Rick Perry Is Quietly Encouraging Texans to Sign Up for Obamacare

Rick Perry Is Quietly Encouraging Texans to Sign Up for Obamacare 

Published October 23, 2013 - 3:30pm

Katie Singh
Burnt Orange Report

Governor Rick Perry has always been one of the Affordable Care Act's most vocal opponents. He's called it a "monstrosity," a "stomach punch to the economy," and a "felony." But that hasn't stopped him from telling Texans to sign up for health coverage from the law.

That's right — Rick Perry's administration is encouraging Texans to enroll in the ACA's health insurance exchanges.

As the Texas Tribune reported last week, Texas will soon be shutting down its high-risk insurance pool for residents with pre-existing conditions, pushing them to seek coverage in the federal insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act. According to the Tribune, "the state has deemed the high-risk pool obsolete, as the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance companies participating in the federal marketplace...from denying coverage to Texans with pre-existing conditions." Governor Perry signed the bill abolishing the high-risk pool into law in June, and it will be shut down by the end of the year.

This is just the latest in a series of hypocritical moves by Governor Perry regarding the Affordable Care Act. Though he's called the law a "criminal act," Perry certainly has no problem accepting money from it. As we reported last month, Perry has accepted over $100 million in ACA grants, and was asking for even more to help expand a state program providing insurance to those with disabilities.

Perry's actions make it utterly impossible to take his position on the ACA seriously. The crux of his argument against the Affordable Care Act has been that it's better for states to control health policy than the federal government. But by accepting ACA grant money, and now by encouraging high-risk patients to enroll in insurance exchanges, Perry's actions have totally undermined his words. In accepting these parts of the ACA, he's essentially acknowledged that federal grants will enhance the state's existing health programs, and that the health exchanges will provide better coverage for people with pre-existing conditions than what the state has now.

Perry's actions confirm what policy experts have known since the law was passed — it's a step forward for Texans. Stacey Pogue of the Center for Public Policy Priorities told the Texas Tribune she "think[s] that people are going to have many more options and many better options in the marketplace than they do in the health pool today."

Texans in the high-risk pool currently pay twice the market rate for health coverage, but they will be able to find much cheaper options in the health insurance exchanges. The ACA's tax subsidies will also make coverage more affordable. In addition, the insurance plans available in the exchanges will expand the level of care people with pre-existing conditions can receive, "as they must cover 'essential health benefits,' some of which, such as maternity care, aren't [currently] covered in the pool."

So, the next time you hear Rick Perry call the Affordable Care Act an "attack on freedom" or some other hyperbole, remember that even he doesn't really think that. Perry's presidential ambitions mean he'll never admit it, but he's repeatedly accepted parts of the Affordable Care Act as good for Texas. In doing so, he's not only recognized that federal assistance can strengthen state programs, but he's also proven himself to be a Texas-sized hypocrite.

Read More

Twelve Times Scott Walker Was Terrible

Twelve Times Scott Walker Was Terrible

Oh, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, how are you terrible? Let us count the ways….  

posted on October 23, 2013 at 6:33pm EDT

emilyslist

BuzzFeed User

This post was created by a user and has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can post awesome lists and creations." Learn more or post your buzz!

1. When he signed the mandatory ultrasound bill into law

tumblr.com

Walker signed into law a bill that will require “women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound and ban doctors who lack admitting privileges at nearby hospitals from performing the procedures.” Essentially, it would make it harder for a woman seeking a safe, legal abortion to get one. His law could force clinics to close and is being challenged by reproductive health advocates.

2. When he repealed the law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to press charges

tumblr.com

So basically, if you’re one of the women in Wisconsin who earns $0.75 for every dollar that your male colleagues make and you want to do something about losing that $4,000 every year, Scott Walker has made it more difficult. THANKS.

3. When he eliminated collective bargaining rights for all of Wisconsin’s public employees

tumblr.com

Scott Walker is no friend of unions. In 2011, he signed into law a bill that abolished collective bargaining rights for 175,000 public union employees in Wisconsin, leading to an attempt to recall him.

4. When he specifically targeted women workers while sticking it to unions

tumblr.com

As we mentioned, in 2011, when Scott Walker was stripping unions of their right to collective bargaining, he did exempt some groups: firefighter, police and state trooper unions. The majority of Wisconsin public workers are actually women, (teachers, nurses, child care workers, home health care workers, etc.) but the exempted groups were overwhelmingly male.

5. When he banned abortion coverage for policies in the ACA’s new health insurance exchange

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

This is just another example of Scott Walker’s extreme, anti-woman agenda.

6. When he ruined Wisconsin sex education

tumblr.com

tumblr.com

Scott Walker signed legislation that required teachers in schools that offered sex education to “stress abstinence as the only sure way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” The legislation also declared that sex ed teachers were not required to address contraception. So that’s helpful.

7. When he eliminated all state funding for family planning services

tumblr.com

In 2011, Scott Walker proposed a budget that would have eliminated all state funding for family planning services for low-income residents, putting 50 clinics in jeopardy. 52,000 women in Wisconsin who received contraceptive care from those clinics would have to find alternative means.

8. When he forced 92,000 people off their health insurance and cost the state $119 million

tumblr.com

Scott Walker could have accepted federal money under the Affordable Care Act that would have expanded BadgerCare Plus insurance, which covers adults with children under 19 in households with incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty threshold, or $47,100 for a family of four. Instead, he rejected the money, kicked 92,000 people off their health insurance and forced them to buy a more expensive plan.

9. When he led Wisconsin to below-average job growth rates

s3-ec.buzzfed.com

The Republican Party says they’re about jobs jobs jobs - except when Scott Walker runs things and the state ranks 34th in job growth. And consider this: Walker’s #1 campaign promise was to add 250,000 private-sector jobs by the end of his term. At last count, nearly three years later, he’s only about 25% there.

10. When he signed an unconstitutional voter ID law

tumblr.com

This law would require poll workers to immediately begin asking voters to show state-issued IDs before they vote - even though voters wouldn’t be required to show them until the next year. Yeah, we’re not sure either - but basically, Walker wanted to make it harder for people to vote.

11. When he was BFFs with the Koch Brothers

tumblr.com

The Koch Brothers are long-time Scott Walker supporters. With a $43,000 donation, their PAC was the second highest donor to Walker’s 2010 campaign. They also gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which streamed spending into Wisconsin on behalf of Walker. Ew.

12. When he wanted to pay teachers less

tumblr.com

Not only did Scott Walker nix the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin teachers, but he capped future pay raises. Under Walker’s administrative rule change, he changed the pay schedule for experienced teachers. Some teachers could lose as much as 30% of their current salary under Walker’s targeted attacks.

So, in short, Scott Walker is the worst.

Luckily, EMILY’s List has endorsed Mary Burke for governor of Wisconsin

Mary Burke is an insightful problem solver who has worked in the private, government, and nonprofit sectors to grow Wisconsin’s economy and increase educational opportunities. Mary has an impressive commitment to economic justice and improving the lives of children and working families. Her intense and selfless commitment to her community will make for a striking contrast with Governor Scott Walker’s extremist agenda. Mary’s been quietly changing the world for the better for years - by breaking barriers herself and by making opportunities for others to get ahead.

lh3.googleusercontent.com

This post was created by a user and has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can post awesome lists and creations. Learn more or post your buzz!

