In 2010, there was finally good news for millions of uninsured children and families when the President and Congress took a major step towards ensuring affordable and comprehensive health coverage for millions of children and families in America. With the passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the Affordable Care Act), more than 35 million Americans including more than 95 percent of children will have access to the critical health coverage they need to survive and thrive. Among other important protections, the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from denying health coverage to children who desperately need it—those already sick with “pre-existing conditions.” Children like Katie H. in Texas who suffers from severe seizure-like attacks that last as long as 11 hours caused by an undiagnosed neuro-developmental disorder. Katie is also deaf in one ear, has a feeding disorder, and requires daily medication for asthma. In her short life, she has already made numerous visits to the emergency room and had several hospital stays.
When Katie lost her health coverage her father tried to buy private insurance through his employer but he couldn’t afford the nearly $1,000 a month cost, about 30 percent of his salary. No other private insurer would offer the family coverage for Katie due to her pre-existing conditions. Today millions of children like Katie will be able to receive the health coverage they need to grow up healthy or in less pain because of protections in the Affordable Care Act. In our wealthy nation no child should be born at low birthweight, at risk of future health and learning difficulties, because of preventable causes, or die in the first year of life because their mothers did not have adequate prenatal or postnatal care. Undiagnosed, untreated, and poorly managed health and mental health problems increase a child’s chances of falling behind in school or having disciplinary problems and lower a child’s chances of succeeding in and out of school. Without access to comprehensive, affordable health care, more children will do poorly in school at a time when we need to be improving our global competitiveness. Good health at birth and throughout childhood is essential for them as children and as productive future workers.
Ensuring children access to comprehensive health coverage is one of the smartest, most cost-effective choices our country can make. The hidden costs of not insuring children include high costs of uncompensated care for those without insurance; use of costly emergency room care instead of early access to primary care; long term treatment of preventable illnesses; and the costs of untreated emotional problems in children whose unmet needs bring them to the child welfare or juvenile justice systems.
Millions of children and families are already depending on the protections in the Affordable Care Act and millions more will do so as the act is implemented over the next few years. That these new and long overdue protections are now subject to a repeal attempt by some members of the new Congress is a travesty. A vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a vote to deny at least 16 million children, parents, and childless adults eligibility for Medicaid; threaten the successful Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which now provides more than seven million children health coverage and is expected to double in size by 2015; and deny health coverage for the more than 1.2 million young adults now eligible for coverage through their parents’ health plans as they graduate from school and seek work up to age 26. A vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act would undermine opportunities for help for hundreds of thousands of children with disabilities and other special needs. It would permit insurance companies to unjustly deny health coverage again to children like Katie with pre-existing conditions and set annual limits and lifetime caps on their coverage. A vote to repeal new health care reforms threatens our children’s and taxpayers’ financial futures. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) said in a press release, “the House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would increase America’s deficit by $230 billion in just ten years. And then, it would increase the deficit by a cost equal to half a percent of our entire economy—more than one trillion dollars—in the ten years that follow. That’s a cost America’s children and grandchildren just can’t afford.”
Our nation must protect the long overdue and major gains for children and families in the Affordable Care Act. The law is already helping children and families and stopping some of the most egregious abuses of health insurers. Why would any sensible person want to go backwards and take these protections away?
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
Melody Moezzi: Enough With Insane Mental Health Cuts
We need to reform the way health care is delivered in this nation. Health insurance companies should not be allowed to profit from our sickness and misery. I would prefer for our government to create a VA-type system for all Americans. Ideally, "alternative" health options would be covered (better yet - encouraged). But, we should all start to realize that we'll have to pay for one another - one way or another. We can pay for our neighbors' health care with our taxes...or we can pay for them to be incarcerated, put on Social Security (from preventable/treatable disabilities) and/or left in need of other social programs (because they're not healthy enough to support themselves and/or make good decisions).
It's counter-intuitive, but much less painful.
If government is to get out of health, all programs need to be zero-base budgeted. And good luck to the Medicare recipients on finding private, individual policies that are affordable.
After the law goes into full effect in 2014 it will have a more profound effect on the cost of health insurance. Anyone not eligible for federal premium subsidies will pay even more than they would without "reform". This isn't a secret. The Obama admin and the CBO have acknowledged it. And it has nothing to do with making the rich pay their fair share. Subsidy levels are age based and relatively low. A 30 year old grossing as little as 41k/year will receive zero relief and instead pay more for health coverage that's already almost unaffordable for the same demographic. This in turn decreases access.
Nothing has been fixed with the PPACA. The problem has just been moved around and in many ways exacerbated. It's quite sensible to demand repeal and replace this ill conceived legislation with something that at least addresses the problem- the ever increasing cost of care and the resulting high cost of health coverage.
That said I cannot support the bill based upon the fact that it will force everyone to buy private insurance WITHOUT imposing any real limits to price increases. The price is already unregulated by government or markets since the health care companies collude amongst themselves to set prices.
It is literally highway robbery.
This law continues to propagate that system.
In fact, no SENSIBLE people want to take these protections away.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
FRONTLINE: sick around the world |PBS
This site has graphs comparing the health care systems of Japan, Britain, Switzerland, and Germany.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/graphs.html
FRONTLINE: sick around the world: Graphs: U.S. Health Stats Compared to Other Countries | PBS
The U.S. has the most-expensive health care system.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aLIc5ABThjBk
Vets Loving Socialized Medicine Show Government Offers Savings - Bloomberg.com
“..The care is superb,” said Tanner, 66, a San Diego resident who visits the veterans medical center in La Jolla, California, and a clinic in nearby Mission Valley. The record- keeping, he said, is “state of the art.”
As Congress considers changing Americans’ access to health care, the veterans agency, whose projected budget this year is $45 billion, is evidence that the government can provide care favored by patients that may offer savings when compared with private insurers.
Researchers publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Annals of Internal Medicine in recent years have endorsed the system. A Canadian policy journal, Healthcare Papers, devoted an entire issue to it in 2005..."
I would rather have an inefficient government bureaucrat to deal with than a corporate bean counter trying to bilk me out of the last of my money - witness the bailout of the private banks. At least I have some pull via the electoral process with the government bureaucrat. It beats being kicked off of public beaches by employees of BP.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031202287.html
T.R. Reid - Universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate - washingtonpost.com
"Countless arguments have been advanced for and against the pending bills to increase health-care coverage. Both sides have valid concerns, which makes the battle tight. But one prominent argument is illogical. The contention that opponents of abortion should oppose the current proposals to expand coverage simply doesn't make sense.
Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions -- a fact proved by years of experience in other industrialized nations. All the other advanced, free-market democracies provide health-care coverage for everybody. And all of them have lower rates of abortion than does the United States.
This is not a coincidence. There's a direct connection between greater health coverage and lower abortion rates. To oppose expanded coverage in the name of restricting abortion gets things exactly backward. It's like saying you won't fix the broken furnace in a schoolhouse because you're against pneumonia. Nonsense! Fixing the furnace will reduce the rate of pneumonia. In the same way, expanding health-care coverage will reduce the rate of abortion.
At least, that's the lesson from every other rich democracy.
The latest United Nations comparative statistics, available at http://data.un.org, demonstrate the point clearly..."
But all of this will be in the end irrelevant because any legislation that passes in the house will not pass through the senate no presidential veto. So chill out!
The top 20% pay 47% of federal taxes and posses 85% of the wealth. The middle class get scrooged as usual.
Ever notice that companies that are consumer-friendly seem to do better than those that aren't?