ObamaCare - UPHELD
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Ruling ups support for Obama healthcare, still unpopular
The online survey showed increased backing from Republicans and, crucially, the political independents whose support will be essential to winning the November 6 presidential election.
- 38 % of independents support the healthcare overhaul in the poll conducted after the court ruled Thursday the law was constitutional. That was up from 27 % from a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken days before the justices' ruling.
- Among all registered voters, support for the law rose to 48 %, from 43 % before the court decision.
"This is a win for Obama. This is his bill. There's not really any doubt in people's minds, that it belongs to him," said Julia Clark, vice president a Ipsos Public Affairs. "It's his baby. It's literally been labeled Obamacare ... which maybe it works in his favor now that there's a little bit of a victory dance going on."
Republican opposition to the law stayed strong, if somewhat weaker than before the High Court ruled. Eighty-one percent of Republicans opposed it in the most recent survey, down from 86 percent in the poll conducted June 19-23.
The survey interviewed 991 Americans online from June 28-30. The precision of the Reuters/Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll has a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points
SOURCE: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/01/us-usa-campaign-healthcare-idUSBRE85S14820120701
well keep on watching because that's all you will be doing.
On what do you base that statement.
Poll: Most want fight over health care law to stop
San Francisco Chronicle
July 2, 2012
In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to largely uphold President Obama's health care law, a majority of Americans now want to put the fight over the Affordable Care Act behind them, a new survey finds.
- <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">Fifty-six percent (56 %) of Americans believe opponents of the law should "stop trying to block its implementation and instead move on</span> to other national problems," according to the poll by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
- By contrast, just 38 percent (38%) said those opposed to the measure should "continue trying to block the law from being implemented."
The survey of 1,239 adults - conducted over three days following the Supreme Court's decision last Thursday - did not pick up major changes in Americans' overall view of the sweeping legislation that Obama signed in 2010.
The law splits the nation, with 41 percent saying they have a favorable view of it and 41 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
SOURCE: http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Poll-Most-want-fight-over-health-care-law-to-stop-3680348.php
Amid ongoing debates over the semantics of a measure in President Obama's Affordable Care Act - and whether a fee some Americans will have to pay if they choose not to buy health insurance under the law qualifies as a "tax" or a "penalty" - Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is taking heat even from some conservative voices over his changing position on the matter.
In an editorial in Thursday's newspaper, the Wall Street Journal blasted what it cast as Romney's "tax confusion" and accused him of "squandering an historic opportunity" to gain ground against Mr. Obama in the presidential race:
"If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts's ObamaCare salvage operation—that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax—into a second political defeat."
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Meet the Mild-Mannered Investment Adviser Who's Humiliating the Administration Over O
Meet the Mild-Mannered Investment Adviser Who's Humiliating the Administration Over Obamacare
A "nobody" named Rich Weinstein keeps digging up damaging clips about the ACA.
by David Weigel
Nov 11, 2014 12:56 PM CST
Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething's five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits.
“I’m an investment adviser,” Weinstein tells me from his home near Philadelphia. “I’m a nobody. I’m the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat.” (He's joking about the mom and the tinfoil.)
He's also behind a series of scoops that could convince the Supreme Court to dismantle part of the Affordable Care Act. Weinstein has absorbed hours upon hours of interviews with Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who advised the Massachusetts legislature when it created “Romneycare” and the Congress when it created “Obamacare.” Conservatives had been looking for ways to demonstrate that the wording of the ACA denied insurance subsidies to consumers in states that did not create their own health exchanges. Weinstein found a clip of Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA's subsidies; it went straight into the King v. Burwell brief, and into a case that's currently headed to the Supreme Court.
A few days ago, Weinstein pulled a short clip from Gruber's year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference. As a crowd murmured with laughter, Gruber explained that the process that created the ACA was, by necessity, obfuscated to pull one over on voters.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” said Gruber. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the America voter, or whatever.”
Weinstein's scoop went around the world in a hurry. American Commitment, a conservative 501(c)(4) founded by Americans for Prosperity veteran Phil Kerpen, published the clip on its YouTube channel. Kerpen promoted it through tweets, which quickly became live coverage of the media outlets discovering Gruber.
The story metastasized when Penn briefly pulled the original video. Jonathan Adler, one of the attorneys in the anti-subsidy cases, was among the people tweeting about the apparent censorship until Penn restored the video. Gruber himself crawled out of view, refusing to comment when reporters asked about his newly discovered argument that the ACA was “designed to dupe a gullible American public.” Even Snopes.com waded in, attempting to debunk the conservative theory that an Ivy League school was trying to hide a damaging gaffe that could hurt the legal case for the ACA.
Weinstein, back at home, was stunned at the reaction. Why did he keep finding Gruber gaffes? Why didn't the press glom onto this stuff first?
“It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is,” he says. “I really do find this disturbing.”
Weinstein dates his accidental citizen journalism back to the end of 2013 and the first run of insurance cancellations or policy changes. He was among the people who got a letter informing him that his old policy did not meet ACA standards.
“When Obama said 'If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period'—frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said 'period,' there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”
So Weinstein, new plan in hand, started watching the news. “These people were showing up on the shows, calling themselves architects of the law,” he recalls. “I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything.”
Weinstein dug and dug and eventually discovered the first Gruber quote, known in conservative circles as the “speak-o.” Gruber had been on TV arguing that the case against subsidies in non-exchange states was ludicrous. Yet at a January 2012 symposium, Gruber seemed to be making the conservatives' argument. “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill,” said Gruber. “So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country.”
The investment advisor e-mailed this around. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed the clip until after the D.C. circuit ruled 2-1 in favor of plaintiffs who were suing to stop the subsidies. Weinstein clicked around for articles about the decision, and left a comment on The Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog, pointing to the clip. In short order, Ryan Radia of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute noticed the clip and promoted it. Within hours, Gruber's “speak-o” had greatly muddied the liberal argument.
“The next day, I woke up and turned on my iPad,” Weinstein recalls. “I did a quick search. You know, 'Gee, if I wonder if anything is out there about this Jonathan Gruber guy?' And the first result was about this video. 'Holy crap, what is going on?' Excuse my language. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. Later that day, a friend told me that Rush Limbaugh was talking about this video. I’m at WaWa, and I'm eating a sandwich in the car, and Limbaugh comes back from commercial and says 'There's more on this Gruber video. The White House is responding.' I’m like, 'What do you mean, the White House is responding?'”