Read More

Local News Station Busts Darrell Issa for Silencing Supporters During ACA Investigation

Local News Station Busts Darrell Issa for Silencing Supporters During ACA Investigation

By: Sarah Jones
Tuesday, November, 26th, 2013

The mainstream media might be letting the public down, but some local media outlets are still diligently reporting the news instead of chasing after Beltway Cool Kids with a GOP playbook in their front pocket.
Melissa Hankins at Charlotte, North Carolina’s WBTV 3 reported that Darrell Issa’s ObamaCare “hearings” in Gastonia called “Obamacare Implementation: Sticker Shock of Increased Premiums for Health Care Coverage” weren’t exactly unbiased.
In fact, people who had positive things to say about the ACA were not only told they couldn’t speak, but they were told that if they spoke “out of turn” they’d have to leave.

 Watch here:

WBTV 3 News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic for Charlotte, NC

 

The meeting got off to a contentious start on Friday, with people complaining that they won’t get a chance to be heard. People were told they would be removed from the meeting if they spoke out of turn. Residents were angry because Issa picked the five witnesses that we will hear from, all residents of North Carolina.

The piece goes on to list several supporters of the ACA whom Issa refused to let speak.
Allison Ward, who says the ACA offers her insurance she can afford for the first time ever, wanted to be heard. If she had been chosen to “testify” (is it really a hearing if it’s all staged? Not so much), she would have said, “My president has said I hear you, I’m going to help you and frankly the way I see it is that other people are getting in the way.”
You can see why Issa wouldn’t let Ms. Ward speak.
Another Charlotte resident wanted to speak about how no one would give her insurance because she was diagnosed with MS. Dana Wilson said the ACA changed the fact that no one would insure her. Ms. Wilson thinks if it’s a real hearing, then all sides should be heard. “I think if it’s a true hearing than all sides should be heard and they don’t want to hear us,” she told WBTV 3.
The reported explained that the area has seen some of the highest increases in premiums in the country, and that’s why Issa was there. Fair enough. But that’s no reason not to hear from supporters of the law.
Issa claims that no Democrats picked any witnesses and that is how he justifies not using supporters of the law. But see, that’s an admission that Issa is not trying to get at the truth, as he claims he is. He’s got a show to put on, and he can only use haters in this script. It’s called propaganda, and it’s following the GOP playbook exactly. The main messages of the GOP attack ACA playbook are: “Because of Obamacare, I Lost My Insurance”, “Obamacare Increases Health Care Costs” and “The Exchanges May Not Be Secure, Putting Personal Information at Risk”. ”
Good old Issa is up to his usual tricks, where he only lets the people who he knows will say what he needs them to say in front of the cameras, and then he blames Democrats when he’s busted Issa got busted doing this on Benghazi as well. Issa refused to let the experts on the Benghazi attacks speak in front of the cameras, and then blamed the White House for not inviting them:

While the rest of the media is reporting that the co-chairmen of the independent review on the Benghazi attacks, Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, have finally agreed to testify, in truth Pickering was not invited by Darell Issa (R-CA) to testify at the televised hearing. When called out on his lies on national TV, Issa finally tried to blame the White House for not inviting Pickering.

Darrell Issa wants you to believe that he is wasting all of this money just to get the truth, but the truth involves refusing to let anyone with a dissenting point of view be heard. It’s just like the founders envisioned…
Only not.
h/t Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars

Local News Station Busts Darrell Issa for Silencing Supporters During ACA Investigation was written by Sarah Jones for PoliticusUSA.

© PoliticusUSA, Tue, Nov 26th, 2013 — All Rights Reserve

Read More

Right-Wing Hackers Create ‘Destroy Obamacare!’ Program, Hope To Disrupt Website

Author: T. Steelman November 20, 2013 11:31 am

A new DDos tool looks to cripple or shut down the healthcare.gov website.
“Destroy Obamacare!” is highly illegal but the right will probably try to use it.

The right really, really wants to destroy Obamacare. Sure, the Obamacare website has had its problems since the roll-out. We’re all disappointed and discouraged that, after all the work we’ve done to get this up and running, we are having to defend the entire idea of health care reform. Because we all know that if a website ever has problems, it should immediately be shut down. Just like YouTube was Monday when it went down for a while. Oh, it wasn’t shut down? Well, I’m sure that was an oversight.

The Obamacare website is being attacked by hackers

Last week, Department of Homeland Security official Roberta Stempfley told the
monkey circusHouse investigative committee that the Healthcare. gov website had been the target of at least 16 cyber-attacks. These occurred between Nov. 6th and Nov. 8th and are currently under investigation.
But things may escalate if some on the right have their way. Recently, Arbor Networks, an online security firm, discovered a tool called “Destroy Obamacare!” It is being distributed (by whom is not yet known) so it can be used to overload the Obamacare website. According to Arbor, the program is written to perform constant, layered requests to get on two healthcare.gov web pages: the home page and the “contact us” page. The tool is a Distributed Denial of Service program. My IT friends tell me that…
“… the extra D in DDoS that makes a DDoS attack so effective — the first D stands for “Distributed” and means that the attacks would be coming from a variety of different IP addresses, making it hard to block the traffic without completely turning off the website (which is the goal of a “denial of service” attack to begin with).”
In other words, tens of thousands (or more) of computers will try to use the website over and over and over again, automatically. Think of having thousands of cars trying to use the same exit on the highway at the same time and you’ll get the idea.

“Destroy Obamacare” isn’t too much of a threat unless…

As it stands, this “Destroy Obamacare!” tool wouldn’t be able to do much to the Obamacare website. But, of course, there are a couple of caveats:

“… if this were developed into something more malicious (and rewritten to fire off more requests, more regularly), spread throughout servers and users online without adequate security, and launched from machines worldwide simultaneously, it would be catastrophically effective (especially if the program was smart enough to change IP addresses when blocked).”

The IP address issue, while not insurmountable, presents a problem for the people who would be using “Destroy Obamacare!” Their computers can be identified and blocked and the users prosecuted. But, as my sources say, if an enormous number of people (say, several million) decided to run the program or if someone with enough money were to rent a bot-net (a robot network), then they could wreak havoc. But, unless that were to happen, these website requests would maybe slow the site down a little. But everyone who ran it would be easily found and blocked.

It’s obvious the program came from someone on the right

Though it is rather like “one-legged dogs trying to take down a pride of lions” (as one of my sources compared it), “Destroy Obamacare!” could still be troublesome. But anyone who wishes to use it should know that it is highly illegal and easily traced. As you can see by the text which accompanies the tool, those who use it may not be smart enough to realize either of these things.

