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RE: Latest news on Obama Care - 1/11/2016 7:13:02 PM

Lucylastic

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Where is the replacement for the ACA?

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan shares a laugh with Republican members of Congress after signing legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and to cut off federal funding of Planned Parenthood during an enrollment ceremony in the Rayburn Room at the U.S. Capitol January 7, 2016. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The GOP’s Obamacare alternative? Don’t hold your breath
01/11/16 10:40 AM
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By Steve Benen
At an event over the weekend, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who’ll deliver her party’s State of the Union response this week, made a curious boast about her congressional allies. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the governor argued, “said that when he took his leadership role, things were going to change. How about the fact that they repealed Obamacare? Was that not fantastic?”

The comments left many confused. House Republicans voted last week for the 62nd time to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but that doesn’t mean they succeeded. On the contrary, President Obama vetoed the repeal bill on Friday afternoon, issuing a statement to Congress that read in part, “Because of the harm this bill would cause to the health and financial security of millions of Americans, it has earned my veto.”

Haley may have been impressed, and Republican lawmakers themselves may have had a grand time pretending to take Americans’ health benefits away – see the above photo – but nothing has changed.

So, now what? If we’re to believe the congressional GOP’s rhetoric, the next step is the release of the long-awaited Republican alternative to the current health care reform law. On CBS’s “Face the Nation” yesterday, host John Dickerson asked Speaker Ryan about this:
DICKERSON: You said you wanted the Republicans to offer an alternative to the president. One of the first things you did this year, though, was offer [an ACA repeal bill]. How is that an alternative?

RYAN: It’s not. That’s why we have to come up with an alternative.
Evidently, that’s easier said than done. The GOP’s alternative has been in the works since June 2009 – a mere six-and-a-half years ago – and asked last week why he’s moving forward with a repeal bill before the Republican alternative ready, Ryan told reporters with a smile, “Just wait.”

Around the same time, the House GOP leadership quietly signaled just how long that wait is likely to be.

Politico reported that the Speaker’s office is pushing Republicans to “go big on ideas” in the 2016 election cycle, but for now, it appears “those ideas might just remain, well, ideas.”
Senior House Republican aides and lawmakers say they do not plan to hold votes on many of the agenda items the party plans to unveil – such as a health care plan to replace Obamacare, or tax reform – because of a tight legislative calendar over the next few months and the reality that none of the bills would be signed by the president, anyway.
The idea that Congress shouldn’t work on bills that won’t earn the president’s signature might be more compelling if Congress hadn’t just sent an ACA-repeal bill to the White House, knowing all the while that the legislation stood no chance of success. Indeed, the House Republican majority has spent roughly five years repeatedly working on measures that they knew would never receive Obama’s support. Why change now?

As for the “tight legislative calendar,” note that this has nothing to do with a busy work schedule – Congress has very little on its to-do list for the rest of the year – and everything to do with vacation time lawmakers have given themselves. In other words, “tight legislative calendar” refers to the limited amount of time members have given themselves for actual work.

If the House Republican majority wanted to give itself more time to do actual work, it could – it’s within the GOP’s power to expand the “tight legislative calendar” by weeks or months. Party leaders simply prefer not to.

The end result suggests we won’t see any real consideration of the Republicans’ ACA alternative until 2017 – at the earliest.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-gops-obamacare-alternative-dont-hold-your-breath?cid=sm_fb_maddow

It’s time for an Obamacare checkup.
Despite much doom and gloom portended for years by the law’s opponents, Obamacare looks surprisingly ... healthy. Consider its performance on four major fronts.
First, expanding health insurance coverage, the law’s primary objective.
Between the year that the Affordable Care Act passed (2010) and the first half of 2015, the share of Americans younger than 65 who were uninsured was nearly halved, falling from 18.2 percent to 10.5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For comparison, just before the law was passed, the Congressional Budget Office projected that it would reduce the nonelderly uninsured rate to 9 percent in 2015. That CBO estimate was premised on all 50 states expanding Medicaid, though; a subsequent Supreme Court ruling allowed states to opt out, and today only 30 states and the District have expanded Medicaid. In this context, the law looks remarkably successful.
Second, cost control.
In 2010, there was a lot of discussion about “bending the cost curve.” That meant not necessarily reducing health-care spending but preventing spending from growing as quickly as it had in the years before health-care reform.
On this objective, the law has exceeded everyone’s wildest dreams.
Shortly before Obamacare was passed, experts predicted that national health expenditure growth rates would be 5.5 percent in 2013 and 7 percent in 2018. In reality, 2013 growth was 3.6 percent, and for 2018, experts now predict a pace of 5.3 percent, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Growth in health-care prices, as measured by both premiums and even overall medical care costs, has also fallen way below the pace of the decade leading up to the passage of Obamacare. Likewise, today’s trends are lower than what the Congressional Budget Office and other forecasters projected in 2010.
Lower-than-expected health-care costs have also resulted in lower-than-expected public health spending. In 2009, the CBO forecast that Medicare would cost $723 billion in 2015; according to the latest estimates, it cost about $90 billion less than that last year ($634 billion).
The question, of course, is whether Obamacare really deserves all the glory for this good news.
Some of the slowdown in spending growth is probably attributable to the sluggish recovery (and indeed, health-care spending has slowed or even fallen in other developed countries dealing with their own economic struggles). Expiring patents on some popular brand-name drugs may have played a role, too.
Most worryingly, the implementation of Obamacare’s strongest cost-control tool — the unpopular “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans — has been kicked down the road. Surveys of employers suggest that the threat of this impending tax has already spurred them to find ways to hold down costs, but if the tax gets delayed indefinitely, its motivating power will diminish.
Third, the labor market.
Obamacare’s passage was accompanied by fears that it would encourage people to drop out of the labor force (since they would no longer need to work to get insurance) and encourage employers to shunt full-time workers into part-time positions (to dodge a new mandate for larger firms to offer all full-time workers health insurance).
There have been anecdotal examples of workers and firms affected by both incentives. But right now this looks like the dog that didn’t bark. A new batch of studies suggests that this “job-killing,” part-time-work-shifting law has had no discernible effect on labor markets. That may change with time, of course, as more firms become subject to the employer mandate.
Finally, public opinion.
Whatever the law’s successes, Americans still seem to mostly hate it. At least, they say they hate it, even though they like what it does.
Surveys show that Americans are pretty keen on almost all of Obamacare’s specific provisions, such as guaranteeing coverage for people with preexisting conditions, the Medicaid expansion, no out-of-pocket costs for preventive care, and letting children stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.
In other words, Obamacare has a branding issue. But given how many court and legislative challenges the law has survived, I’d say that even on this metric, our patient’s prognosis still looks good.

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(in reply to Lucylastic)