There came a wave of reporters, senators, and wonks arguing that Gruber had mangled the description of congressional intent. They were matched with more clips of Gruber suggesting that, no, really, the subsidies were intended to nudge states into creating exchanges. Gruber, all of a sudden, was getting the sort of vetting previously reserved for high court nominees or Senate candidates. All because somebody actually paid attention to the words he was blabbing at sleepy-looking health care conferences. He wasn't even eavesdropping. He was just...listening.
I wondered if Weinstein shared Gruber's worry that a victory for the King plaintiffs would make health care unaffordable for millions of people. “If they do undo the subsidies, there’ll be a disruption, and the markets will adjust,” he says. “Some states will build their own exchanges. People will say, 'Oh, you’re trying to kill 5 million people,' but I do believe there'll be a solution.”
Before he hangs up, Weinstein asks me to remember two things. One: He doesn't actually have a position on the validity of the anti-subsidy lawsuits. Two: He does not hate Jonathan Gruber.
“Apparently people have been posting his MIT information and bullying him,” he says. “I’ve been telling people to not do that. I don't like that at all. Do not bully him.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/a...humiliating-the-administration-over-obamacare
Meet the Mild-Mannered Investment Adviser Who's Humiliating the Administration Over Obamacare
A "nobody" named Rich Weinstein keeps digging up damaging clips about the ACA.
by David Weigel
Nov 11, 2014 12:56 PM CST
Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething's five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits.
“I’m an investment adviser,” Weinstein tells me from his home near Philadelphia. “I’m a nobody. I’m the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat.” (He's joking about the mom and the tinfoil.)
He's also behind a series of scoops that could convince the Supreme Court to dismantle part of the Affordable Care Act. Weinstein has absorbed hours upon hours of interviews with Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who advised the Massachusetts legislature when it created “Romneycare” and the Congress when it created “Obamacare.” Conservatives had been looking for ways to demonstrate that the wording of the ACA denied insurance subsidies to consumers in states that did not create their own health exchanges. Weinstein found a clip of Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA's subsidies; it went straight into the King v. Burwell brief, and into a case that's currently headed to the Supreme Court.
A few days ago, Weinstein pulled a short clip from Gruber's year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference. As a crowd murmured with laughter, Gruber explained that the process that created the ACA was, by necessity, obfuscated to pull one over on voters.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” said Gruber. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the America voter, or whatever.”
Weinstein's scoop went around the world in a hurry. American Commitment, a conservative 501(c)(4) founded by Americans for Prosperity veteran Phil Kerpen, published the clip on its YouTube channel. Kerpen promoted it through tweets, which quickly became live coverage of the media outlets discovering Gruber.
The story metastasized when Penn briefly pulled the original video. Jonathan Adler, one of the attorneys in the anti-subsidy cases, was among the people tweeting about the apparent censorship until Penn restored the video. Gruber himself crawled out of view, refusing to comment when reporters asked about his newly discovered argument that the ACA was “designed to dupe a gullible American public.” Even Snopes.com waded in, attempting to debunk the conservative theory that an Ivy League school was trying to hide a damaging gaffe that could hurt the legal case for the ACA.
Weinstein, back at home, was stunned at the reaction. Why did he keep finding Gruber gaffes? Why didn't the press glom onto this stuff first?
“It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is,” he says. “I really do find this disturbing.”
Weinstein dates his accidental citizen journalism back to the end of 2013 and the first run of insurance cancellations or policy changes. He was among the people who got a letter informing him that his old policy did not meet ACA standards.
“When Obama said 'If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period'—frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said 'period,' there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”
So Weinstein, new plan in hand, started watching the news. “These people were showing up on the shows, calling themselves architects of the law,” he recalls. “I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything.”
Weinstein dug and dug and eventually discovered the first Gruber quote, known in conservative circles as the “speak-o.” Gruber had been on TV arguing that the case against subsidies in non-exchange states was ludicrous. Yet at a January 2012 symposium, Gruber seemed to be making the conservatives' argument. “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill,” said Gruber. “So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country.”
The investment advisor e-mailed this around. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed the clip until after the D.C. circuit ruled 2-1 in favor of plaintiffs who were suing to stop the subsidies. Weinstein clicked around for articles about the decision, and left a comment on The Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog, pointing to the clip. In short order, Ryan Radia of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute noticed the clip and promoted it. Within hours, Gruber's “speak-o” had greatly muddied the liberal argument.
“The next day, I woke up and turned on my iPad,” Weinstein recalls. “I did a quick search. You know, 'Gee, if I wonder if anything is out there about this Jonathan Gruber guy?' And the first result was about this video. 'Holy crap, what is going on?' Excuse my language. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. Later that day, a friend told me that Rush Limbaugh was talking about this video. I’m at WaWa, and I'm eating a sandwich in the car, and Limbaugh comes back from commercial and says 'There's more on this Gruber video. The White House is responding.' I’m like, 'What do you mean, the White House is responding?'”
There came a wave of reporters, senators, and wonks arguing that Gruber had mangled the description of congressional intent. They were matched with more clips of Gruber suggesting that, no, really, the subsidies were intended to nudge states into creating exchanges. Gruber, all of a sudden, was getting the sort of vetting previously reserved for high court nominees or Senate candidates. All because somebody actually paid attention to the words he was blabbing at sleepy-looking health care conferences. He wasn't even eavesdropping. He was just...listening.
I wondered if Weinstein shared Gruber's worry that a victory for the King plaintiffs would make health care unaffordable for millions of people. “If they do undo the subsidies, there’ll be a disruption, and the markets will adjust,” he says. “Some states will build their own exchanges. People will say, 'Oh, you’re trying to kill 5 million people,' but I do believe there'll be a solution.”
Before he hangs up, Weinstein asks me to remember two things. One: He doesn't actually have a position on the validity of the anti-subsidy lawsuits. Two: He does not hate Jonathan Gruber.