Looks like a Tea Party thing to me. Arbor says on their website coverage of this subject that they have no information on the active use of this software — yet — but that they have:

… seen site specific denial of service tools in the past related to topics of social or political interest.  This application continues a trend ASERT is seeing with denial of service attacks being used as a means of retaliation against a policy, legal rulings or government actions. (source)

They may be referring to Anonymous, who has targeted websites before. But this is, as far as we know, the first time that the right-wing has tried to use cyber-attacks.

My IT sources say it’s poorly written

For the coders among you, here is a screen shot of some of “Destroy Obamacare!” code:

My very smart IT sources assure me that this is nothing to worry about. Any well-written high-capacity website could easily handle this. Unless, of course, the Koch brothers decide to rent that bot-net…
What is frustrating for me, and for many of you, is that the media is focusing on the healthcare.gov website having problems. Yet nobody mentions the attacks that have already occurred nor this nascent, though probably toothless, concerted attack. “Liberal media” my arse.
 

Read More

Paul Ryan’s Poverty Plan Includes Religion, But No Real Help For The Poor

Author: Rika Christensen November 20, 2013 10:04 pm

 

Will Paul Ryan’s poverty plan actually help the poor, 

or is it more of the same old Tea Party rhetoric 

regarding cuts to the social safety net? 

Congressman Paul Ryan. (R-WI). 

Image from Neon Tommy

In the run-up to the 2014 election cycle, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will set his sights on fighting poverty. As a Tea Party crusader, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Ryan’s poverty plan will call for more cuts in the social safety net, and more assurances that such cuts will free people of dependency on the government.
Of course he believes that the social safety net merely creates a culture of dependency. That’s not a surprise at all. To him, government programs designed to help the poor actually hold the poor back. They keep the poor from being able to empower themselves, so they can’t lift themselves out of their bad situation. Government programs are what make the poor lazy, they are why the poor don’t have the will to take charge of their lives.

Paul Ryan’s poverty plan is part of a bigger plan to push the GOP away from hateful Tea Party rhetoric.

Paul 

Ryan’s poverty plan is part of a larger effort to steer the GOP away from the “angry, nativist inclinations of the tea party movement and toward the more inclusive vision of his mentor, Jack Kemp.” There’s an ongoing perception that the GOP doesn’t care about people. That was made clear in RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ so-called “autopsy report” after the massive failure of the 2012 elections. Paul Ryan’s poverty plan may be the response to the rising poverty rate and increasing income inequality that the GOP has been looking for.

The Washington Post article quotes conservative strategist Bill Bennett on the plan, who says, “You can’t be the governing party unless you offer people a way out of poverty.” This is all well and good, however, when that vision means taking away much-needed help, this type of fight will fail. You can’t maintain an appearance of helping people when you keep cutting the very things that help them in times of crisis.

Contrary to the cold, religious beliefs of people like Paul Ryan, the social safety net is necessary.

The average family is on food stamps for about 9 months. For welfare, 19% of recipients get benefits for less than 7 months, which is about the same as those that get benefits for more than 5 years. 26% get benefits for 2 to 5 years. There is no time period encompassing a majority of welfare recipients.
Bishop Shirley Holloway, from City of Hope, said that Paul Ryan wants people to dream, and people on food stamps don’t dream. Government benefits only speed up people’s downfalls, rather than lifting them up. Ryan himself says that spiritual redemption is what will save people. With that statement, he implies that the social safety net will never save people.
That may be true, but it’s also true that government programs must be there. Paul Ryan’s poverty plan likely will not take this into account. It’s also true that spiritual redemption won’t lift people out of poverty. Some of the most pious people out there receive assistance. People in emergency situations, such as suddenly losing a job or losing the ability to work, need these programs. Besides that, charity experts say that existing charities cannot fill the gaps created by cuts to government programs. When it comes to food, for instance, charities can’t make up the $4 billion per year food stamp cuts that went into effect at the beginning of November. For major disasters, such as the Oklahoma tornadoes and Superstorm Sandy, the donations may be incredible. But these experts say that for “steady-state emergencies” like hunger, there isn’t enough money coming in to compensate for government budget cuts.
If Paul Ryan’s poverty plan focuses on spiritual redemption as the primary path out of poverty, he has a sorry grasp of the actual problem.
His plan will likely boil down to more volunteerism, more charity, more tax credits and even vouchers. In other words, Paul Ryan’s poverty plan is same old story. Get rid of the safety net, cut taxes, and let charity help the poor. There aren’t many details available yet (there actually aren’t any), but it’s easy to figure out at least some of what it will have based on previous attitudes of his.

Read More

Brownback (Kansas) Turns Medicaid Over to Private Companies.. and these are the results

Brownback (Kansas) Turns Medicaid Over to Private Companies.. and these are the results

by tmservo433Follow

Wed Nov 20, 2013 at 04:33 PM PST

Today, Pitch Magazine, a Kansas City alternative newspaper released a scathing, on point analysis of Kansas "KanCare" debacle.

Since learning of his condition in college, Bullers has slowly lost control of his body. But his mind remains clear. These days, the former Kansas City Star reporter spends his days hounding a bureaucracy in Topeka in an attempt to keep in-home nurses all day, every day. This past January, the state transferred the care of 380,000 Medicaid recipients to three private companies as part of a program called KanCare. Gov. Sam Brownback has said the wholesale privatization of Medicaid under KanCare was meant to save $1 billion over five years. He also promised that the move wouldn't sacrifice Kansans' level of care, and the number of people on Medicaid's waiting list would be reduced.
But the only way for the three managed-care organizations to realize cost savings on clients with permanent physical disabilities, like Bullers, is by cutting Medicaid services. Bullers' 24/7 care was slated to be reduced by November 1 to 40 hours per week. Caregivers, who now work in three eight-hour shifts, could visit him only on weekdays for eight hours a day, or all seven days of the week for five hours each.

"To me, that's an Orwellian clusterfuck," Bullers tells The Pitch. "How can you take out that chunk of money on the backs of the most vulnerable and say with a straight face that you're going to improve services? It defies common sense."

http://www.pitch.com/...

The Pitch of course does all of the leg work in a multi-page piece that deserves to be read.   Because it highlights what is wrong with using a for-profit motive when dispensing need to those who are amongst the most vulnerable.
It isn't as though Kansas couldn't see it coming:

Steve Rose
Star columnist The Kansas Health Institute has nailed it.
KanCare – to paraphrase – is likely to be a mess when it is implemented on Jan. 1.
On that date 380,000 poor and disabled Kansans, who now receive services through Medicaid, will be shifted to private, managed care in an attempt to save money. The new program is called KanCare.
The KHI researched what has happened in Kentucky, which recently has implemented what we are about to implement. And, so far, it has had lots of hiccups.
And Kentucky did not even include three categories that are included in the Kansas plan: long-term services for the elderly, physically disabled and, eventually, the developmentally disabled.

http://joco913.com/...Pitch lays out the truth in page after page..

Medicaid is a health program for low-income Americans that's funded jointly by states and the federal government. Several states have transferred segments of their Medicaid programs to private insurers to curb rising costs.

