Some food for thought.

Source

Gee does that mean that Sarah Palin WAS right?

The GOP's Obamacare sabotage summed up in one chart.

Click here for larger version.

Courtesy of TPM: The GOP's relentless assault on Obamacare hasn't succeeded in repealing or defunding the law, but it has managed to do something: prevent a lot of uninsured Americans from getting health insurance. 

With three months of Obamacare enrollment completed, the effect of the Republican intransigence on health care reform can be seen in new data compiled by Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and director of the Scholars Strategy Network. 

Though it is a federal law, the Affordable Care Act is a program that relies on states. States had the opportunity to set up its own health insurance marketplace, and states were heavily incentivized to expand Medicaid to cover their poor -- though the choice was up to them. 

Largely as a result of the entrenched opposition of state GOP leaders, only 14 states (plus D.C.) have built their own marketplaces, and just half the states decided to expand Medicaid in the first year. Heading into 2014, those two state-based decisions have created a huge disparity between states under the law. 

Skocpol has quantified that disparity in the chart above. She's attempted to measure how much progress different groups of states -- those that both expanded Medicaid and built their marketplace, for example -- have made in signing their residents up for private coverage and Medicaid under Obamacare. 

The difference between the top and the bottom groups tells the whole story. Those states, like California and New York, that have fully bought into the ACA have performed exceedingly well in enrolling their citizens. They're already 43 percent of their way toward their projected Medicaid enrollment, as calculated by Skocpol, and 37 percent of the way there on private coverage.

Ultimately the people who suffer the most from the Republican obstructionism are the people living in the states where they are in charge. (And that includes me up here in Alaska as well of course.)

The Republicans were hoping to use the website troubles and cherry picked, exaggerated, stories of people losing their health care or having to pay higher premiums and deductibles to defeat the Democrats in 2014.

But I think that the Democrats have a very good shot at using their refusal to cooperate with the ACA, and their attempts to sabotage it at every opportunity, against them.

In the end it may all come down to who reaches the voters the best. The GOP with their lies and exaggerations, or the Democrats with their facts and truthful stories of the benefits of the ACA, and how much more there would be if not for the Republicans they are running against.

“I just instantly burst into tears.” Woman describes her emotions when she discovered that through the ACA she would only have to pay $3.19 a month.

Courtesy of NBC News:  

It took two months, weekly visits to the jammed-up federal website and a half-dozen phone calls, but JoAnn Smith finally got health insurance Monday. It’ll only cost her $3.19 a month to cover herself and her husband. 

“I just instantly burst into tears,” she says. 

Smith started working on getting insurance even before the federal website, HealthCare.gov, opened Oct. 1, pre-registering to get a headstart on the process. But, like millions of other Americans who tried, she was stymied by the website’s glitches. 

She told NBC News her story last week, and as of Friday, a week after the federal website was supposed to have been much improved, Smith still could not get all the way through the process. 

Smith, a 60-year-old medical transcriptionist in Clearwater, Fla., must use the federal website to buy health insurance because Florida opted not to run its own. She’s been without health insurance for years and had been looking forward to getting subsidized coverage for herself and her husband Eric, 56, who’s unemployed. 

The 2010 Affordable Care Act aims to get health insurance to the 16 percent of Americans who don’t have any by helping some buy health insurance on new websites, and by widening Medicaid benefits to others. People have until Dec. 23 to sign up for health insurance that starts on the first possible day, Jan. 1. They have until March 31 to sign up and avoid paying a tax. 

Smith’s employer doesn’t provide health insurance. “They took a vote at the company and people wanted more money in their pockets,” she says. And business has been thin. “I have had four paycuts in one year,” says Smith, who estimates she will earn $23,000 this year for her 40-hour a week job. 

This makes her eligible for a hefty federal subsidy.

The current Right Wing strategy is to use horror stories about higher premiums and cancelled policies to attack Obamacare. That is why it is very important for those of us who are supporters, to promote positive anecdotes, and stories of real success for those signing up though the website and exchange.

I have to say that a few more stories like this and the Right Wing is going to have NOTHING at their disposal to convince the American people that Obamacare is a bad thing.