“Apparently people have been posting his MIT information and bullying him,” he says. “I’ve been telling people to not do that. I don't like that at all. Do not bully him.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/a...humiliating-the-administration-over-obamacare
Controversial MIT economist Jonathan Gruber reportedly played key role in ObamaCare l
Controversial MIT economist Jonathan Gruber reportedly played key role in ObamaCare law
FoxNews.com
Published June 22, 2015
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who claimed the authors of ObamaCare took advantage of what he called the "stupidity of the American voter," played a much bigger role in the law's drafting than previously acknowledged, according to a published report.
The Wall Street Journal, citing 20,000 pages of emails sent by Gruber between January 2009 and March 2010, reported Sunday that Gruber was frequently consulted by staffers and advisers for both the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about the Affordable Care Act. Among the topics that Gruber discusses in the emails are media interviews, consultations with lawmakers, and even how to publicly describe his role.
The emails were released as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of federal health insurance exchange subsidies.
The Journal reports that the officials Gruber contacted by e-mail included Peter Orszag, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president; and Ezekiel Emanuel, then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.
"His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted," Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R- Utah, chairman of the House oversight committee, told the Journal. "There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce."
"As has been previously reported, Mr. Gruber was a widely used economic modeler for administrations and state governments run by both parties—both before and after the Affordable Care Act was passed," HHS spokeswoman Meaghan Smith told the Journal in a statement. "These emails only echo old news."
Gruber became the center of a political storm in November 2014, when a video surfaced of him taking part in a 2013 panel discussion about ObamaCare. At one point, Gruber said the Obama administration wrote the bill "in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies ... Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."
At the time of the controversy, President Obama referred to Gruber as "some adviser who never worked on our staff." However, the Journal reports that Gruber's emails appear to reference at least one meeting with Obama. Furthermore, one email from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama health adviser, thanks Gruber for "being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment", while another message from Lambrew refers to Gruber as "our hero."
Fox News previously reported that HHS retained Gruber in March 2009 on a $95,000 contract to produce "a series of technical memoranda on the estimated changes in health insurance coverage and associated costs and impacts to the government under alternative specifications of health system reform." A second contract with HHS three months later saw Gruber receive an additional $297,600.
Gruber later apologized for his comments in a December 2014 hearing before the House Oversight Committee, calling the remarks "mean and insulting."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...onathan-gruber-reportedly-played-key-role-in/
Controversial MIT economist Jonathan Gruber reportedly played key role in ObamaCare law
FoxNews.com
Published June 22, 2015
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who claimed the authors of ObamaCare took advantage of what he called the "stupidity of the American voter," played a much bigger role in the law's drafting than previously acknowledged, according to a published report.
The Wall Street Journal, citing 20,000 pages of emails sent by Gruber between January 2009 and March 2010, reported Sunday that Gruber was frequently consulted by staffers and advisers for both the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about the Affordable Care Act. Among the topics that Gruber discusses in the emails are media interviews, consultations with lawmakers, and even how to publicly describe his role.
The emails were released as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of federal health insurance exchange subsidies.
The Journal reports that the officials Gruber contacted by e-mail included Peter Orszag, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president; and Ezekiel Emanuel, then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.
"His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted," Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R- Utah, chairman of the House oversight committee, told the Journal. "There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce."
"As has been previously reported, Mr. Gruber was a widely used economic modeler for administrations and state governments run by both parties—both before and after the Affordable Care Act was passed," HHS spokeswoman Meaghan Smith told the Journal in a statement. "These emails only echo old news."
Gruber became the center of a political storm in November 2014, when a video surfaced of him taking part in a 2013 panel discussion about ObamaCare. At one point, Gruber said the Obama administration wrote the bill "in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies ... Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass."
At the time of the controversy, President Obama referred to Gruber as "some adviser who never worked on our staff." However, the Journal reports that Gruber's emails appear to reference at least one meeting with Obama. Furthermore, one email from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama health adviser, thanks Gruber for "being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment", while another message from Lambrew refers to Gruber as "our hero."
Fox News previously reported that HHS retained Gruber in March 2009 on a $95,000 contract to produce "a series of technical memoranda on the estimated changes in health insurance coverage and associated costs and impacts to the government under alternative specifications of health system reform." A second contract with HHS three months later saw Gruber receive an additional $297,600.
Gruber later apologized for his comments in a December 2014 hearing before the House Oversight Committee, calling the remarks "mean and insulting."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...onathan-gruber-reportedly-played-key-role-in/
No comment from the Greedy people?
Many states don't operate exchanges because the federal government can run it cheaper. There is also liability if something goes wrong. Just because you see a state not running an exchange does not mean they are rejecting the ACA. The fee the HHS charges for running it is low.
A state is conceding authority to the Federal government and has the ultimate power. Even though the Federal government runs it can be considered a state exchange.
The state has the Federal government perform a duty in the state, it still is a state function. The Federal government is acting like a state contractor.
It is a State exchange run by the Federal government.
A state is conceding authority to the Federal government and has the ultimate power. Even though the Federal government runs it can be considered a state exchange.
The state has the Federal government perform a duty in the state, it still is a state function. The Federal government is acting like a state contractor.
It is a State exchange run by the Federal government.
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Peeps the SCOTUS ruling came as no surprise in the $$$$$$$$$$$$ money-is-the-only-thing-that-matters, motivated, 'reality-based' world. If SCOTUS repealing the Obamacare Federal $$$$$$$ subsidies because of the literal interpretation of four words contained in a 950+ page law was the 'OVER' & SCOTUS upholding the obvious and intended Congressional meaning of those four words was the 'UNDER'; I can tell you that 95% of Wall Street bet the 'UNDER". Every "Health Care Mafia" company sent a amicus brief to SCOTUS supporting the Obama administrations position that the law NOT be tampered with. In fact chief justice Roberts who wrote the majority opinion crafted his opinion in such a manner that closed any other avenues which could be used to legally attack the law. MONEY TRUMPS POLITICS most of the time in the U.S.; especially when the political and practical effect of Obamacare has been to, lower health care policy costs, dramatically decrease millions of uninsured who previously would show up in a hospital emergency room only after they started spitting up blood, and save people from dying who would be DEAD if Obamacare didn't exist..........
...........AND.........the 'investor class' and "Health Care Mafia" companies are making a fucking $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ fortune as millions of new customers enroll and purchase a health care policy.