While other states have dipped their toes into the privatization of Medicaid, Kansas has cannonballed into the deep end by shifting all of its Medicaid management to three private companies."It is the most extensive in the nation," says Gary Blumenthal, a former Kansas legislator who is now CEO of the Association of Developmental Disabilities Providers in suburban Boston and a member of the federal National Council on Disability. "Other states have viewed managed care as an area to move slowly and cautiously in the use of managed care, to determine if the use of managed care can produce the savings that advocates claim can occur while preserving the quality and safety for people that it would be serving."

Brownback has made every effort to twist the truth and portray this story one way.. when it is far different than that.

"The process has not gone as smoothly as the people at the Statehouse would have you believe, as far as the implementation is concerned," said Allen Van Driel, CEO of Smith County Memorial Hospital in north-central Kansas, according to a September 23 Kansas Health Institute News Service report. "The party line is that the managed-care plans are working and that KanCare is a huge success, that it's processing claims and all that. But that's simply not factual."

This is a powerful piece that needs to be read by more people.   What it doesn't touch on, though is the falseness of this dilemma altogether.  Those like Brownback assert that there simply isn't enough money to support all those who are sick and disabled, therefore they must cut costs.  What isn't be said is that there is another alternative to continuous cutting of costs.. it's called increasing revenues.   Brownback and others hate that - cut, cut cut is the only way.   But in the end, part of the social responsibility has to be the fact that we care for those who need it most.   This means that we count on companies not getting over the top tax breaks, we ask that people carry their weight and we provide for our population. But that kind of talk makes people unhappy.   Too bad, because tonight here in KC there are a lot of people on a wait list that is now 7+ years long who won't get services because the continuous cuts to healthcare in Kansas.

Originally posted to tmservo433 on Wed Nov 20, 2013 at 04:33 PM PST.

Also republished by Kansas & Missouri Kossacks.

Read More

Obama’s new Obamacare ‘fix,’ explained in one minute

By Sarah Kliff, Published: November 15 at 9:00 am

Yesterday's news that President Obama was trying to reverse millions of health insurance cancellation notices can seem confusing - but it doesn't have to be!
Working with Post TV video producer Kate Tobey, we've put together this video that clocks in just under one minute (57 seconds, to be exact) and explains what, exactly, the president did yesterday.


Or, if you prefer your explainers in text form, you can check out this Q&A on how this policy works.

Sarah Kliff covers health policy, focusing on Medicare, Medicaid and the health reform law. She tries to fit in some reproductive health and education policy coverage, too, alongside an occasional hockey reference. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Politico, and the BBC. She is on Twitter and Facebook.

Read More

Michele Bachmann Considers Suing Obama Over Canceled Plans Fix

The Huffington Post  |  By Mollie Reilly Posted: 11/19/2013 4:31 pm EST  |  Updated: 11/20/2013 11:15 am EST  

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said Tuesday that she and several of her Republican collegaues in the House of Representatives are considering suing President Barack Obama for allowing plans canceled under the Affordable Care Act to be extended through 2014.
According to Politico, Bachmann, speaking at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, accused the president of violating the constitutional separation of powers by changing the health care law through administrative means, rather than consulting Congress.
"That's the essence of lawlessness and now it's our time to defend our prerogative," she said.
When asked about the lawsuit by MinnPost, Bachmann's office said a lawsuit was not imminent, but was under discussion.
"She and some of her colleagues have had discussions about the best recourse to put a stop to his unconstitutional actions," a spokesman said in a statement.
Last week, facing backlash over plan cancellations under the health care law, Obama asked insurers to let individuals whose plans had been cancelled to renew their plans another year.
"Insurers can extend current plans that otherwise would be canceled into 2014 and Americans whose plans have been canceled can choose to re-enroll in the same kind of plan," Obama said. "This fix won't solve every problem for every person, but it's going to help a lot of people. Doing more would require work with Congress."

The White House later offered legal justification for Obama's fix to the Washington Post's Greg Sargent.
“The Supreme Court held more than 25 years ago that agencies charged with administering statues have inherent authority to exercise discretion to ensure that their statutes are enforced in a manner that achieves statutory goals and are consistent with other administrative policies," a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said. "Agencies may exercise this discretion in appropriate circumstances, including when implementing new or different regulatory regimes, and to ensure that transitional periods do not result in undue hardship.”
 

Read More

Right still pushing ‘don’t enroll’ crusade 

11/15/13 11:15 AM

By Steve Benen

 

 

Of all the things conservatives have done to sabotage and derail the Affordable Care Act – and good lord, is this a long list – nothing seems quite as offensive as the right’s campaign to encourage those without coverage to stay uninsured, on purpose, to advance an ideological cause.

 

Regular readers may recall that we covered this quite a bit over the summer. Conservatives launched organized efforts to convince the uninsured to voluntarily “refuse to enroll” – because if fewer people participate in the system, costs would soar, and in theory the system could become unsustainable. Struggling families will of course be completely screwed in this scenario, but for the right, that’s a small price to pay – and a sacrifice they’re willing to see others make.

 

Eric Lach, referencing a report from the Alaska Dispatch, noted yesterday that the campaign is still very much underway. Indeed, it appears far-right Floridians are now lobbying Alaskans to stay uninsured on purpose.

The websites, dontenrollalaska.org and knowthefactsalaska.org, strike different tones and do not identify their creators, but they share similar layouts and were created on the same day in September. Facebook pages for both groups were also created on the same day, and, according to the Dispatch, television ads for both groups have been running during the same commercial breaks in Alaska.

 

And while the websites don’t identify the creators or backers of either group, a representative from the Alaska chapter of the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity told the Dispatch that a group called the Foundation for Government Accountability was “directly involved” in both websites.

 

Based in Naples, Fla., the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit that “promotes public policies that achieve limited, constitutional government and a robust economy that will be an engine for job creation across the states.” One of the foundation’s directors is Robert Levy, the chairman of the board of the Cato Institute, the Washington, D.C. think tank with a long and complicated relationship with the Koch brothers.

Even by the standards of contemporary conservatism, there’s something morally bankrupt about wealthy far-right forces targeting struggling Americans and telling them to go without access to basic health – on purpose – apparently because they don’t like the president.

 

The debate over health care reform has never been especially responsible or high-minded, but this is uniquely ugly.

 

Indeed, freshman Sen. Angus King, a mild-mannered independent from Maine, recently expressed his understandable contempt for those behind schemes like these.

 

“That’s a scandal – those people are guilty of murder in my opinion,” King told Brian Beutler in September. “Some of those people they persuade are going to end up dying because they don’t have health insurance. For people who do that to other people in the name of some obscure political ideology is one of the grossest violations of our humanity I can think of. This absolutely drives me crazy.”

Senator, you’re not the only one.

