When Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, told HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that he worried Obamacare’s implementation was headed for a “train wreck,” she publicly promised to bring him into the loop.
Turns out that Sebelius kept her word and has been giving Baucus one-on-one briefings on the law’s implementation every other week since his very public April 17 complaint about a lack of information. (Her staff promised synchronized press briefings implementation and has since declined to provide those.) The White House also has chipped in, sending Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to brief Baucus on the healthcare overhaul’s implementation (along with other issues) on alternating weeks from Sebelius’ briefings, according to his staff.
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The CMS has a growing health insurance exchange problem.
The authors of the 2010 federal healthcare overhaul never intended the federal government to operate most health insurance exchanges. But as the nation gears up for an expected 7 million new beneficiaries to make use of exchanges — about 85% of whom will require complex subsidies — 26 states have left their operations to the federal government.
And it’s beginning to look like the number of states hankering for a federal takeover could grow. A number of state-led exchanges are way behind schedule.
Are the feds up to the task, given that running something for more than half the country is a lot more complex than launching any one state exchange? Experts say local insurance market variations will stop the federal exchange builders from using cookie cutter economies of scale.
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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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A new study from the left-leaning Urban Institute says the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act relies on market-based principles to achieve its goals, which opponents of the law say they find puzzling.
Released Friday, the brief report from authors Randall Bovbjerg and Stan Dorn (PDF) starts with the premise that although critics of the 2010 law refer to it as a government takeover of the U.S. healthcare system, it is actually based on pro-competitive reforms reminiscent of the Reagan era.
“The argument that the ACA is market-based when the opponents say the market can't address healthcare is perplexing,” says Sean Riley, director of the health and human services task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a not-for-profit organization in Washington centered on free-enterprise principles and federalism at the state level.
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