I've been telling you peeps to ignore the RepubliKlan tea-baggers rant against Obamacare for years. Follow the money , not the rhetoric. Obamacare (ACA) is and was RMoney-care which RMoney implemented in Massachusetts when he served his one term as Governor. RMoney care was a conservative Heritage Foundation plan that former RepubliKlan U.S. senator Bob Dole was trying to push in the U.S. senate in the 1990's
I told you peeps about New York Stock Exchange, ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) VHT in April 2014. It was trading at $102 a share. It is now $142 a share as of June 25, 2015. If you don't know what that means, it means that $100,000 invested in April 2014 is now $140,000
The stock chart is below.
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="10"></hr>
Peeps there has been NO debate in the "reality based" community about the Affordable Care Act also-known-as National Romney Care since Obama was elected in 2008 and announced that he wanted to enact some type of National Health Plan as his priority.
As I've pointed out numerous times over the past nine years; you have to separate "political rhetoric" (PROPAGANDA) aka DELIBERATE LIES from sober "reality based" facts. Just as I pointed out in 2010 in a post about CLIMATE CHANGE.
Follow The $$$$$$$$$$ Money!!
Follow The $$$$$$$$$$ Money!!
Follow The $$$$$$$$$$ Money!!
As a money man following the money and analyzing WTF is going on is something I've been doing hours per day since 1979. In the "reality based" money $$$$$$$ community whether or not the Affordable Care Act would work as advertised was NEVER an issue; NEVER! Every investment conference I attended, which are rooms full of 80% white people, 75% Republicans, and all 'Acredited Investors' like myself - the only questions were, How do I invest to take advantage of Obamacare????
Below I post just one New York Stock Exchange, ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) VHT
that the "investor class" I describe above has had money invested in since 2009. The return on capital $$$$$$$$$$ speaks for itself.
As you assess the $$$$$$$$$$$ returns, think of the millions of clueless American sheeple who have ALL of their money sitting in a bank account earning less than 1.00% for the whole fucking year.
Are these 'knowledgeable' Americans bewildered that most Americans know nothing but bank accounts, CD's or a 401k mutual fund?? Yes, they assume incorrectly that many Americans know what they know.
As of today (July 15, 2014) 11:27AM VHT now trading at 112.
That's 9% on your money since I brought it to you peeps attention on April 17, 2014
READ:http://www.bgol.us/board/showpost.php?p=14235929&postcount=256
For those of you who don't understand this stuff it means that on $100,000 you made $9,000 since April 17, 2014
As inevitably the RepubliKlan states that are resisting medicare expansion solely for racist political reasons get dragged into the civilized "reality based" world this ETF will go higher
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U.S. Uninsured Rate at 11.0%, Lowest in Eight-Year Trend
April 7, 2016
http://www.gallup.com/poll/190484/uninsured-rate-lowest-eight-year-trend.aspx?g_source=percentage uninsured&g_medium=search&g_campaign=tiles
________________________________________________________________________________
THE LAST THING Christina remembered was letting two men buy her a drink at a Fort Lauderdale bar. Then she woke up hours later on a roadside, with injuries to her genitals suggesting that she was raped. Though she had no memory of how she left the bar or wound up cut and bruised on the side of a road, it was soon obvious that she’d been drugged.1
Months later, Christina learned that her rape was a preexisting condition.
After she woke up with signs of a sexual assault, Christina’s doctor prescribed her a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medication as a precaution in case her assailants were HIV positive. Several months after she took these drugs, when she lost her health insurance and needed to find a new plan, she discovered that no insurance company would cover her. Though Christina never developed an HIV infection, insurers saw that she’d once taken anti-AIDS drugs—and that marked her as someone who might have an expensive medical condition the insurance companies did not want to pay for.2
Christina’s experience was not particularly unusual. Before the Affordable Care Act banned the practice, numerous insurers denied care to women infected with a sexually transmitted disease by their rapist or to rape survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder.3 Eight states permitted insurers to deny coverage to a woman because she’d experienced domestic violence.4
And these coverage denials were hardly limited to victims of violence. Before Obamacare, insurance companies refused to cover Americans for conditions as severe as cancer or as routine as hay fever. Women who became pregnant could immediately lose their ability to obtain insurance, as could college athletes in excellent physical condition who experienced an injury.5 Moreover, for the millions of Americans unable to obtain insurance prior to the Affordable Care Act, every trip to the doctor was a flirtation with bankruptcy.
According to a 2007 study, nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the United States had a “medical cause.”
Worse, in the world before Obamacare, many Americans simply watched their bodies fall into ruin because they were unable to afford care. George, a teenaged diabetic in Buffalo, had a factory job that offered him no insurance and too little money to pay for the insulin, syringes, and testing materials he needed to manage his condition. Unable to control his blood sugar levels, he went blind at age twenty. One year later he died of multiple organ failure.7
George’s sister Tina worked a waitressing job that also left her uninsured. At twenty-four she had a baby, only to watch that child die five months later due to complications from gestational diabetes. A year later, Tina had a fatal heart attack.
If George and Tina had been insured, their fates almost certainly would have been different. “I had to face their mother at the funerals knowing if they had gotten good care for diabetes, we could have prevented all their end organ disease,” their doctor later explained to a reporter. “George would not have gone blind. The baby would have lived. Neither would have had heart or kidney problems.”8
In Kansas City, a well-regarded gynecologist and Vietnam veteran named Joseph started experiencing involuntary twitches. Eventually, they became so bad that he lost his medical practice—and with it his house, his car, and his health insurance. For eleven years, he was unable to afford the $200 blood test that would have diagnosed his condition as Huntington’s disease. He frequently skipped meals in order to pay for medication. Joseph’s story ended less tragically than George’s or Tina’s—he eventually found a clinic willing to diagnose his condition and provide him with care—but he watched his life slip into ruin for more than a decade before that happened.9
In rural Idaho, a twenty-eight-year-old mother developed a rare bacterial infection in her heart. Because her convenience store job did not provide her with insurance, she delayed care long enough that a mass formed in her heart, entered an artery, and traveled to her brain, killing her. In a particularly cruel twist, the convenience store promoted her to assistant manager shortly before her death—a promotion that came with health insurance. She left behind two small children.10
Beth lost her health insurance after her husband crushed his right leg in a motorcycle accident, causing him to lose his job. A diabetic with a heart condition, Beth stopped seeing her specialist, stopped taking one of her insulin drugs, and started rationing her heart medication in order to save money to pay for her husband’s care. Before she found care at a free clinic, Beth’s health deteriorated to the point that she was unable to get out of bed.11
In Jamestown, New York, a small town a little more than an hour south of Buffalo, an unemployed carpenter arrived at the hospital with bloody urine and sky-high blood sugar due to his untreated diabetes. When the hospital diagnosed him with cancer, he refused surgery because he had no way to pay for it—though he changed his mind six months later after the cancer grew worse.
