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In a press release announcing her vote in favor of repealing the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Kelly Ayotte repeats the discredited claim that PolitiFact calls the "2010 Lie of the Year."
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) today voted for a key measure to move forward on a full repeal of the federal takeover of health care – which Senate Democrats blocked by a vote of 47 to 51. [Emphasis added]
Politifact is the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checking project of the St. Petersburg (FL) Times. They analyzed the Republican talking point that President Obama's health care reform represents a government takeover of health care and concluded succinctly: "The phrase is simply not true."
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
[T]he majority of Americans will continue to get coverage from private insurers. And it will bring new business for the insurance industry: People who don"t currently have coverage will get it, for the most part, from private insurance companies.
The website for the New Hampshire Executive Council explains, "Councilors are elected to serve as advocates for the people." Here's what our advocates had to say when asked to begin the process of setting up a state health insurance exchange required by the Affordable Care Act.
Councilor Christopher Sununu, R-Newfields:
"It makes no sense to do this at this time, against the exchange and Obamacare," he said. "No one has yet to prove to me even remotely closely that either would work . . . It's a debacle."
Councilor David Wheeler, R-Milford:
"I think it's really clear that it really ain't going to happen as written, and based on the U.S. House vote, it will not be funded as written," he said. "It's stupid to study and create rules for the exchanges until we know exactly what's going to happen."
Insurance Commissioner Roger Sevigny promises to spend more time with the Executive Council to explain the implications of the proposal. Says Sununu, "I feel I know everything I need to know."
Yesterday, Dean noted that House Speaker O'Brien and House Majority Leader Bettencourt had called on the Executive Council to block the Department of Insurance from beginning the process to implement federal health care reforms.
Today, Pindell reports they won — at least temporarily. Insurance Commissioner Roger Sevigny withdrew the two implementation proposals from consideration by the Executive Council.
Commissioner Roger Sevigny said he should have explained more of the implications of these requests to the council and plans to bring these requests back to the council at another time.
He said that while he heard concerns over the requests and a Florida federal judge's decision that the heath care law was unconstitutional, the ruling was not a factor.
No doubt prodded by their expensive proxy governor, House Speaker Bill O'Brien and Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt are trying to make political hay over the news from Florida:
Following yesterday's ruling by a federal judge that struck down President Obama's health care reform law, House Speaker William O'Brien and House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt called upon the Executive Council to block a contract on tomorrow's agenda that would have the state Department of Insurance begin the process to implement the federal law in New Hampshire.
...
House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt
"Yesterday's federal court decision makes clear that Obamacare is an unconstitutional federal overreach that restricts our freedoms by forcing individuals to purchase health care or face serious penalties.
What's missing from this release is what O'Brien and Bettencourt plan on doing for Granite Staters like Hillary St. Pierre (remember her?) who are counting on this law to stay alive:
Today, President Obama's health care reform legislation was ruled unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, saying Congress overstepped its authority to regulate commerce.
Andrew Cohen says, don't lose any sleep over it.
Both sides will thus likely overreact to Judge Vinson's ruling — much as both sides overreacted to last month's similar ruling by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia. This is inevitable, I suppose, with so many people watching these cases so closely as they make their way up to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, however, the laser focus upon lower-court vote-counting detracts from the only judicial vote-counting that ultimately counts here. Judge Vinson could issue a virtual Tea Party manifesto Monday — and he might — but it wouldn't ultimately make a bit of difference in your life or mine if it doesn't earn the support of at least five Supreme Court justices.
So the Joint Fiscal Committee will be discussing whether to accept $2 million in federal funding to implement health insurance reform this morning. If they don't, it's completely wrong. That federal money is OUR money, money NH taxpayers sent to the US government with our federal tax payments. New Hampshire needs that money to follow the law. This is not the 1830s, for goodness sake! Nullification was used to keep human slavery going, now it is being used to keep people slaves to a broken health care system.
One million dollars is to set up an exchange, the other million is to help the state investigate premium increases and make sure they are justified.
The folks at the NH Department of Insurance put a great deal of effort into explaining the importance of accepting these grants to the new majority.
Leslie Ludtke (of the state Insurance Department):"The education really was to ensure that we understood, they understood, the federal government understood, that it was a common understanding all around that by accepting the million in funding for the first phase of these grants that the state of NH was making no commitments relative to implementing federal reform."
