Elections have consequences, right?
Although Democrats and their allied organizations have spent the weeks since the Nov. 6 election crowing that President Barack Obama's re-election decisively endorsed his approach to healthcare policy, some polls might cloud that picture.
For instance, a new Gallup poll taken after the election found a first-time outright majority opposing the federal government ensuring all Americans have health insurance. Fifty-four percent of Americans opposed such a government role, while 44% supported it.
The opposition to such federal action has grown 23 percentage points since 2000, while support for it plummeted by 22 percentage points. The drop in support for a federal health coverage role included a 10 percentage point decline since just 2008.
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Affordable health insurance is part of the “middle-class bargain” that President Barack Obama is promising all Americans if he's elected to another term on Nov. 6.
That message was included in The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security (PDF), a 20-page booklet of second-term plans that the president's campaign released Tuesday along with a new video ad. Pledging to build an “economy from the middle class out,” the agenda offers the president's objectives for American manufacturing, small business, education, healthcare, retirement security and the deficit. Not surprisingly, the section on healthcare touts the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and how the administration would ensure the controversial law's continued implementation in a second term.
“It is up to you whether we go back to a healthcare system that lets insurance companies decide who to cover, when to cover it, whether they can drop you from your coverage whenever you need it most, or whether we keep moving forward with a law that is already cutting costs and covering more people and saving lives,” the president says in it.
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Did President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney miss an opportunity in Tuesday night's debate to attract the much-coveted female voting bloc by barely touching on healthcare issues? Or should moderator Candy Crowley take responsibility for that instead?
Ilisa Halpern Paul, managing government relations director at the law firm Drinker, Biddle and Reath watched the 90-minute debate with her colleague Jodie Curtis, who serves as government relations director at the firm. When I spoke with them late Tuesday, they both expressed surprise that the town hall discussion didn't include one direct question on healthcare.
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Here's to diving below the overheated healthcare rhetoric.
It's widely assumed that tonight's vice presidential debate will be a health policy wonkfest (with zingers) that submerges deeply into the numerous conflicting approaches of the two presidential tickets. Specifically, the debate likely will focus on Medicare due to the significant changes the Obama administration has made to the program and because of the overhaul proposed by the Romney-Ryan ticket.
But there are a couple health policy questions that each campaign has rarely addressed that could give some insight and move beyond the rhetoric of which side is “ending Medicare as we know it.”
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Did the door to compromise close for Catholic hospitals this week?
Even as the Obama administration attempts a delicate negotiation with Catholic hospitals and other religious-run institutions over the healthcare law's birth control mandate, speech after speech at the Democrats' nominating convention showed little interest in compromising on the issue.
“We ensured life-saving preventive care and the full range of reproductive services are now covered,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) in her primetime convention speech in reference to the inclusion of birth control within preventive services that all insurance policies are required to cover.
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Fifty shades of Medicare.
The addition of Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential ticket has led President Barack Obama to expand his Medicare focus on the stump. But his Medicare comments include an unexpected twist.
Conventional wisdom in Washington was that the selection of Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee and author of two budget blueprints that would add an insurance subsidy component to Medicare, would open the Republican ticket to charges of trying to undermine Medicare. The healthcare program for seniors is traditionally a third-rail issue in Washington that politicians from both parties have studiously avoided. And now, Mitt Romney appeared to be following Ryan right onto the tracks.
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