And as a matter of fact the President and the ACA's approval ratings are already returning to the pre-rollout levels.

Let's face it the Right Wing is fighting a losing battle here, the only question is how many bodies will they pile up before finally admitting defeat? 

Republicans won't have Obamacare to kick around for much longer part deux.

President Obama feeling the love from Californians. A state where Obamacare is working quite well.

Courtesy of Salon:  

The confluence of two pieces of news last week will place Republicans at a moral crossroads — either by this weekend, or whenever Healthcare.gov can legitimately be described as a “working” website. 

The first came from Jeffrey Zients — the Obama administration point person in charge of fixing Healthcare.gov — who told reporters on Friday that the site will be able to handle 50,000 users at a time and 800,000 users a day by the the end of next week. That’s double the current capacity, and right in time for an expected surge in demand just before the end of the year. 

The second came from the pro-reform group Families USA, which examined options available to 15 million people who are currently covered on the individual market (many of whose policies have been canceled and will lapse by the end of the year) under the Affordable Care Act. 

According to Families USA, over 70 percent of those currently insured will either qualify for premium tax credits on state-based insurance exchanges, or become newly eligible for Medicaid coverage under the healthcare law. 

“Nationally, 71 percent of people in the individual market under age 65 have incomes at or below 400 percent of poverty,” according to Families USA. “Under the Affordable Care Act, these people are income-eligible for financial help to purchase an insurance plan, either through new premium tax credit subsidies or through expanded Medicaid.” 

Together that combines all of the ingredients any marketplace needs to be successful: 

1) An appealing product. 

2) A large population of motivated shoppers. 

3) Affordable prices, either by design or by discount. 

4). A fast-moving checkout counter. 

For the past couple of months, the Healthcare.gov failure allowed Republicans to ignore the moral imperative they face to direct these constituents toward new options. The cash registers aren’t working, they could tell themselves, so what good would we be doing by directing people to the market anyhow. This was always dodgy logic, but it enjoyed a real sheen of plausibility. And that’s why Republicans have spent most of November soliciting Obamacare horror stories, rather than trying to help the narrators. 

A working site that can service nearly a million people a day destroys that excuse. Some conservative groups have been craven and reckless enough to actively discourage people from enrolling in Affordable Care Act coverage. Elected Republicans have generally used their influence more subtly, by drawing attention to the hassles and supposed dangers of using Healthcare.gov. Manipulation vs. direct appeal. They’ve also maligned an administrative solution President Obama devised that will allow carriers in some states to reissue canceled policies. 

But the real fix for 70 percent (or so) of people whose policies have been canceled is to get new, subsidized coverage through exchanges, or to enroll in Medicaid. Once Healthcare.gov is working at high capacity, they’ll owe people with canceled coverage more than just the play-acting they’ve offered for the past month.

A picture courtesy of Dennis Zaki who says these are everywhere in California.

There has always been a shelf life for the Republican attacks against the ACA, and the website problems certainly extended it, but once those problems are worked out the GOP will have to come up with a different strategy to use to attack Democrats and this President. 

Gee I can hardly wait to see what that will be.

Well it looks like it won't be too much longer before the Republicans won't have Obamacare to kick around anymore.

Courtesy of the LA Times:  

Despite the disastrous rollout of the federal government's healthcare website, enrollment is surging in many states as tens of thousands of consumers sign up for insurance plans made available by President Obama's health law. 

A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November, according to state officials. 

"What we are seeing is incredible momentum," said Peter Lee, director of Covered California, the nation's largest state insurance marketplace, which accounted for a third of all enrollments nationally in October. California — which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month — nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month. 

Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, are outpacing their enrollment estimates, even as states that depend on the federal website lag far behind. In Minnesota, enrollment in the second half of October ran at triple the rate of the first half, officials said. Washington state is also on track to easily exceed its October enrollment figure, officials said. 

You know whenever I see statistics like this I  cannot help but think of all of the millions of Americans who could have been helped to get health care if only those Republican governors had allowed the expansion of Medicaid in their states and had set up state exchanges of their own.

I just hope that the people in their states are paying attention, and are prepared to punish them come election day.