Fiscal Committee Chairman Ken Weyler says he's comfortable with the "no strings attached" approach that Insurance Commissioner Roger Sevigny described to him.
Representative Ken Weyler:"He feels that we need to be prepared. Even if Obamacare is canceled, he would do it on a contract, so that if something happens between giving him the money and Obamacare going away, he'd be able to cancel the contract."
In any event, if the state doesn't design an exchange, it will have to accept a boilerplate fed version.
State Senator Ray White (R-Bedford) and Rep. Ken Weyler (R-Kingston) both refer to "Obamacare". That's just playing to their base. But go ahead, party like it's 2009. Only 18% of Americans want reform repealed.
While the NH House is entertaining all kinds of bills against federal health care reform, from taking us out of the mandates to joining the lawsuit against it, Vermont is moving ahead toward a single payer system that is expected to save a half a billion dollars in its first year.
The state of Vermont commissioned Dr. William Hsiao, A Harvard economist and health care system expert to come up with a plan for further health care reform. Hsiao designed the current health care system in Taiwan and several other countries. He and a team of 20 researchers came up with some plans and reported on them to a joint session of the state legislature.
According to Hsiao, a public-private hybrid would be the best solution for Vermont going forward.
It would be paid for with payroll contributions from employers and workers. That, Hsiao said, is the "most viable and most practical" financing mechanism. The plan would produce health care savings of 8 to 12 percent in the first year, allowing the state to expand coverage to all Vermonters, add additional primary care physicians in the state and improve some hospitals, he said.
Low wage employers and workers would be exempt. Hsiao said most employers and employees would not be paying more than they are presently paying in premiums. Common vital benefits would be provided and administered by a single entity with standardized payments to providers. It would include dental for children and vision care for everyone.
The system would not be run solely by the government, according to Hsiao. Administration of the system should be put out to bid every few years, he said, and a private or quasi-government entity could administer the system, he said
Hsiao was clear to enumerate obstacles to implementing the system, including the fact that federal waivers to allow it will not be available until 2017.
He says the plan would create 5000 jobs in Vermont and improve the economy as a whole
"When you can reduce the health care costs and health insurance premiums for employers and employees, the employer will increase the cash wage of the worker," Hsiao said. "When health premiums go down, the savings will be passed on to the workers as higher wages. With higher wages, the workers will consume more in Vermont. They may buy more clothing. They may go to the movie more often, or the restaurant."
And a Republican Representative from Bennington is actually looking at ways to make the plan work.
"I think everyone is kind of digesting the overview," Morrissey said. "There's probably a lot of details within it that may not be clear."
However, she said lawmakers in her committee across the political spectrum are asking important questions and looking to work together.
Frank Guinta brags that he's a co-sponsor of the House bill to repeal last year's health care reform legislation. It's so important, he writes, "I made it my very first piece of legislation in Congress." Guinta's first speech on the floor of the House will be to speak in favor of the bill.
It's not an auspicious start for the freshman Congressman.
Health care reform's loudest critics and those who have the most to gain if it is repealed -- including the industry's biggest trade groups and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- do not support repeal.
To be sure, the Chamber, AHIP, and like-minded powerhouses haven't suddenly grown fond of the Affordable Care Act. Rather, they're ignoring the House Republican's effort because they see it as a vanity exercise -- the new GOP House majority is just going through the motions, hoping to satisfy, at least temporarily, far-right activists who don't seem to understand what it is they don't like about the health care law anyway.
Jennifer Keefe, at Fosters.com, has a very informative article about how the federal health care reform law supports and strengthens existing mental health parity laws at the state and federal level.
The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, passed in 2008, is to bring coverage of mental health into line with coverage of medical and surgical care. As of now, small businesses with 50 or fewer employees and individual policies are exempt, but this will change. In 2014, the creation of health care exchanges are set to bring the costs of premiums down, thus enabling more people to be covered.
But New Hampshire isn't expected to see much change from this aspect of the parity act in part because it already has an existing state parity law that doesn't contain an exemption for small businesses and because it doesn't have as many larger health insurance agencies as other states that would participate in the exchanges, according to state Department of Health and Human Services Associate Commissioner Nancy Rollins.