Explore:

Affordable Care Act, Alaska, Florida, Koch Brothers and Obamacare

Read More

The Obamacare Cancellation Notices You Haven’t Heard About

By Igor Volsky and Adam Peck on November 18, 2013 at 2:44 pm

As lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are endorsing legislation to allow Americans purchasing health care coverage in the individual market to stay in their existing insurance plans, they’re ignoring a far more pressing coverage problem in the 26 states that have yet to expand their Medicaid programs. There, five million working poor Americans could be denied access to affordable insurance altogether.
The stories of private market enrollees being forced to purchase more substantive insurance have animated politics for the last three weeks. But the failure of 25 states to expand Medicaid coverage to 133 percent of the federal poverty line, as envisioned by reform, is actually far more disastrous and undermines the promise of health care for the millions who earn “too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to qualify for Marketplace premium tax credits.”
Relying on analysis form the Kaiser Family Foundation, ThinkProgress compared the numbers of lower-income Americans who are denied coverage by GOP-controlled legislatures or governors to the public estimates of residents receiving cancellation notices in those states’ individual markets. Though the public debate has focused on the loss of individual private plans, the working poor are far more likely to go without insurance:

The problem plaguing recipients of cancellation notices is even less severe than the graphic above would suggest. Nationally, approximately 15 million people are purchasing individual plans, but just 5 million remain in those plans for a year or more — the majority switch to more comprehensive insurance.
Some percentage of these five million enrollees will be able to stay in their cancelled policies for longer, as state insurance commissioners and insurers adopt the Obama administration’s new flexibility rule, allowing existing plans to continue offering coverage for at least a year. But even the millions who do have to enroll in new policies in 2014 will do so with the aid of a tax credit and will pay less or a comparable price for more comprehensive coverage. Approximately 48 percent “of people now buying their own insurance would be eligible for a tax credit that would offset their premium,” Kaiser estimates. More than one million “will be eligible for Medicaid starting in 2014.” That leaves 2.1 million to 2.4 million Americans who are too wealthy to qualify for assistance and will have to pay more for insurance under the new system.
Compare that to the 5 million Americans who fall into the coverage gap. They are the working poor cashiers, cooks, nurses’ aides, waiters and waitresses who were intended to benefit the most under reform, yet will continue to struggle to afford coverage as a result of the GOP’s political calculations. “Blacks are disproportionately affected,” the New York Times recently reported, “largely because more of them are poor and living in Southern states. In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid.”
Yet the very same Republican lawmakers and conservative advocacy groups who have seized on the cancellation notices to argue that the law has failed are actively campaigning to prevent states from expanding public health insurance to these people. They claim that expansion would cost states millions, even though the federal government will pick up nearly all of the costs of coverage (100 percent for the first three years, phasing down to 90 percent in 2020 and all subsequent years), paying nearly 93 percent the cost over the next nine years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Read More

Insurance Companies Caught Ripping Off Customers and Blaming Obamacare

posted by Salvatore Aversa November 14, 2013


Republicans are continuing their attack of President Obama for policy holders that are being faced with cancellation through their insurance companies.  Most of the cancellations are due to “junk insurance,” which are plans that provided bare basic benefits, and if ever needed to be used for a serious illness, would be canceled.  There are gaps in the sensational headlines however that, while not as sexy, tell the rest of the story.
The Affordable Care Act sets standards.  Starting January 1, 2013, all new policies must meet a certain criteria in order to be legal.  Consumer standards are nothing new to the world.  Just like pieces of glass in our food or a car made out of sugar would not be legal to sell in United States, our insurance companies are finally being regulated so they can no longer advantage of consumers.
The people hold “junk insurance” policies that are being canceled are finding they are able to receive better insurance coverage, with more benefits, at the same price.  What’s more, with the available subsidies, many are finding their premium lower or even free.  Time after time, those who went on shows like Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity to decry ObamaCare finally went to the Marketplace to view their options, they found they were wrong.
How insurance companies tried to pull one over on their policy holders was to inform them that their policies would no longer be valid “because of ObamaCare,” and their plan will turn into a higher priced one, sometimes 10 times their old rate.  They conveniently left out, however, that they had other options and would be able to find a comparable priced policy on healthcare.gov or a correspondent state exchange.
Even this is not the full story.
The way the insurance companies informed their policy holders of their canceled policy, was to tell them to do nothing, and their old plan would automatically transfer to the new plan.  This deceived many in to believing they had to stick with their insurance company.  Some governors, I’m looking at you Rick Scott, required insurance companies that were canceling their plans to blame ObamaCare, even if that was not the reason at all.
All of this has led to stick shock and confusion among many.  Humana insurance in Kentucky is being sued for sending out 6,500 misleading letters doing just that.
Humana is neither alone nor the worst of the bunch, though.  According to ThinkProgress.org:
“Blue Cross successfully enticed tens of thousands of its individual policyholders to switch out of their grandfathered health plans and forever lose their protected grandfathered status,” states the lawsuit. “Blue Cross concealed information about the consequences of switching plans and intentionally misled its policyholders to encourage the replacement of grandfathered policies.”

In California, 900,000 customers were canceled from grandfathered plans, and no, that isn’t a typo.  The canceled plans were “grandfathered” in, meaning that, while outdated, the plans were still legal and did not need to be canceled.  The insurance companies were doing this strictly to try and forced customers in to higher priced plans, thus keeping them away from the marketplace, while putting the blame on the ACA.  This is referred to as “twisting,” and under state law is illegal.  The Superior Court is pushing back on the cancellations, signaling pushback from consumers.

The plaintiffs, Paul Simon, 39, and Catherine Corker, 63, of California say that they are among the customers that Anthem Blue Cross pressured to drop their grandfathered policies in 2011 without giving them all the facts about new Obamacare requirements that could raise the price of their plans in an effort to cut its own costs. Simon and Corker would have preferred to remain on the grandfathered plans permitted by the law, and are now asking the courts to block Anthem from canceling any more policies unless the company allows consumers to switch back into their grandfathered plans.
“This is about an insurance company manipulating the situation and concealing the facts,” said William Shernoff, an attorney for both the plaintiffs, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We are asking the court to give our clients and everybody else in the same situation the option of going back to their grandfathered policies.”

The letters that are being sent out by insurance companies are not proof that ObamaCare is a failure.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  Insurance companies are going to be insurance companies, and these actions just prove the need for extensive insurance reform.  There are talks of allowing junk plans to still exist.  If this happens, who will pick up the tab when one of these policy holders develops cancer, gets in a car accident, or anything else life throws at us?
Behind all of the crying of the Right and muted frustration on the Left is the desire for a single payer system.  The case on the Left is quite simple, we take care of our own.  There is a reason no developed country is moving towards our system of making an industry out of people’s health.  For the Right, they love to claim they are for small business.  What would help businesses more than not having to provide insurance?  Under a single payer system, everybody would be covered from birth to death by Medicaid.  The only thing holding the country back is the extreme paranoia on the Right.
Conservatism, by definition, means resisting change, and it is the Right that is currently hold us back from taking care of every citizen in the country.  Sad, for a party that claims to love god and family so much.  Then again, when have we ever expected consistency from a Republican.
Video
California Department of Insurance announces that major insurance providers are delaying policy cancellations.

About Author

Salvatore

Salvatore Aversa attended Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in History in 2009. He currently resides in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Nicole and their Chocolate Labrador Godiva.