In the final months of his life, he lost his ability to work after he accidentally cut off his own thumb. He faced regular calls from a collection agency seeking payment for the cancer surgery. His toes had to be amputated due to his unchecked diabetes. His vision grew worse and one of his kidneys failed. After he developed cancer in his bladder, he lost that organ as well. Though he eventually qualified for Medicaid, that was after his family discovered him lying on the floor from a stroke brought on by his diabetes. He died in a nursing home, sharing a room with four other men.12
A sixty-four-year-old Idaho woman developed a prolapsed uterus, a weakening in the pelvic muscles that held her womb in place. Although her uterus was literally hanging outside her vagina, the woman delayed surgery for a year so that this expensive procedure would be covered by Medicare.13
A young boy developed a tooth infection that spread to his heart, eventually causing permanent damage, because his mother did not make enough money as a janitor to pay for his care.14
A Chicago electrician blinded by his diabetes had no way to pay for his medications, so he was forced to go back to work despite the fact that he could not see the electric wires he worked with—he’d feel his way along them to figure out what he was doing.15
Doctors often based treatment decisions for their uninsured patients on which drug company had recently provided them with free samples of their product. “You change medication every time a patient comes in and switch them to whatever free samples you happen to have that day,” according to a physician in an inner-city health clinic. Another doctor relied on free samples to treat a schizophrenic woman with thoughts of suicide. The woman’s husband was on ten different medications, and would beg for samples of each one.16
This is what health care looked like in the United States of America—the richest nation the world has ever known—before President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Hard-working Americans died because their jobs did not provide them with health benefits. Mothers prayed helplessly over sick children who were unable to receive the most basic care. Senior citizens counted the days until they qualified for Medicare and could finally receive treatment for long-neglected conditions. Rape survivors were treated like pariahs by the insurance industry.
According to one study published by six Harvard physicians, nearly 45,000 American adults died in 2005 because they lacked health insurance. That’s more than one death every twelve minutes.17
And yet, just seven minutes after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in March of 2010, a group of thirteen state attorneys general filed a lawsuit asking the courts to return America to the days when patients had to beg their doctors for free samples of lifesaving drugs.18
AMONG LEGAL EXPERTS, this lawsuit was widely viewed as a joke. Charles Fried, who served as Solicitor General of the United States under Ronald Reagan, told Fox News that he “would be happy to come on this program and eat a hat which I bought in Australia last month made of kangaroo skin,” if the Supreme Court struck down the law.19
Judge Laurence Silberman, a prominent conservative who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, wrote in an opinion upholding the law that the lawsuit asked the courts to impose a rule that had no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”20
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of a handful of judges President Bush interviewed for the seat on the Supreme Court that eventually went to Chief Justice John Roberts, said in the New York Times that the case against Obamacare would “imbue judges with unprecedented powers to topple an exhaustively debated and duly enacted federal law.” The notion that judges could strike down “commercial regulation on ill-defined and subjective bases is a prescription for economic chaos,” Wilkinson warned. And it was a notion that “the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”21
Even many of the lawyers closest to the legal attacks on the Affordable Care Act secretly believed that they had a weak case. David Rivkin, one of the lead trial attorneys challenging the law, later admitted that many of his “colleagues were privately skeptical” that he could win. Randy Barnett, a libertarian law professor recruited by the challengers to give scholarly legitimacy to their lawsuit, also harbored hidden misgivings. After reading a pair of op-eds Rivkin coauthored laying out his legal case, Barnett concluded that “if those were the best arguments that the law is unconstitutional, then I figured it must be constitutional.”22
Shortly before the justices heard oral arguments on the health care lawsuit, the American Bar Association polled “a select group of academics, journalists and lawyers who regularly follow and/or comment on the Supreme Court,” seeking their predictions on how the Court was likely to decide the case. Eighty-five percent predicted that the law would be upheld.23
And, yet, with only the most tenuous legal arguments on their side, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents came within a hair of convincing the Supreme Court to repeal it. Four justices voted to wipe the law off the books in its entirety,24 and the fifth, Chief Justice Roberts, reportedly flipped his vote sometime after the case was argued—he’d initially voted to strike down the bulk of the law.25
The remarkable thing about the Obamacare litigation isn’t the fact that Roberts changed his vote, and it certainly isn’t the fact that a legal argument that was widely perceived as absurd by the legal community ultimately did not carry the day. The remarkable thing about the Obamacare litigation is that the justices took it so seriously despite the fact that it had no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”
With the possible exception of Justice Clarence Thomas, the four justices who voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act had not previously staked out positions as radical as their predecessors from the Lochner Era. Only Thomas for example, had indicated that he would return to the days when federal child labor laws were considered unconstitutional....................................
Excerpt above from the incredible trenchant book:
Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted
For the very, very, few of you peeps who still read non-fiction longer than a 300 word Facebook post
READ the entire book
Below Originally posted September 2014
http://www.bgol.us/forum/index.php?posts/14777213/
Once Opposed To ObamaCare, Now A Convert
Political odd couple: Dean Angstadt (left) opposed Obamacare until his friend
Bob Leinhauser persuaded him to sign up just in time for life-saving heart surgery.
by Robert Calandra | April 28, 2014
Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.
He's a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he'd been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
"I don't read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they're full of it," he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.
That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion's share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.
"A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA," Angstadt said. "I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs."
In 2011, Angstadt had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted to help his ailing heart pump more efficiently. Not long after, the almost 6-foot, 285-pound man's man was back in the woods, doing the Paul Bunyan thing.
But last summer, his health worsened again. It was taking him 10 minutes to catch his breath after felling a tree. By fall, he was winded after traveling the 50 feet between his house and truck.
