The problem with repealing Obamacare

The health plan popularly known as Obamacare is clunky and confusing but the big benefit that made it worthwhile (at least as a stop-gap until a single-payer system was implemented) was that tens of millions of previously uninsured people were now able to get access to health care. Three other major benefits were that people could not be denied coverage for so-called pre-existence conditions (an appalling feature of previous plans that insurance companies heavily exploited to deny coverage for many people) children could stay on their parents’ plans until they were 26, and the expansion of eligibility for Medicaid.
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Single payer health care move in Colorado

I am a strong advocate of a government-funded single payer health care, along the lines of the ‘Medicare for all’ plan proposed by Bernie Sanders. Colorado is putting such a plan on the ballot for November. It is called Amendment 69 and the parasitic health insurance industry backed by oligarchs like the Koch brothers has gone all out to try and get people to vote it down.
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Howard Dean switches positions on single payer

Howard Dean, who was once a supporter of the single-payer health care system, has now come out and criticized Bernie Sanders’s plans to implement it via a Medicare for All program. Back in 2009 he called the idea of single-payer “by far the most economically efficient system.” So what changed? It’s the same old story. Dean now works for a lobbying firm that has as its clients major players in the heath care industry.
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Medicaid expansion complicates Republican moves to end Obamacare

One of the features of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was the Medicaid Expansion provision that enabled those people who were too poor to qualify for the tax subsidies of the main plan but not poor enough to qualify for the standard Medicaid to be able to get access to health care. However the US Supreme Court ruled that while Obamacare was constitutional, states could choose not to accept the Medicaid provision and many Republican controlled states refused to do so because of their ideological opposition to Obamacare, even though it was almost cost-free for them, since the federal government would pay the entire cost for the first few years and almost the entire cost subsequently. Thus the poor in their states were sacrificed because of the Republicans’ hatred for anything associated with Obamacare.
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Medicaid expansion slowly expands

The Affordable Car Act or Obamacare consisted of two parts to assist people getting affordable health insurance. For those who earned above a certain income level, they provided a subsidy in the form of a tax credit to reduce the effective cost to the consumer of the insurance premiums that they could purchase on the insurance exchanges. Last month’s Supreme Court decision settled the issue as to whether federal–run exchanges were also allowed to provide such subsidies by saying that they were.
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The coming Supreme Court vote on Obamacare

Sometime this month, the US Supreme Court will issue their opinion on whether the subsidies offered by the health exchanges set up by the federal government are consistent with the wording of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the official name of what has come to be better known as Obamacare). If they rule that they are not and invalidate the subsidies, this will result in tens of millions of people who now have affordable health insurance abruptly losing them. The elimination of the federal subsidies would be a serious, and some argue fatal, blow to Obamacare and thus on the surface Republicans should welcome an adverse Supreme Court opinion.
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Mississippi shows the way on vaccinations

Mississippi is a favorite punch line of comedians whenever they need to point to a state that is the worst in terms of almost any social measure such as poverty, teen pregnancies, education, and so on. But interestingly, Mississippi has the highest vaccination rates. How did it get that way? Melissa Bass and Austin Vitale explain how a state that is usually last came to be first in something good.
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What Britons think of US health care system

Boosters of the US health care system often claim that the British system, in which the government’s National Health System actually employs doctors and owns and runs an extensive system of hospitals that provide most of the care though there is a private system overlaid on top of it, is inferior to what we have here. They are aided in the claim by the fact that successive Conservative governments in the UK are underfunding the system causing some problems.
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