Peter Newbould, director of Congressional and Political Affairs for the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. says many New Hampshire citizens will benefit from the act, about a half a million who are in state regulated or self insured plans.
However, as Republicans now hold a supermajority in the legislature - many of whom campaigned against the health care reform law and vowed to repeal it - some mental health officials are closely watching the upcoming session for any negative impact on the parity law.
Hopefully the new majority realizes most citizens do not support repeal of the federal health care reform law.
For another take on the subject, read Ed Kirby's column in the UL.
The UL today has a column by Ezra Klein titled "How could health care reform look? Check Massachusetts". In it, Klein shows how the mandate in the MA plan works. He also gives credit where credit is due, reviewing how in 2006, Republican Governor Mitt Romney hailed the measure. Klein goes on to say that Democrats saw this and used the MA law as the basis for national reform, assuming that a law signed by a Republican governor would garner Republican votes in Congress.
The theory was wrong. An approach to universal coverage that represented "health insurance for everyone without a government takeover" when it was signed by a Republican governor in Massachusetts was spun by congressional Republicans as the missing final chapter of "The Communist Manifesto" when Democrats tried to scale it nationally.
The Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services released a survey done by an independent group that showed 98% of Massachusetts residents are now insured, including 99% of the state's children. The numbers have improved over the past two years despite the worst recession since the Great Depression. Nationally, the number of uninsured has risen.
That Massachusetts's reforms have survived, and even prospered, in this economic environment has left the law's architects feeling vindicated. "The goal of the law was covering people," says Jonathan Gruber, an MIT health economist who worked on the legislation, "and it couldn't have gone better."
Klein sees two reason's for Massachussett's success: the individual mandate, along with combining individual and small firms in the same market, lowered costs by having the participation of younger, healthier people. That brought everyone's premiums down. The other reason is the market was made more transparent. thus increasing the competition among plans.
Neither law is perfect, but Klein warns
But the reality is that there's one way in which it could get much worse: if Republican judges strike out the individual mandate, and Republican congressmen refuse to work with Democrats on a replacement. In that world, the law can limp along, and it will still cover tens of millions of Americans, but premiums will be higher, the insurance markets will be less competitive and many of the bill's cost controls will not have the chance they need to work.
Only a Villager could read something as plain as day and still not get it:
"The most underreported part of Nancy Pelosi's decision on Friday to run for minority leader: The fact that her announcement (both her Tweet and her full statement) NEVER once mentioned how she plans to lead the House Democrats back to the majority. It was about protecting what had been created (health care, and Wall Street reform), not about how Democrats regain power. We know that Pelosi racked up a considerable legislative record over the past two years, and we also know that she and her team were able to win control in '06. But how does she fix her public image?"
Aside from the Villagers, the politically active, and the part of the FOX viewing GOP base that will never vote for a Democrat, no one cares about Nancy Pelosi or her public image or her being Speaker again.
Do you know what people care about?
People care about their kids having health insurance. People care about banks not stealing their home. Older people care about being able to collect Social Security benefits at 67 and not 70. Younger people care about the money they put into Social Security not being stolen from them on the other end. People care about there being enough jobs.
None of the Blue Dogs who want to be Minority House Leader will fight for those things the way Nancy Pelosi will. And did.
So we could either placate the Villagers and the Editors-in-Chief over proper decorum in the wake of big election changes. Or we could put the person who has been the strongest advocate for regular Americans - stronger than President Obama, stronger than Harry Reid - in the most prominent position to stand up to the corporatist Republicans in charge of the House.
John Stephen can't wait to get back into power so he can be like Kelly and start frivolous lawsuits, the goal of which is to keep you uninsured:
Stephen said one of the first things he would do if elected on Nov. 2 would be do "make sure... New Hampshire is the 23rd state to join the lawsuit" alleging the health care bill is unconstitutional, which received hearty approval from many in the church.
(The "many" there refers to the 912 Glenn Beck crowd.)
Standing ovation (and best wishes) for Beth Ann Salzman:
I want to thank Carol Shea-Porter for having had the courage to stand up and vote for health care reform. This past winter, I had a snarly little cough that I thought was nasal drip. When I had a CT scan in April, I learned I had Stage 3 lung cancer. This came as a major shock to someone who is not a smoker and lives in a smoke-free environment.