Read More

Michele Bachmann on CNN: ‘I Lost My Health Insurance Under Obamacare’

 Michele Bachmann on CNN: ‘I Lost My Health Insurance Under Obamacare’

by Josh Feldman | 6:30 pm, November 14th, 2013
During a lively debate with Paul Begala on CNN, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann told Begala and Wolf Blitzer that she lost her health insurance under Obamacare and is going to have to sign up for the D.C. exchanges, but wants to wait until the website, with the glitches and information errors, gets properly fixed.

When asked by Blitzer if she’s going to sign up for the exchanges, Bachmann first said, “Are you kidding? I’m not gonna waste an hour on that thing!” before telling him “I lost my health insurance under Obamacare.”
She said her husband has some personal health issues and they need insurance, at which point Begala jumped in to say, “And now you can’t be denied! Thanks, Barack Obama!” Bachmann shot back, “We were just fine before.”
She explained to Blitzer that “we are forced to go on the website and purchase the health insurance plan from the D.C. health exchange.” And while she’s going to do it eventually, Bachmann said she doesn’t want to waste her “time and frustration” on a website that doesn’t even work yet.
Watch the video below, via CNN:


– –
Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

Read More

Republicans Begged For Patience After Awful 2006 Medicare Part D Rollout 

 

Read More

"Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out."

Steve Israel on Wednesday, November 6th, 2013 in an interview on MSNBC

Did Medicare Part D have the same rollout problems as the Obamacare online marketplaces?

Share this story:

Democrats are pleading for patience as they try to reassure the country that the online insurance marketplaces critical to President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul can be fixed.
Big programs have seen rocky rollouts only to achieve success later, they say. Their top example: the 2005 launch of Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan.
"Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out," Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told MSNBC on Nov. 6. "When things go wrong, there are two things we can do as a country. We can spend all our time figuring out who to blame, or we can spend all our time figuring out how to fix it."
Eight years after it went live, Medicare Part D is now widely popular among the seniors who use it.
Were there major problems with the rollout of Medicare Part D? And were they comparable to the challenges facing Obamacare? We decided to take a more a detailed look at its implementation.
Strangely similar
Let’s play a quick game: who made this statement?
"This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches."
A Democrat in 2013? Wrong! Actually, it was Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, about Medicare Part D in 2006.
The similarities between the two health care programs, both heralded as the signature domestic achievements of the presidents who signed them into law, are at times eerie. Supporters of the laws asked for time and promised a quick fix. Critics did not mince their words. Even the lingo -- words like "glitches" -- has been recycled.
A report documenting the history of Medicare Part D was released earlier this year by a group of health policy experts at the Center on Health Insurance Reform at Georgetown University. It highlighted several areas where Medicare Part D struggled in its implementation that sound extremely familiar.
For one thing, the Bush administration faced a difficult political battle to get the bill passed in 2003. That damaged public opinion of the law, making it a challenge to educate 43 million seniors on its nuances.
Enrollment in the law was set to begin in late 2005. In April of that year, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 27 percent of respondents understood the law, while only 21 percent favored it. (In a comparable Kaiser poll in April 2013, 35 percent viewed the Affordable Care Act favorably and less than half felt they were well-informed of its details.)
The Medicare site, meant to help seniors pick benefit plans, was supposed to debut Oct. 13, 2005, but it didn’t go live until weeks later in November. Even then, "the tool itself appeared to be in need of fixing," the Washington Post reported at the time.
"Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly," the Post reported. (Sensing a pattern?)
Once seniors began to enroll, problems persisted. According to the report, the online tools had "accuracy problems," and local organizations designated with assisting seniors "reported problems getting necessary and accurate information." Call centers provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services underestimated "the needed capacity to ensure that reliable answers could be provided" and "service representatives were not knowledgeable or failed to provide accurate information."
The Georgetown experts anticipated similar hiccups with the Affordable Care Act, noting that the country’s experience with Medicare Part D suggested "the experience will be far from perfect" and "problems were not always addressed as quickly or as thoroughly as critics would have liked, but fixes were usually found."
These days, nine in 10 seniors who utilize the program report they are satisfied with it.
"There’s really a striking amount of similarity even though this time it’s a far larger and daunting task. It’s a fair comparison," said Jack Hoadley at the Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute and one of the authors of the study. "Once something works its way through the problems, you forget the problems."
Still different
But there are important differences between Medicare Part D and the Affordable Care Act that make the challenges facing the exchanges different.
Because it was aimed at seniors and e-commerce was still relatively young, Medicare.gov was not intended to be the main hub for people to purchase and review plans, said David Brailer, the first National Coordinator for Health Information Technology under Bush.
"The issue with Medicare Part D is there were choices of 70 to 100 plans," Brailer said. "People were overwhelmed with the choices, with the options available and didn't know how to navigate and pick one. I don’t remember a conversation at all blaming any IT people. This was about how do you really navigate through all these choices."
Meanwhile, most people who logged on to healthcare.gov in the opening weeks couldn’t even get far enough to review what options were available.
Also, prescription drugs are a relatively small and easy-to-understand part of health care. Shopping for an insurance plan is more complicated.
"For those who did choose to enroll (in Medicare Part D) online, they checked out their options by typing in drugs they used, and once you did, you got an estimated out-of-pocket cost to make your comparisons. In the exchange world you have a full health care benefit to buy," Hoadley said. "The drug cost is relatively predictable, certainly a lot more predictable than overall health costs. The challenge for this website is a lot greater, probably by a significant amount of magnitude."
And there’s the political climate as well. When Medicare Part D passed, Democrats were not happy with the final bill and were critical of its botched rollout. But even then, they were generally supportive of its intended outcome and worked with constituents who had difficulty signing up or utilizing their new benefits.
When Medicare Part D faced early troubles, many blue states came to its rescue.
The New York Times reported in 2006 that "about 20 states, including California, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and all of New England, have announced that they will help low-income people by paying drug claims that should have been paid by the federal Medicare program."
By contrast, not a single Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act, and in the years since it passed, the party has made its repeal a top priority. In the states, many Republican governors have bucked the Medicaid expansion and rejected offers to build their own insurance marketplaces, putting greater pressure on the federal government.
Henry Aaron, a health policy expert at the Brookings Institute, said the opposition from Republicans has forced the Obama administration into a "two-front war" Bush did not have to fight.
"On the one hand, one must and should address the administrative problems that no one denies is plaguing the problem," he said. "But you’re also waging a war of public opinion against the hysterics of its critics."
Our ruling
Israel said, "Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out." There definitely were problems, and in some cases, the parallels between the prescription benefit program’s introduction and the Obamacare marketplaces are strikingly similar. While we also found some serious differences in the laws, we can’t find fault with Israel’s fairly general statement.
We rate his statement True.

Read More

Palin Asked for Her Alternative to ACA; She NAILS It!

Palin Asked for Her Alternative to ACA; She NAILS It!

by SemDemFollow

 

To all you haters out there:  You gotta hand it to Lady Blah-Blah.  Going on the lamestream media to face the wrath of the liberal machine, surely she knew that she was going to be asked about her plans for an alternative to the program she has been railing against for months.  And in typical Palin fashion, she studied hard and prepared a perfect response to the liberal, socialist/fascist health-care huggers.
Just kidding.
Warning:  you may need to play it several times to attempt to decipher the incoherent, rambling Palin gibberish session.  But as you learned in English class, the more words you use in a sentence, the more intelligent you sound.
I give you Palin, unedited.

