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Can anybody help me find a picture of pajama boy from the healthcare commercials, please?

For over a decade, I’ve been helping politicians talk about health care and the Affordable Care Act. But in the past weeks the health care system hit me like an avalanche consuming a mountain. In the blink of an eye, I went from someone who thought they understood the minutiae to realizing all the Beltway smarts in the world couldn’t prepare me for this journey. In 2010, as a staffer working for House Democrats, I crafted messaging as we attempted to make some of the most expansive changes to our health care system in a generation. There was hand-wringing, whipping,...

The number of people who signed up for health insurance through HealthCare.gov jumped by 40 percent compared to last year, President Biden said on Friday. “Right now, four out of five folks who sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act can get healthcare coverage for $10 a month or less. These lower rates were set to expire on Jan. 1 of this coming year, but instead we were able to extend them,” Biden said during remarks addressing business and labor leaders.

When Emmanuel Obeng-Dankwa is worried about making rent on his New York City apartment, he sometimes holds off on filling his blood pressure medication. “If there’s no money, I prefer to skip the medication to being homeless,” said Obeng-Dankwa, a 58-year-old security guard. He is among a majority of adults in the U.S. who say that health care is not handled well in the country, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll reveals that public satisfaction with the U.S. health care system is remarkably low, with fewer than half of Americans...

With the latest HHS report about Obamacare coverage, the Biden administration doesn’t want to let facts get in the way of a good narrative.In the “lies, d-mned lies, and statistics” category comes a report the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released Saturday, in conjunction with a Zoom call from presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama promoting Obamacare.The report wants you to believe more than 30 million people obtained coverage because of Obamacare. But the Biden administration knows that number isn’t true. So instead of discussing people “newly insured” by the law, it talks about those who were merely...

Pro-lifers living in half of the United States have very few options for health care under Obamacare. A new report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, Family Research Council and The Heritage Foundation found that 69 percent of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, health plans in 24 states and Washington, D.C. cover elective abortions. More specifically, in seven of those states and D.C., pro-lifers have no options; all of the plans offered on the Obamacare exchange cover elective abortions, according to the report. They are: Alaska, California, D.C., Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont. These plans are subsidized by...

The Department of Health and Human Services has finalized a rule that repeals Obamacare policy relating to access to abortion and gender identity. The new rule will define “sex discrimination” in terms of a person’s biological sex, rather than gender. The Obamacare rule defined “sex discrimination” as including discrimination regarding gender identity, which the rule defined as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.” Anyone who requires a list to define their gender needs help — badly.Under the new policy, hospitals can decline to perform “gender transition surgery” as...

Attorney General William Barr made a last-minute push Monday to persuade the administration to modify its position in the Obamacare dispute that will be heard at the Supreme Court this fall, arguing that the administration should pull back from its insistence that the entire law be struck down. ... Barr and other top advisers have argued against the hard-line position for some time, warning it could have major political implications if the comprehensive health care law appears in jeopardy as voters head to the polls in November. According to four sources familiar with the meeting, Barr argued for modifying the...

Former President Barack Obama is defending the Obamacare law as election season heats up and as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a legal challenge about a court ruling that invalidated his signature domestic legislation. “It’s been 10 years since we passed the Affordable Care Act. With your help, it’s the closest we’ve ever come to universal coverage in America,” Obama said in a 90-second video produced by his allies at Protect Our Care, a project of the well-heeled left-wing group Sixteen Thirty Fund.“There are people alive today because of what you did,” he said, without substantiating the claim. CORONAVIRUS...

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal case on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare, that could potentially invalidate the entire law. On Dec. 15, 2018, a Texas judge ruled that Obamacare’s individual mandate was unconstitutional. Judge Reed O’Connor agreed with the plaintiffs who argued that the lack of a penalty invalidated the “individual mandate” provision of the law, and if that part of the law was now invalid, then the whole law was. Democratic states and the House of Representatives appealed the decision, and the case made it all the way up to the...

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide a lawsuit that threatens the Obama-era health care law, but the decision is not likely until after the 2020 election. The court said it would hear an appeal by 20 mainly Democratic states of a lower-court ruling that declared part of the statute unconstitutional and cast a cloud over the rest. Defenders of the Affordable Care Act argued that the issues raised by the case are too important to let the litigation drag on for months or years in lower courts and that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New...

When the health reform debate began more than a dozen years ago, most public health advocates touted the need for universal coverage. By the time Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA), however, it had become predicated on also making care accessible for people with pre-existing conditions.  Obamacare allowed people with chronic illnesses to buy health coverage at rates no higher than their healthy neighbors. This feature has always been popular. Americans feel sympathy for those who were penalized for conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease. Less healthy individuals often paid higher premiums to compensate for...

As a conservative, you might want to stay mad at the insurance companies, because they are still gaming the system to make even more money off of Obamacare.  Right now, they are supporting legislation that will help health insurance companies to make even more money while harming doctors, patients and service providers. The lead trade group for health insurers, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), were critical in helping to get Obamacare passed. They loved the idea of the federal government mandating that all Americans be forced to purchase their product. Healthcare Finance reported on March 23, 2012, “in March 2009,...

So much for the Spring Showdown. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court appeared ready to jump into the middle of a 2020 election debate over ObamaCare, telling both sides of an appear to submit briefs over the possibility of an expedited review of a case where the law was ruled unconstitutional. There was just enough time to add this to the calendar for this session — if the court wanted to stick their fingers into a political and electoral maelstrom.To quote Emily Litella … never mind: The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Democrats’ plea to consider a high-stakes legal...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or ObamaCare, includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall . . . ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, the individual mandate, after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.” As of January, thanks to a tax reform bill that Congress enacted in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero....

More than $12 billion is at stake for the nation’s health insurers Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears another Affordable Care Act case. For the federal government, the potential damages could be far greater, as its reputation as a reliable partner to private businesses is on the line.

More Americans are going without health coverage and the pace of spending on health care nationally is rising in part because of an Affordable Care Act tax on insurers, Trump administration officials said Thursday. A federal report from actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services documented trends that are likely to further fuel the battle between Republicans and Democrats over how to slow health-care spending growth that has already put the U.S. far ahead of most comparable wealthy countries. Overall, national health-care spending rose to $3.65 trillion in 2018, up 4.6% from 2017. The U.S. spent $11,172 per...

Trump administration officials say they’re working to resolve problems with HealthCare.gov following reports of widespread technical glitches on the first day of “Obamacare” sign-ups. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a statement Friday that it’s aware that some consumers trying to sign up for health insurance have received error messages from the online system. The agency said its “highest priority” is to fix the issues quickly to provide a “seamless consumer experience.” …

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Obamacare’s special protections for transgender individuals and women who choose to have abortions violate religious freedom. Judge Reed O’Connor of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, a George W. Bush appointee, overturned the protections by vacating the Obama-era rule that banned health insurers and providers who receive federal taxpayer funds from denying coverage or treatment to any individual based on sex, gender identity, or termination of pregnancy. As the Hill noted, Reed is the same judge who ruled last December that Obamacare in its entirety is unconstitutional. In January 2017...

“Middlemen" are causing a crisis in health care that's hitting everyday Americans in the wallet and preventing them from getting the care they need. They have contributed to soaring health care costs and medicine shortages. On May 11th of this year, the President held a press conference and stated "We’re very much eliminating the middlemen. The middlemen became very, very rich. Whoever those middlemen were — and a lot of people never even figured it out — they’re rich. They won’t be so rich anymore." https://www.houstoncourant.com/houston-voices/2019/7/28/middlemen-in-healthcare-creating-high-costs