Since then, I have had radiation, chemotherapy, lung surgery removing two of the three lobes in my right lung, and I'm about to have more chemo. It has been a difficult journey, but I've got my eye on the prize. And I have been able to go through all this with the peace of mind that because of the new health care reforms, my insurer will no longer be able to write me off their books when the year ends.
...I've also learned that if I did not have Medicare and health insurance, I would be looking at the glass half-empty. Frank Guinta wants to dismantle the entire health care plan. If for one minute he thinks a health care savings plan could pay for the treatment I've had, then we all would have to find mysterious $250,000 savings accounts like he found. He says he wants to repeal Obamacare. As I make this difficult journey, I feel blessed that Obama cares and Carol Shea-Porter fought for health care reform.
Every single one of you reading this has a powerful story to tell about how life has changed thanks to the hard work Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes and Jeanne Shaheen and John Lynch have done - and Annie Kuster will fight to continue - to bring our country out of the hole eight years of Bush and Republican rule feverishly dug.
Please consider writing a letter to the editor to your local paper today. They are among the most powerful elements of voter persuasion out there.
UPDATE: Rep. Shea-Porter sent along this response:
Dear Beth,
Thank you so much for your courage. In the middle of your battle against cancer, you take the time to share your story, so others can see the people behind my decision to vote for the new health care law. I have heard from so many generous people just like you, and I have been privileged to fight side by side with you to win this battle. You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers.
If you're on Medicare, the federal health program for people 65 and older and the disabled, and you've fallen into the prescription-drug coverage gap known as the doughnut hole this year, the U.S. government is putting a $250 check in the mail for you starting Thursday. You don't have to apply for your check because Medicare tracks your drug costs. The agency will send you your $250 check automatically as soon as you reach the coverage gap this year, experts from AARP said during a conference call Tuesday.
Bush era, twice defeated, millionaire hobby politician Jeb Bradley now spends his time funneling FOX/Hate Radio agitprop into local venues.
He knows perfectly well that when he is involved in orchestrating theater like this he is actually hurting the access to health care for the most vulnerable in our state.
But that's just water under the bridge if it means possibly switching up the state or house majority in the fall to better give him a leg up on his next hobby run for governor in 2012.
My vote for the most irresponsible UL piece for 2010. I know it's only April, but it will be hard to top this one:
Is your government lying to you? Consider: Your current President promised you that no one earning less than $250,000 a year would see any form of tax increase. He then approved several. He said he opposed forcing all Americans to buy health insurance. He then made us all buy insurance and is hiring 16,500 IRS agents to make sure we all comply.
There's so much misleading nonsense in that one paragraph (out of a whole editorial of crazy), but let's just focus on that last, reckless statement:
Q: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?
A: No. The law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The claim of 16,500 new agents stems from a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.
And:
Federal investigators are looking into threats to IRS workers by taxpayers worried that the new [health care] law will be either be too expensive or too intrusive.
UPDATE: The UL has, with no correction notice that I can see, edited away the "is hiring 16,500 IRS agents to make sure we all comply" part.
A piece of an op-ed from Carol Shea-Porter that is making the rounds in the dailies:
At many of my town halls, people have asked me why I didn't vote with my constituents, and my answer is always, "which ones?" New Hampshire's First Congressional District - which I am so proud to represent - is considered a "swing district," which means people are pretty evenly split on just about everything. I represent more than 650,000 people, and there is a wide range of thoughts and opinions. I have always been clear about my support for health care reform - I highlighted it during both the 2006 and 2008 elections. While this was not a perfect bill - none ever are - I was proud to vote for this bill that my committee, Education and Labor, worked on for more than a year.
As I stated, this was a very tough vote. But I did not come to Congress just to keep a seat warm. I came to work for change and to be an advocate for the people. I cast this vote because it will improve the lives of millions of Americans. In fact, the first phone call I made after the vote was to a constituent - a senior - that I met at one of my senior open houses. She told me that she was struggling financially because her husband fell into the Medicare donut hole. I told her that, because of this legislation, seniors who fall into the donut hole will now receive a $250 rebate this year, and a 50% discount for brand name drugs until the donut hole is completely closed in 2020. Also, her preventive care will no longer have co-pays and deductibles - it will be fully covered.