Matt Lauer:  "What are we hearing from the Tea Party in terms of an absolute, realistic plan that can be an alternative to Obamacare?"

Without even thinking, Palin sprung into action:

Said Palin: "The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health-care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there's more competition, there's less tort reform threat, there's less trajectory of the cost increases, and those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It's the far left. It's President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care."

Got that? Matt Lauer, clearly not interested in deciphering any of that and not wanting to make her feel bad, simply said "L-L-Let's move on. Let's talk about Chris Christie? Boy, he had a massive win!"
Really, it was a softball interview and Matt Lauer was an embarrassment.  You can't appreciate how bad he was until you listen to him immediately after she said that ball of stupid.  She has had months to think of a coherent response to what an alternative would be (and its not like she has had any real work to do).  A REAL journalist would have called her out on what she said:   "What plans are you talking about that have been proposed over and over?  How is the ACA not free market?"
Or just "I'm sorry, I didn't understand any of that.  What?"
But asking for clarification wouldn't be fair to her fans.  After all, this isn't a real news program, its a talk show interview.  So let's move on to an easy question.  And don't you have a book to plug?
In fact, don't waste your time on the whole interview.  The today show is a joke.  Just enjoy 1:37-2:31.   You will pine for the intellect of Quayle and Bush.
Because as bad as our leaders can be, I am proud to say that at the very least they can put a coherent sentence together.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Read More

The Obamacare 'scandal' you haven't heard about

 

 

 

Few Bible Belt pastors mention 
what's in their backyard, millions 
of poor people trapped in the Obamacare 
“coverage gap.”

November 8th, 2013

10:01 AM ET

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) – The Rev. Timothy McDonald gripped the pulpit with both hands, locked eyes with the shouting worshippers, and decided to speak the unspeakable.
The bespectacled Baptist minister was not confessing to a scandalous love affair or the theft of church funds. He brought up another taboo: the millions of poor Americans who won’t get health insurance beginning in January because their states refused to accept Obamacare.
McDonald cited a New Testament passage in which Jesus gathered the 5,000 and fed them with five loaves and two fishes. Members of his congregation bolted to their feet and yelled, “C’mon preacher” and “Yessir” as his voice rose in righteous anger.
“What I like about our God is that he doesn’t throw people away,” McDonald told First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta during a recent Sunday service. “There will be health care for every American. Don’t you worry when they try to cast you aside.  Just say I’m a leftover for God and leftovers just taste better the next day!”
McDonald’s congregation cheered, but his is a voice crying in the wilderness. He’s willing to condemn state leaders whose refusal to accept Obamacare has left nearly 5 million poor Americans without health coverage. But few of the most famous pastors in the Bible Belt will join him.

Joel Osteen? Bishop T.D. Jakes, and other prominent pastors throughout the South?
Like McDonald, they preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline yet the poor can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere. All declined to comment.
When people talk about the Affordable Care Act, most focus on the troubled launch of its website. But another complication of the law has received less attention: a “coverage gap” that will leave nearly 5 million poor Americans without health care, according to a Kaiser Health Foundation study.
Learn more from Kaiser about the coverage gap in states that refused Obamacare
The coverage gap was created when 25 states refused to accept the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. The people who fall into this gap make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to qualify for Obamacare subsidies in their state insurance exchanges. If they lived elsewhere, they would probably get insurance. But because they live in a state that refused the new health care law, they likely will remain among the nation’s uninsured poor after Obamacare coverage kicks in come January.
The coverage gap has been treated as a political issue, but there is a religious irony to the gap that has been ignored.
Most of the people who fall into the coverage gap live in the Bible Belt, a 14-state region in the South stretching from North Carolina to Texas and Florida. The Bible Belt is the most overtly Christian region in the country, filled with megachurches and pastors who are treated like celebrities.  All but two Bible Belt states have refused to accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
Should Bible Belt pastors say anything publicly about the millions of poor people in their communities stranded by the coverage gap? Is it anti-Christian for state leaders to turn down help for the people Jesus called “the least of these"? Or should pastors say nothing publicly about such issues because they are strictly political?
CNN's Sanjay Gupta explains who falls into the coverage gap
Who speaks for the poor in the coverage gap?
When these questions were sent to many of the most popular pastors in the Bible Belt, they hit a wall of silence. Virtually no prominent pastor wanted to talk about the uninsured poor in their midst.

Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest church in the nation, declined to be interviewed about the subject. So did Bishop T.D. Jakes. Their megachurches are both in Texas, the state with the nation’s highest number of people without health insurance.

Max Lucado, the best-selling Christian author who is a minister at a church in Texas, declined to speak; Charles Stanley, the Southern Baptist pastor in Georgia whose In Touch Ministries reaches millions around the globe, declined to speak; Ed Young Sr. and Ed Young Jr., a father and son in Texas who pastor two of the fastest-growing churches in the nation, also declined to speak. 

Bishop T.D. Jakes declined to talk about the millions of poor people stranded in the “coverage gap."

The list goes on.
The silence is not hard to understand. Obamacare is a polarizing political issue in the Bible Belt. A pastor who publicly weighs in on the subject could divide his or her congregation or risk their job. And some prominent pastors like Osteen are popular in part because they  do not alienate fans by taking political stands.
The Rev. Phil Wages, senior pastor Winterville First Baptist Church in Georgia and a blogger, was one of the few Bible Belt ministers willing to speak on the subject.
He says he won’t preach about the coverage gap created by the state’s rejection of the Medicaid expansion because he has what he calls theological differences with the thrust of the new health care law.
Wages says the Bible teaches that the care of orphans, widows and the sick are given to the church, not to the government. Early Christians were the first to create hospitals, orphanages and hospices.
“I have an issue with the government coming in to get money through me - through taxes - to take care of people, when my argument is that I should be free to give to charities or to my church in order to take care of the sick and destitute,” he says.
Wages says he has no doubt that lack of health insurance is a monumental problem, and that many people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control. Yet there is no New Testament example of Jesus trying to shape public policy on behalf of the poor.
“I do not see any biblical precedent where Jesus ever went to Herod or Pilate and said you should be taking care of the poor,” Wages says. “Jesus told his disciples to take care of the poor and the apostles said the same thing to the early church.”

Wages’ position is impractical and unbiblical, says Ronald Sider, a longtime advocate for the poor and author of “The Scandal of Evangelical Politics."
Churches and charities don’t have enough resources to take care of an estimated 48 million Americans who don’t have health care. The Bible is filled with examples of God's fury over economic oppression of the poor, which Christians should regard as scandalous, he says.

