Kucinich Kicks off Health Care Debate with Renewed Call for Single-Payer

"Rather than waste time on debating how much reform insurance companies will permit - - if any - - -it is time to change the debate" - Kucinich Kicks off Health Care Debate with Renewed Call for Single-Payer

Source

FACT CHECK: Shaky health care job loss estimate

GOP claims 650,000 lost jobs from "ObamaCare," and cites the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as the source. But the CBO never produced the number. What follows is a story of how statistics get used and abused in Washington.

Read it all at Yahoo! News

GOP Leadership Intentionally Distorting Obamacare As Job Killer

Rick Ungar - The Policy Page - Forbes:

"The Republican case is laid out in a document published on January 6th, under the authorship of the House GOP leadership and named, “Obamacare: A budget-busting, job-killing health care law.”

It’s an interesting document and well worth reading.

Indeed, the GOP arguments put forth in the study would be truly compelling were it not for the fact that the claims made are so astonishingly dishonest that it takes but a few hours of research to disprove and discredit virtually every substantial claim they make. If you question this, and I know many of you will, I have carefully provided links to each and every document and report the GOP has relied upon so that you may read these authorities for yourself."

Well worth the time to read the rest, where Mr. Ungar does the work for you.

Poll: Support for Health Care Repeal Drops

PBS:

"As the House of Representatives gears up to vote this week on a proposed repeal of the health care reform bill, public support for the move is falling.

Only 25 percent of people polled now support repealing the health care law, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll out Monday, compared to 46 percent on Jan. 7..."

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” ~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Don't die waiting in the ER

From CNN.com: "Emergency room wait times a national problem

According to a 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office, emergency department wait times continue to increase. The report says the average wait time to see a physician is more than double the recommended time in some cases.

Research from Press Ganey Associates, a group that works with health care organizations to improve clinical outcomes, finds that in 2009, patients admitted to hospitals waited on average six hours in emergency rooms. Nearly 400,000 patients waited 24 hours or more."

These types of stories - where a 2 year old winds up losing her limbs because the ER staff was too busy to take care of her - would diminish, not grow, if it was affordable for the average citizen to have a primary care physician they were able to build a relationship with.

As House Republicans begin health-care repeal effort, no clear plan has emerged

With the House preparing to vote this week on whether to repeal the health-care law, the chamber's new Republican majority is confronting a far more delicate task: forging its own path to expand medical coverage and curb costs.
The House's GOP leaders have made clear that they regard the repeal vote, scheduled to begin Tuesday, as the prelude to a two-prong strategy that is likely to last throughout the year, or longer.
They intend to take apart some of the sprawling law, which Democrats pushed through Congress last year, piece by piece before major aspects of it go into effect. At the same time, Republicans say, they will come up with their own plan to revise the health-care system, tailored along more conservative lines.
On the cusp of undertaking this work, the GOP has a cupboard of health-care ideas, most going back a decade or more. They include tax credits to help Americans afford insurance, limiting awards in medical malpractice lawsuits and unfettering consumers from rules that require them to buy state-regulated insurance policies. In broad strokes, the approach favors the health-care marketplace over government programs and rules.
House Republicans have termed their strategy "repeal and replace." But according to GOP House leaders, senior aides and conservative health policy specialists, Republicans have not distilled their ideas into a coherent plan.

More at the Washington Post

Poll: More want health law expanded than fully repealed

The Plum Line:

Today brings a new Marist poll: "More registered voters want the law expanded than fully repealed, with the latter category amounting to less than a third. A total of 49 percent want to let it stand or change it so it does more, versus 43 percent who want to scale it back or get rid of it entirely. "

Which one of the following comes closest to your opinion about what Congress should do with the 2010 health care law:
Let it stand: 14
Change it so it does more: 35
Change it so it does less: 13
Repeal it completely: 30

There's no 'job-killing health-care law'

Ezra Klein:

"There's no 'job-killing' health-care law. There's only the health-care bill. And my problem with the modifier 'job-killing' isn't that it's uncivil, though perhaps it is. It's that it's untrue."

The GOP lifted the claim from this Congressional Budget Office report (pdf) -- but the report never says the bill will kill jobs. What it says, rather, is that the law will slightly reduce labor. It's not that employers will fire workers. It's that potential workers -- particularly older ones -- will retire somewhat earlier. "The expansion of Medicaid and the availability of subsidies through the exchanges will effectively increase beneficiaries’ financial resources. Those additional resources will encourage some people to work fewer hours or to withdraw from the labor market."

Town meeting attendee confronts GOP freshman over health reform repeal

Guess what happens when a congressional town meeting audience isn't created by the Koch brothers or fueled by Fox News? There's a different kind of confrontation. Here's what happened at a meeting earlier this week at Ohio's Walsh University, with GOP Rep. Jim Renacci (OH).

Source: Daily Kos

Supreme Court ruling hints of difficulty for foes of Obama's health insurance law

From the latimes.com: "Rejection of a challenge to a federal law on body armor for felons suggests a reluctance to rein in Congress' powers under the Constitution's commerce clause."