"I knew that I was really sick," said the Boyertown resident. "I figured the doctors were going to have to operate, so I tried to work as long as I could to save money for the surgery. But it got to the point where I couldn't work."
Angstadt called Leinhauser. The political odd couple talked a bit before Angstadt mentioned he was having trouble breathing.
Leinhauser, 55, a retired firefighter and nurse, drove him to a doctor's office. "Dean only saw a doctor when he needed to because it made a big difference in his finances," Leinhauser said.
From time to time, Leinhauser would urge Angstadt to buy a plan through the ACA marketplace. And each time, Angstadt refused.
"We argued about it for months," Angstadt said. "I didn't trust this Obamacare. One of the big reasons is it sounded too good to be true."
January came, and Angstadt's health continued to decline. His doctor made it clear he urgently needed valve-replacement surgery. Leinhauser had seen enough and insisted his friend get insured.
"The only thing he was ever really adamant about was that Obamacare was the real deal," Angstadt said. "I trusted him to at least take a look at it."
Leinhauser went to Angstadt's house, and in less than an hour, the duo had done the application. A day later, Angstadt signed up for the Highmark Blue Cross silver PPO plan and paid his first monthly premium: $26.11.
"All of a sudden, I'm getting notification from Highmark, and I got my card, and it was actually all legitimate," he said. "I could have done backflips if I was in better shape."
Angstadt's plan kicked in on March 1. It was just in time. Surgery couldn't be put off any longer. On March 31, Angstadt had life-saving valve-replacement surgery.
"I probably would have ended up falling over dead" without the surgery, Angstadt said. "Not only did it save my life, it's going to give me a better quality of life."
Angstadt faces a long recovery, but his conversion to ACA supporter is done. The political storm around the ACA, he said, is the political parties "fighting each other over things that can benefit people."
"For me, this isn't about politics," he added. "I'm trying to help other people who are like me, stubborn and bullheaded, who refused to even look. From my own experience, the ACA is everything it's supposed to be and, in fact, better than it's made out to be."
He has also thanked his good friend, Leinhauser, for caring enough to persuade him to buy insurance and have the surgery.
"He has thanked me a couple times," Leinhauser said. "I just wish he would reciprocate by eating his green beans."
http://articles.philly.com/2014-04-28/news/49440051_1_health-plan-obamacare-life-saving-surgery
April 7, 2016
http://www.gallup.com/poll/190484/uninsured-rate-lowest-eight-year-trend.aspx?g_source=percentage uninsured&g_medium=search&g_campaign=tiles
________________________________________________________________________________
THE LAST THING Christina remembered was letting two men buy her a drink at a Fort Lauderdale bar. Then she woke up hours later on a roadside, with injuries to her genitals suggesting that she was raped. Though she had no memory of how she left the bar or wound up cut and bruised on the side of a road, it was soon obvious that she’d been drugged.1
Months later, Christina learned that her rape was a preexisting condition.
After she woke up with signs of a sexual assault, Christina’s doctor prescribed her a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medication as a precaution in case her assailants were HIV positive. Several months after she took these drugs, when she lost her health insurance and needed to find a new plan, she discovered that no insurance company would cover her. Though Christina never developed an HIV infection, insurers saw that she’d once taken anti-AIDS drugs—and that marked her as someone who might have an expensive medical condition the insurance companies did not want to pay for.2
Christina’s experience was not particularly unusual. Before the Affordable Care Act banned the practice, numerous insurers denied care to women infected with a sexually transmitted disease by their rapist or to rape survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder.3 Eight states permitted insurers to deny coverage to a woman because she’d experienced domestic violence.4
And these coverage denials were hardly limited to victims of violence. Before Obamacare, insurance companies refused to cover Americans for conditions as severe as cancer or as routine as hay fever. Women who became pregnant could immediately lose their ability to obtain insurance, as could college athletes in excellent physical condition who experienced an injury.5 Moreover, for the millions of Americans unable to obtain insurance prior to the Affordable Care Act, every trip to the doctor was a flirtation with bankruptcy.
According to a 2007 study, nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the United States had a “medical cause.”
Worse, in the world before Obamacare, many Americans simply watched their bodies fall into ruin because they were unable to afford care. George, a teenaged diabetic in Buffalo, had a factory job that offered him no insurance and too little money to pay for the insulin, syringes, and testing materials he needed to manage his condition. Unable to control his blood sugar levels, he went blind at age twenty. One year later he died of multiple organ failure.7
George’s sister Tina worked a waitressing job that also left her uninsured. At twenty-four she had a baby, only to watch that child die five months later due to complications from gestational diabetes. A year later, Tina had a fatal heart attack.
If George and Tina had been insured, their fates almost certainly would have been different. “I had to face their mother at the funerals knowing if they had gotten good care for diabetes, we could have prevented all their end organ disease,” their doctor later explained to a reporter. “George would not have gone blind. The baby would have lived. Neither would have had heart or kidney problems.”8
In Kansas City, a well-regarded gynecologist and Vietnam veteran named Joseph started experiencing involuntary twitches. Eventually, they became so bad that he lost his medical practice—and with it his house, his car, and his health insurance. For eleven years, he was unable to afford the $200 blood test that would have diagnosed his condition as Huntington’s disease. He frequently skipped meals in order to pay for medication. Joseph’s story ended less tragically than George’s or Tina’s—he eventually found a clinic willing to diagnose his condition and provide him with care—but he watched his life slip into ruin for more than a decade before that happened.9
In rural Idaho, a twenty-eight-year-old mother developed a rare bacterial infection in her heart. Because her convenience store job did not provide her with insurance, she delayed care long enough that a mass formed in her heart, entered an artery, and traveled to her brain, killing her. In a particularly cruel twist, the convenience store promoted her to assistant manager shortly before her death—a promotion that came with health insurance. She left behind two small children.10
Beth lost her health insurance after her husband crushed his right leg in a motorcycle accident, causing him to lose his job. A diabetic with a heart condition, Beth stopped seeing her specialist, stopped taking one of her insulin drugs, and started rationing her heart medication in order to save money to pay for her husband’s care. Before she found care at a free clinic, Beth’s health deteriorated to the point that she was unable to get out of bed.11
In Jamestown, New York, a small town a little more than an hour south of Buffalo, an unemployed carpenter arrived at the hospital with bloody urine and sky-high blood sugar due to his untreated diabetes. When the hospital diagnosed him with cancer, he refused surgery because he had no way to pay for it—though he changed his mind six months later after the cancer grew worse.