“If you are not sharing God’s concern for the poor, it raises huge questions about whether you are a Christian at all,” he says about pastors who say nothing about the uninsured poor.
“As God’s spokespersons, you ought to be talking about God’s concern for the poor as much as God. In the richest nation in world history, it’s contradictory to have millions without health insurance.”
“It absolutely stinks”
The coverage gap may inspire a religious debate, but for its victims the issue is raw and personal.
A recent New York Times article about the coverage gap revealed that many of its victims are the working poor: cooks, cashiers, sales clerks and waitresses.
“These are people who are working people but they haven’t been able to afford health insurance or their employers don’t offer it and they’re stuck,” says Andy Miller, editor of Georgia Health News, a nonprofit news organization that covers health news in the state. “A lot of these folks have chronic health conditions.”
They are people like Shelley “Myra” Mitchell, a single mom with four children who makes $9 an hour working at a Chick-fil-A in Georgia. She makes $18,000 a year – too much for Georgia’s existing Medicaid program, but not enough to qualify for subsidies to sign up for Obamacare’s insurance marketplace in Georgia.
Mitchell’s voice grew edgy with frustration when asked to describe her health needs. She rang up about $20,000 in emergency room bills because she has no health insurance. She can’t afford to get pap smears, go to the dentist or get surgery for a two-year-old hernia. She can’t take medication for her depression and anxiety because she can’t afford it.
She thought she could get help under Obamacare but recently learned she can’t because Georgia did not accept the law’s Medicaid expansion.
“It stinks,” she says. “I’ve been dealing with this hernia for two years now, and I can’t get anyone to help me because I don’t have health insurance. It absolutely stinks.”
Why pastors should stay silent about the coverage gap
Mitchell’s plight may stink. But at what point should a pastor go public on such a complex issue, and what could he or she actually say?
Two prominent evangelical pastors openly wrestled with those questions.
Andy Stanley is one of the most popular evangelical pastors in the nation. He is the senior pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, a megachurch with at least 33,000 members. He is also the author of the forthcoming book “How to be Rich,” which urges Christians to be "rich in good deeds" instead of wealth. His church recently announced that it donated $5.2 million to Atlanta charities and provided another 34,000 volunteer hours.

Joel Osteen has the largest church in America. He also declined to speak about the coverage gap.

Stanley says the coverage gap disturbs him. The church cannot handle the needs of millions of uninsured people alone and should quit taking shots at government involvement, he says. But he adds that it’s not anti-Christian for political leaders in states like Georgia to turn down the Medicaid expansion for the poor.
“If you really want to know how concerned someone is for the poor ask them what percentage of their personal money they give to organizations that help the poor,” he says. “Ask them how much time they give to organizations that help the poor.”
Stanley says it would be difficult for any pastor to talk about the Medicaid expansion without addressing the entire law.
“I tried to imagine a scenario where I urged people to write our governor encouraging him to reconsider his decision regarding the expansion of Medicaid for the poor,” he says. “As I imagined that, I got the feeling that by the time I finished explaining the issue, people’s eyes would be glazed over.”
Pastors who don't preach one way or the other on Medicaid expansion aren't callous or apathetic, says Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. They may be suspicious of a bigger government and skeptical of whether this move will solve the problem.
“The Bible calls on Christians to answer the cries of the poor,” he says. “All Christians must do that. The question of the Medicaid expansion is a question of how we do that. I don’t hear many people arguing that we shouldn’t care about the plight of the poor when it comes to medical care. The question is a genuine debate about the role of the state.”
Moore says some people have a “utopian view” of what state power can accomplish.
“Government programs sometimes encourage dependency, unintentionally break down family structures, and become unsustainable financially,” Moore says.
Bob Coy, pastor of Calvary Chapel megachurch in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, wondered aloud about what he could, and should, say.
Florida, which has the second highest number of people without health insurance behind Texas, has not accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
Coy says he hasn’t spoken publicly about poor people missing health coverage in Florida. But he has called the governor to get more information.
“I’m not an activist guy. I don’t tell the government what to do. I am a church guy. I teach the Bible.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care for the poor, though, Coy says. He grew up in a poor family that couldn’t afford to go to the dentist. His church also spends a large percentage of its budget on serving the poor.
Coy says he is suspicious of large-scale programs that are publicly funded because they are often abused.
“One side of our society is saying, 'We need this,' while on the other side is saying, 'This isn’t fair and isn’t going to work.’ So how should a pastor, who has a heart to help people, respond?”
Why pastors should speak out
The Rev. Shane Stanford’s answer to Coy is simple: Talk about justice for the poor like Jesus did.
Stanford is the senior pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Memphis and author of “Five Stones: Conquering Your Giants.”
He is also HIV-positive. He was born a hemophiliac and contracted the virus when he was 16 during treatment for his illness.
Stanford says he publicly speaks out about the millions of Americans stranded without health coverage because he knows how it feels. Once, after heart surgery, he was getting a transfusion when a nurse came into the room and pulled the needle out of his arm because she said he had maxed out his health insurance coverage.
He says standing up for people in the coverage gap is a matter of justice.
“Sometimes pastors have to tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”
Stanford ignores fellow pastors who counsel him to be silent about his state and others that refused to accept the Medicaid expansion.
“They say you have to be careful talking about political issues,” he says. “When I look at their lives, part of me thinks they never had that needle yanked out of their arm.”
Conservative pastors who urge their colleagues to avoid politics are hypocrites, says James Cone, a prominent theologian who has spent much of his career writing books condemning white churches for what he says is their indifference to social justice.
“When their own interests are involved, they are very much involved in politics,” Cone says. “Same-sex marriage and abortion – they have no trouble politically opposing them.”
Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, says a nation is defined by how it treats its most vulnerable members. But there is an entrenched hostility to poor people in America that goes unchallenged by some white, conservative Christians, he says.
“When poor people get food stamps, they get mad,” Cone says. “When the rich and corporations get tax breaks and pay no taxes, they don’t say anything.”
McDonald, the pastor who spoke out on behalf of poor people from his Atlanta church, says Jesus provided universal health care. The Gospels are filled with accounts of Jesus healing marginalized people.
“He did it for free,” McDonald says of Jesus’ healing. “The reason the crowds gathered around Jesus primarily was for healing. People want wholeness.”
Perhaps the gap between Bible Belt pastors who say nothing about the uninsured poor and those who do is also rooted in history. 
Conservative Christians have traditionally emphasized providing charity to the poor - soup kitchens, donations to impoverished people in undeveloped countries - while progressive Christians have blended charity with calls for public policy changes that help the poor.
The distinction between both approaches was distilled by a memorable quote from the late Brazilian Roman Catholic Bishop Dom Helder Camara, who said: "When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor they call me a communist."
That may be changing as a new generation of evangelicals rise in the Bible Belt and elsewhere. One minister who speaks to them is the Rev. Timothy Keller, a conservative Christian author who pastors a megachurch in New York.
Keller is the author of “Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just,” a popular book that argues that evangelicals should do more than preach personal salvation; they must “speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves.” He is a role model for many younger evangelicals.
“God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to ‘do justice.’ ’’
CNN.com recently contacted Keller to see if he would talk about "Generous Justice" and how it might apply to health care and the poor. Did he think pastors in Bible Belt states should say anything publicly on behalf of poor people being denied basic medical insurance? His publicist said she would contact Keller with the request.
Several days later, she returned with Keller’s answer.
He had no comment. 

John Blake - CNN Writer

Read More