Harry Reid: 'The Arithmetic on Social Security Works' -- 'It's Not in Crisis'

Great news from Harry Reid this morning on Meet The Press.
From Crooks and Liars:

HARRY REID: One of the things that always troubles me is when we start talking about the debt, the first thing people do is run to Social Security. Social Security is a program that works. And it's going to be-- it's fully funded for the next forty years. Stop picking on Social Security. There're a lotta places--

DAVID GREGORY: Senator are you really saying --

HARRY REID: --where you can go to save money.

DAVID GREGORY:-- the arithmetic on Social Security works?

HARRY REID: I'm saying the arithmetic in Social Security works. I have no doubt it does.

DAVID GREGORY: It's not in crisis?

HARRY REID: The ne-- no, it's not in crisis. This is-- this is-- this is something that's perpetuated by people who don't like government. Social Security is fine. Are there things we can do to improve Social Security? Of course.

DAVID GREGORY: Means testing. Raising the --

DAVID GREGORY:--retirement age--

HARRY REID: --don't--

DAVID GREGORY: --do you--

HARRY REID: --I'm--

DAVID GREGORY: --agree with either of those?

HARRY REID: --I'm not going to go to with any of those backdoor methods- you know, to whack Social Security recipients. I'm not going to do that. We have a lot of things we can do with-- this debt. It's a problem. But one of the places where I'm not going to be part of picking on is Social Security.

10 Reasons Why Repealing Health Reform Would Harm Children

While there are a wide array of opinions about health care reform and its impact, it is indisputable that our nation's children, especially low-income children and those with special health care needs, are better off today because of the new law. Repealing health reform would be devastating for these the millions children and families who already are or soon will benefit from this historic legislation. Why? Here are 10 key reasons:

1. If health reform were repealed, insurers would go back to denying coverage for children with pre-existing conditions. Parents of children with cancer, children born with a birth defect, children with asthma, special-needs kids, among others, would once again be unable to get coverage for their kids without the Affordable Care Act.

2. Insurers would return to the practice of placing lifetime limits on coverage so that if a child is fortunate enough to beat leukemia when they are 8 they would be uninsurable if they face another serious illness later in life.

3. Dependent children through age 26 would not be guaranteed access to coverage on their parents' policy, leaving scores of young adults, including recent high school and college grads, back among the ranks of the uninsured.

4. Insurers would not have to cover vision care services or eyeglasses for children even if it is impossible for a child to be successful in school if they can't see.

5. Insurers also would not be required to cover dental care, a horrible return to the days when lack of coverage could cause a child to die from an infected tooth that could have been addressed for about 100.

6. Repealing health reform would jeopardize the future of the successful Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federal-state program that offers low or no-cost coverage for families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy their own coverage. CHIP and Medicaid have been crucial for families during this recession, ensuring that coverage for kids has remained stable despite the downturn in the economy.

7. Children with terminal illnesses would be returned to the days when they would not be able to get compassionate end-of-life hospice care unless they agreed to forgo looking for a cure for their illness.

8. Insurers would be allowed to resume the practice of charging co-payments for preventive health services, including essential well-baby and well-child visits, and vaccinations, creating financial disincentives for parents to get care for their children that keeps them healthy.

9. Children in foster care would no longer qualify for Medicaid beyond age 18.

10. New efforts to eliminate bureaucratic red tape and streamline enrollment processes for children who are already eligible but not enrolled in public health coverage would suffer if health reform was repealed. Nearly two-thirds of children who are uninsured actually qualify for coverage but face significant barriers that make it difficult for them to sign-up or re-enroll for coverage.

Read it all here.

Death Panel Definition at Senior Community Center

Now This Is What a 'Death Panel' Looks Like:

"'It let's you make your own choice,' says Barbara Aplin, shouldering an oxygen tank on her way to the lunch line here at the senior Community Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She is speaking not of her meal options in 2011 but of so-called 'death panels,' the more colloquial name for the new Medicare rule now paying doctors to counsel this seventy-six-year-old ('and three-quarters!') and her fellow senior citizens about end-of-life care. If you listen to the new fear merchants from the right, the rule pushes seniors to opt out of medical treatment that might prolong their lives. But take an afternoon to listen to the actual grandmas, and you get a much different kind of scare. If her children don't listen to an end-of-life plan, Aplin says, 'I'll come back to haunt them.'"

What's getting Fox News's granny panties in a twist comes down to a new billing code — "voluntary" instead of "v66.7" — that the Obama administration added back in to Medicare regulation on New Year's Day after dropping it from the rather contentious Section 1233 of the health-care bill. But we couldn't find a single elderly American on Medicare who was against the provision.

"Death panels," now that they're going down in a slightly different way, don't strike those a bit closer to actual death as particularly deadly — and certainly not as anything new.

Here's something Fox News won't tell you: While the controversial billing code for an end-of-life conversation did not exist on Medicare forms until January 1, many doctors had the chat anyway — uncompensated. One primary-care physician told us that others found a way to bill "for the disease, and then add a v66.7 'encounter for palliative care.' And then I bill by time and code them usually a 99215, as it is usually forty-plus minutes."

With the new health-care regulation, she says she'll simply bill for "voluntary advance care planning." A different check box, as it were.

See also: Anatomy of the Right Wing's Death-Panel Meme

Physicians for a National Health Program | Open Letter to the Vermont Legislature: Enact Single-Payer Health Care

Open Letter to the Vermont Legislature: Physicians to the Vermont Legislature - Enact a single-payer health care system