In the final months of his life, he lost his ability to work after he accidentally cut off his own thumb. He faced regular calls from a collection agency seeking payment for the cancer surgery. His toes had to be amputated due to his unchecked diabetes. His vision grew worse and one of his kidneys failed. After he developed cancer in his bladder, he lost that organ as well. Though he eventually qualified for Medicaid, that was after his family discovered him lying on the floor from a stroke brought on by his diabetes. He died in a nursing home, sharing a room with four other men.12
A sixty-four-year-old Idaho woman developed a prolapsed uterus, a weakening in the pelvic muscles that held her womb in place. Although her uterus was literally hanging outside her vagina, the woman delayed surgery for a year so that this expensive procedure would be covered by Medicare.13
A young boy developed a tooth infection that spread to his heart, eventually causing permanent damage, because his mother did not make enough money as a janitor to pay for his care.14
A Chicago electrician blinded by his diabetes had no way to pay for his medications, so he was forced to go back to work despite the fact that he could not see the electric wires he worked with—he’d feel his way along them to figure out what he was doing.15
Doctors often based treatment decisions for their uninsured patients on which drug company had recently provided them with free samples of their product. “You change medication every time a patient comes in and switch them to whatever free samples you happen to have that day,” according to a physician in an inner-city health clinic. Another doctor relied on free samples to treat a schizophrenic woman with thoughts of suicide. The woman’s husband was on ten different medications, and would beg for samples of each one.16
This is what health care looked like in the United States of America—the richest nation the world has ever known—before President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Hard-working Americans died because their jobs did not provide them with health benefits. Mothers prayed helplessly over sick children who were unable to receive the most basic care. Senior citizens counted the days until they qualified for Medicare and could finally receive treatment for long-neglected conditions. Rape survivors were treated like pariahs by the insurance industry.
According to one study published by six Harvard physicians, nearly 45,000 American adults died in 2005 because they lacked health insurance. That’s more than one death every twelve minutes.17
And yet, just seven minutes after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in March of 2010, a group of thirteen state attorneys general filed a lawsuit asking the courts to return America to the days when patients had to beg their doctors for free samples of lifesaving drugs.18
AMONG LEGAL EXPERTS, this lawsuit was widely viewed as a joke. Charles Fried, who served as Solicitor General of the United States under Ronald Reagan, told Fox News that he “would be happy to come on this program and eat a hat which I bought in Australia last month made of kangaroo skin,” if the Supreme Court struck down the law.19
Judge Laurence Silberman, a prominent conservative who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, wrote in an opinion upholding the law that the lawsuit asked the courts to impose a rule that had no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”20
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of a handful of judges President Bush interviewed for the seat on the Supreme Court that eventually went to Chief Justice John Roberts, said in the New York Times that the case against Obamacare would “imbue judges with unprecedented powers to topple an exhaustively debated and duly enacted federal law.” The notion that judges could strike down “commercial regulation on ill-defined and subjective bases is a prescription for economic chaos,” Wilkinson warned. And it was a notion that “the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”21
Even many of the lawyers closest to the legal attacks on the Affordable Care Act secretly believed that they had a weak case. David Rivkin, one of the lead trial attorneys challenging the law, later admitted that many of his “colleagues were privately skeptical” that he could win. Randy Barnett, a libertarian law professor recruited by the challengers to give scholarly legitimacy to their lawsuit, also harbored hidden misgivings. After reading a pair of op-eds Rivkin coauthored laying out his legal case, Barnett concluded that “if those were the best arguments that the law is unconstitutional, then I figured it must be constitutional.”22
Shortly before the justices heard oral arguments on the health care lawsuit, the American Bar Association polled “a select group of academics, journalists and lawyers who regularly follow and/or comment on the Supreme Court,” seeking their predictions on how the Court was likely to decide the case. Eighty-five percent predicted that the law would be upheld.23
And, yet, with only the most tenuous legal arguments on their side, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents came within a hair of convincing the Supreme Court to repeal it. Four justices voted to wipe the law off the books in its entirety,24 and the fifth, Chief Justice Roberts, reportedly flipped his vote sometime after the case was argued—he’d initially voted to strike down the bulk of the law.25
The remarkable thing about the Obamacare litigation isn’t the fact that Roberts changed his vote, and it certainly isn’t the fact that a legal argument that was widely perceived as absurd by the legal community ultimately did not carry the day. The remarkable thing about the Obamacare litigation is that the justices took it so seriously despite the fact that it had no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”
With the possible exception of Justice Clarence Thomas, the four justices who voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act had not previously staked out positions as radical as their predecessors from the Lochner Era. Only Thomas for example, had indicated that he would return to the days when federal child labor laws were considered unconstitutional....................................
Excerpt above from the incredible trenchant book:
Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted
For the very, very, few of you peeps who still read non-fiction longer than a 300 word Facebook post
READ the entire book
Code:
http://depositfiles.com/files/aowrri3k2Below Originally posted September 2014
http://www.bgol.us/forum/index.php?posts/14777213/
Once Opposed To ObamaCare, Now A Convert
Political odd couple: Dean Angstadt (left) opposed Obamacare until his friend
Bob Leinhauser persuaded him to sign up just in time for life-saving heart surgery.
by Robert Calandra | April 28, 2014
Dean Angstadt fells trees for a living.
He's a self-employed, self-sufficient logger who has cleared his own path for most of his 57 years, never expecting help from anyone. And even though he'd been uninsured since 2009, he especially wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
"I don't read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they're full of it," he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.
That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion's share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.
"A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA," Angstadt said. "I was, before Bob went through all this for me. I would recommend it to anybody and, in fact, have encouraged friends, including the one guy who hauls my logs."
In 2011, Angstadt had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted to help his ailing heart pump more efficiently. Not long after, the almost 6-foot, 285-pound man's man was back in the woods, doing the Paul Bunyan thing.
