In Your Faces, Teabaggers!

By Carl 

Health-care reform, what you so cutely call "Obamacare," WORKS!

Rick Ungar of Forbes is reporting that recent data provided by the nation's largest health insurance companies reveals that a provision of the Affordable Care Act -- "Obamacare" – is bringing big numbers of the uninsured into the health care insurance system. The uninsured in this study include the sick and the young. 

The provision of the law that permits young adults under 26, long the largest uninsured demographic in the country, to remain on their parents' health insurance program resulted in at least 600,000 newly insured Americans during the first quarter of 2011.

Wellpoint, the nation's largest publicly traded health insurer with some 34 million customers, reports adding 280,000 new members in the first three months of 2011.

Add in the results of some of the other large health insurers including Aetna, who added just short of 100,000 newly insured to their customer base, Kaiser Permanente's additional 90,000, and Highmark's 72,000 new customers, and we begin to sense our health insurance pools are filling up with some badly needed young blood. 

BAM! -- as the kids say.

One of the most tragic aspects of the private health care shenanigans that was the old system was that millions of people were remaining uninsured, despite the facts that they were both human and subject to major risk taking behaviors, like driving too fast (or while drunk) or "planking" or what have you.

The rest of us covered those uninsured ninnies, and these aren't poor newbie adults we're talking about. Many of them have good jobs (or had, before Bush got hold of them) but simply opted out of insurance because, well, "More BEER! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Bringing these folks into the insured fold has a double benefit: one, their own insurance will now cover them when they do something clumsy which lowers our premiums and two, their entrance into the pool means that insurance companies can lower premiums to the rest of us, since these same people are less likely to suffer the chronic illnesses that come with aging like high blood pressure, obesity, high cholesterol, and heart disease.

The original Health and Human Services projection for additional insured Americans in 2011 was a modest 1.2 million. It looks like we're going to blow that out of the water.

And yet, insurance companies, for all the scaremongering by conservatives, have been drawing record profits. Gee...think it might have something to do in part with more insured Americans? I sure do.

Health-care reform is only just getting started. In my book, Obama did too little, but fortunately it's not too late, too.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Et tu, Mitch? (or, how Mitch Daniels has a health-care problem)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I noted yesterday that Republican desperation is driving the Draft Mitch Daniels movement.

Faced with an embarrassingly bad presidential field, Republicans are doing what they often do, which is look for a savior to rescue them from the abyss, and that savior, it seems, or so they seem to think, is Daniels.

The problem, I also noted, isn't just that Daniels lacks a dynamic personality and engaging charisma but that he's got some blemishes on his record that just won't fly with the Tea Party grassroots base of the GOP, nor perhaps with the social conservatives who continue to wield influence in the party.

He called for a truce on social issues in Indiana, for example, and, even more damaging, once proposed raising taxes. He might as well have been Osama bin Laden's accountant.

Well, there's more -- and it just gets worse. As The Huffington Post is reporting, Daniels has accepted Affordable Care Act money and has supported universal health coverage and... (pause for effect)... an individual mandate. He might as well have set fire to the flag, urinated on its ashes, and defecated upon the very idea of freedom.

But wait. There's still more:

Back in 2003, mandates were very much a conservative idea, making support for them by Daniels -- let alone fellow 2012 Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich -- either mundane or expected.

But there are other similarities between the health care policies Daniel's passed as governor and those that constitute President Obama's signature legislation. Both, for instance, require insurance companies to allow children to remain on their parents' accounts past traditional ages for college graduation -- Daniels allows dependent coverage up to age 24, Obama up to 26. Both required Medicaid programs to expand eligibility to individuals and families above the poverty level.

Like Obama, Daniels also put a premium on updating hospital records and information sharing. According to a February 21, 2005, Indianapolis Business Journal article, he "ordered the state Department of Health to come up with a regulation that requires every hospital to implement an error reporting system and provide data to the department, which will post it on the Internet." Separately, both Daniels and Obama increased taxes on cigarettes as a means of generating revenue for health care coverage elsewhere (and discouraging smoking).

So there you have it. Daniels, like Romney, has a huge health-care problem that he simply won't be able to overcome.

He hasn't even entered the race yet, but I think it's fairly safe to say he's toast. So much for the Great Republican Savior of 2012.