Republicans still have no health care plan other than to take away prescription drug discounts for seniors, no-cost preventive care for everyone, small-business tax credits and consumer protections like the ban on denying care or charging more because of pre-existing medical conditions.
In an op-ed piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said that when President Obama signed the health care reform bill into law march 23,
the country took a giant and long-overdue step toward equitable health and social policy.
E-Mails Show Fox Driving Radical Right Agenda
Reports that a Fox News editor directed his staff to use a politically charged phrase recommended by a Republican pollster to misrepresent the Democrats’ health care reform plan is proof that Fox is driving a radical right-wing political agenda, says Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
In a statement released today, Rome says:
At a time when right-wing extremists were trying to make the case that the health care reform bill was a government takeover plot, Fox News incorporated politically charged language into its day-to-day reporting to mislead its audience into thinking the public option was something that it wasn’t.
Fox News’ policy is to drive a political agenda and systematically influence its audience’s views.
HCAN is a grassroots coalition that includes the AFL-CIO and several affiliated unions.
New Health Care Rule: You Get More Care for Your Money
Big insurers spent millions to try to gut a proposed new rule that requires they spend a certain amount of premium dollars on actual medical care. But American families and businesses are coming out on top.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today issued a new rule—known as “medical loss ratio”—that will require health insurance companies to spend 80 percent to 85 percent of your health care insurance premiums on making you healthier instead of overhead costs like advertising or executive pay.
Last month, big insurers sent more than 1,000 executives and lobbyists to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) meeting in Orlando to try and get the rule changed, according to the coalition, Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
Health Care Giants Spent $86 Million in Effort to Kill Reform
We reported that Big Insurance funneled millions of dollars to the Chamber of Commerce to fight health care reform and millions more to try and water down the law once it was passed. Now Bloomberg Business News reporter Drew Armstrong has put a price tag on the effort to kill the bill. In an article earlier this week, Armstrong says tax records show big health insurers last year gave the Chamber $86.2 million that was used to oppose the health care overhaul law.
The Chamber is not required to disclose its donors, but unnamed sources told Bloomberg that the money came from America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), an industry trade group that represents companies like Cigna and UnitedHealth Group. AHIP’s donation accounted for 40 percent of all the money the Chamber received in 2009.
Health Coverage Declines But Companies’ Profits Soar
The number of working-age Americans who get their health care coverage through work dropped for the ninth year in a row in 2009, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The main reason, says the report, is the lousy economy and an unemployment rate that jumped from 5.8 percent in 2008 to 9.3 in 2009.
The latest figures show that employment-based health insurance fell from 61.9 percent of workers in 2008 to 58.9 percent in 2009. Says Elise Gould, Director of Health Policy Research at EPI and author of the report:
The current recession and its negative impact on access to health care highlight how dependent Americans are on a healthy labor market for all facets of economic security.
The report points out that the new health care reform law will make it easier and more affordable for Americans to secure and maintain health insurance coverage. But the “continued poor labor market will likely lead to”
further losses in insurance coverage before this major relief takes effect in 2014.
Click here for the full report.
The lousy economy hasn’t had much of an impact on six of the nation’s biggest private health insurance companies which saw their profits increase by 22 percent over last year in the quarter that ended in September, according to a new analysis by Health Care for America Now! (HCAN). Read the rest of this entry »
Insurance Commissioners Refuse to Bow to Insurers on Health Care Rule
State insurance commissioners today beat back efforts by big insurers to gut a proposed new rule that requires they spend a certain amount of premium dollars on actual medical care, not wasteful administration, marketing or executive pay and bonuses.
The insurance industry sent more than 1,000 executives and lobbyists to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) meeting in Orlando to try and get the rule changed, according to the coalition, Health Care for America Now (HCAN). Large insurers have spent more than $769 million on federal lobbying since 2007, according to HCAN, along with record amounts of political spending through election front groups like 60 Plus and the Chamber of Commerce.
Insurers Set to End Sick Kids’ Policies
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This Thursday, Sept. 23, several key components of the health care reform law go into effect, including a ban on denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. But just this week, several large health insurers began an end-run around the law when they announced that rather than cover kids, they’ll get out of the business of selling children’s policies.
That action, says Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), is “immoral…appalling…and dishonest.”
We’re just days away from a new era when insurance companies must stop denying coverage to kids just because they are sick, and now some of the biggest changed their minds and decided to refuse to sell child-only coverage. The latest announcement by the insurance companies that they won’t cover kids is immoral, and to blame their appalling behavior on the new law is patently dishonest.
Health Care CEOs Pocket Big Bucks, Still Fight Real Reform
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Republicans on Capitol Hill want to keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich. Never mind the nation lost nearly 8 million jobs under the Bush administration when the tax breaks were in place.
Now, Ezra Klein points out why the corporate-backed Republicans support tax breaks for the wealthy. Klein pulled together a chart comparing how much of a break each taxpayer would receive under President Obama’s tax plan and the Bush plan. For taxpayers who make $1 million a year or more, the tax break under the Bush plan is 16 times as big as it is under the Obama plan ($103,835 vs. $6,349).
Some of the people who got those huge tax breaks are the CEOs of health care companies. According to a new study by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), while most people struggled to pay health care premiums, the CEOs of the nation’s health care companies made nearly $1 billion last year—enough to pay for every resident of Philadelphia, Dallas and Minneapolis combined to go to their regular doctor for an office visit. Read the report here.
Failing to Kill Health Care Reform, Insurers Now Fight to Weaken It
After spending tens of millions of dollars trying to kill the new health care reform law, the nation’s big health insurance companies now, says Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), are:
sparing no expense to weaken this new law and the protection it promises to America’s consumers.
According to a new report by the coalition Health Care for America Now (HCAN), big insurers are trying to gut proposed new rules that require they spend a certain amount of premium dollars on actual medical care, not wasteful administration, marketing or executive pay and bonuses.