But last summer, his health worsened again. It was taking him 10 minutes to catch his breath after felling a tree. By fall, he was winded after traveling the 50 feet between his house and truck.
"I knew that I was really sick," said the Boyertown resident. "I figured the doctors were going to have to operate, so I tried to work as long as I could to save money for the surgery. But it got to the point where I couldn't work."
Angstadt called Leinhauser. The political odd couple talked a bit before Angstadt mentioned he was having trouble breathing.
Leinhauser, 55, a retired firefighter and nurse, drove him to a doctor's office. "Dean only saw a doctor when he needed to because it made a big difference in his finances," Leinhauser said.
From time to time, Leinhauser would urge Angstadt to buy a plan through the ACA marketplace. And each time, Angstadt refused.
"We argued about it for months," Angstadt said. "I didn't trust this Obamacare. One of the big reasons is it sounded too good to be true."
January came, and Angstadt's health continued to decline. His doctor made it clear he urgently needed valve-replacement surgery. Leinhauser had seen enough and insisted his friend get insured.
"The only thing he was ever really adamant about was that Obamacare was the real deal," Angstadt said. "I trusted him to at least take a look at it."
Leinhauser went to Angstadt's house, and in less than an hour, the duo had done the application. A day later, Angstadt signed up for the Highmark Blue Cross silver PPO plan and paid his first monthly premium: $26.11.
"All of a sudden, I'm getting notification from Highmark, and I got my card, and it was actually all legitimate," he said. "I could have done backflips if I was in better shape."
Angstadt's plan kicked in on March 1. It was just in time. Surgery couldn't be put off any longer. On March 31, Angstadt had life-saving valve-replacement surgery.
"I probably would have ended up falling over dead" without the surgery, Angstadt said. "Not only did it save my life, it's going to give me a better quality of life."
Angstadt faces a long recovery, but his conversion to ACA supporter is done. The political storm around the ACA, he said, is the political parties "fighting each other over things that can benefit people."
"For me, this isn't about politics," he added. "I'm trying to help other people who are like me, stubborn and bullheaded, who refused to even look. From my own experience, the ACA is everything it's supposed to be and, in fact, better than it's made out to be."
He has also thanked his good friend, Leinhauser, for caring enough to persuade him to buy insurance and have the surgery.
"He has thanked me a couple times," Leinhauser said. "I just wish he would reciprocate by eating his green beans."
http://articles.philly.com/2014-04-28/news/49440051_1_health-plan-obamacare-life-saving-surgery
So why did he resist enrolling in ObamaCare for so long? As he explained to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, he's a Fox News guy who trusted Republicans' dire warnings about the law.
Last edited:
Obama becomes first president to publish in academic journal
Obama published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association defending the Affordable Care Act
The article is a first for a sitting president
In the article, Obama calls for cutting prescription drug prices and reviving a “public option” plan
President Barack Obama has made the case for the Affordable Care Act just about everywhere: on television shows, in online skits, in personal appeals to the American people. On Monday, he went back to his academic roots and published a paper in one of the country’s foremost medical journals to defend his signature health care law.
In what Bloomberg called a “first for a sitting president,” an article written by “Barack Obama, JD” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, reviewing the Affordable Care Act and next steps for a future president to take.
Among those steps: slashing prescription drug costs and introducing a “public option” insurance plan, which he had championed during his first presidential bid but which was ultimately omitted from the Affordable Care Act.
Kristie Canegallo, a deputy White House chief of staff, told Bloomberg that the article was intended to “point future policy makers in the right direction” on health care.
Publication in the Journal of the American Medical Assocation is highly prized. But the article, “United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps,” was billed as a “special communication” and was not peer-reviewed, Fortune reported.
The journal’s editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner told Bloomberg that the piece was edited by some of the journal’s senior editors for two months before publication.
“While we of course recognized the author is the president of the United States, JAMA has enormously high standards and we certainly expected the president to meet those standards,” Bauchner told Bloomberg.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article89286492.html#storylink=cpy
.
Obama published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association defending the Affordable Care Act
The article is a first for a sitting president
In the article, Obama calls for cutting prescription drug prices and reviving a “public option” plan
President Barack Obama has made the case for the Affordable Care Act just about everywhere: on television shows, in online skits, in personal appeals to the American people. On Monday, he went back to his academic roots and published a paper in one of the country’s foremost medical journals to defend his signature health care law.
In what Bloomberg called a “first for a sitting president,” an article written by “Barack Obama, JD” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, reviewing the Affordable Care Act and next steps for a future president to take.
Among those steps: slashing prescription drug costs and introducing a “public option” insurance plan, which he had championed during his first presidential bid but which was ultimately omitted from the Affordable Care Act.
Kristie Canegallo, a deputy White House chief of staff, told Bloomberg that the article was intended to “point future policy makers in the right direction” on health care.
Publication in the Journal of the American Medical Assocation is highly prized. But the article, “United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps,” was billed as a “special communication” and was not peer-reviewed, Fortune reported.
The journal’s editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner told Bloomberg that the piece was edited by some of the journal’s senior editors for two months before publication.
“While we of course recognized the author is the president of the United States, JAMA has enormously high standards and we certainly expected the president to meet those standards,” Bauchner told Bloomberg.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article89286492.html#storylink=cpy
.
Federal judge rules ObamaCare unconstitutional
A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday night that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as ObamaCare, must be "invalidated in whole" because its individual mandate provision is unconstitutional.
District Judge Reed O'Connor argued the mandate is "essential to and inseverable from the remainder of the ACA," and that it cannot "be fairly read as an exercise of Congress's tax power," contrary a 2012 Supreme Court rulingupholding the ACA as a tax.
President Trump celebrated the decision, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said ACA enrollment will continue because the case will be litigated further.
Source: Fox News, CNN
.
A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday night that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as ObamaCare, must be "invalidated in whole" because its individual mandate provision is unconstitutional.
District Judge Reed O'Connor argued the mandate is "essential to and inseverable from the remainder of the ACA," and that it cannot "be fairly read as an exercise of Congress's tax power," contrary a 2012 Supreme Court rulingupholding the ACA as a tax.
President Trump celebrated the decision, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said ACA enrollment will continue because the case will be litigated further.
Source: Fox News, CNN
.
The rethuglicans are trying to burn down as much as they can before they leave.
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