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Health

How The Affordable Care Act Helped One Family Find Insurance For Their Autistic Son

By Guest Blogger on Apr 16, 2012 at 5:10 pm

As the Supreme Court decides the fate of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, what had been most often overlooked amid all of the fierce rhetoric and debate is the inescapable truth that the financial security and potential health outcomes for millions of ordinary Americans who have already benefited from the health reform law also hang in the balance.

PBS NewsHour profiled the five-member Hill family, who were forced to go uninsured for three months as they could not afford to pay the $7,972.25 per month (just shy of $100,000 per year) premium for health coverage. The astronomical fee was due in large part to the pre-existing conditions of their 17-year-old son, who struggled with leukemia, autism, and epilepsy. At the time of his diagnosis, the family had reasonably priced, high-quality employer based health insurance coverage through MetLife. But as the title agency started shopping around for better deals, the Hill family’s health plan changed to one with significantly higher deductibles and co-pays, where the maximum out-of-pocket was $8,000 per person and $35,000 for the family.

As her son’s health gradually deteriorated, Lisa Hill eventually quit her job and purchased coverage through COBRA. Still, the bills were overwhelming:

“And there are some of them that I will say we walked away from,” she said. “I had to say, ‘we’re not going to pay it. He is 18, he’s legally responsible himself and you’re going to have to write it off.’ With a $9,000 bill … I mean, how do you afford that?”

After Lisa had been unemployed for 18 months, the COBRA coverage eventually ran out, and the family’s only option became to transfer to a plan in the individual health care market — the one costing nearly $8,000 per month. But just when the Hill family became uninsured, debate erupted over health reform, and the Hills were gifted a glimmer of hope in “the part of the bill would prohibit insurance companies charging higher premiums to people with health problems or restricting coverage of pre-existing conditions.”

Three months after they lost coverage, the laborers’ union extended their plan to the Hill family. That allowed the Hills to pay $1,200 per month for a plan that includes dental, vision, and health. Doctor visits are $15. Prescriptions are $25.

And a few months after that, President Obama signed the health care reform bill into law, allowing Adam to stay on the family plan through age 26. He can go to his oncologist, neurologist, psychologist, psychiatrist, and primary care physician as needed. All for $15 per visit. And after the age of 26, Adam won’t be charged higher premiums because of his disorders. Insurance companies will be barred for charging higher rates for pre-existing conditions starting in 2014.

At least 2.5 million younger Americans now have health insurance as a result of the provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows adults to stay on their parents’ health care plans until 26 years of age, but should the Supreme Court strike down the ACA’s individual mandate on the basis of its ‘unconstitutionality,’ the pre-existing condition rule might also be jeopardized and millions of families like the Hills could end up without access to affordable coverage.

– Fatima Najiy

Economy

At Least 30 Countries Have Unemployment Benefits More Generous Than The U.S.

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 16, 2012 at 5:00 pm

According to data from the International Monetary Fund analyzed by Tim Vlandas, there are at least 30 countries with unemployment benefits that are more generous than those that go to American workers. The University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Kenneth Thomas broke the data down:

The metric used is the gross replacement rate (GRR) the ratio of unemployment benefits to a worker’s previous wages. The United States gives, on average, a miserly 27.5% of previous wages in unemployment benefits, behind 17 OECD members, though ahead of 11 others (no data was given for OECD members Iceland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia). Not only that, the U.S. falls behind 13 non-OECD members, including Algeria, Taiwan, and Ukraine, all of which have at least double the replacement rate of the U.S.

The U.S. does rank ahead of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, but trails Egypt, Azerbaijan, and Tunisia in terms of the amount of income replaced by unemployment insurance. And in the wake of the Great Recession, instead of fashioning a better unemployment insurance system, Republicans across the country have slashed benefits, even while some, such as Florida, have high unemployment rates. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Congress have blocked and voted against several benefit extensions.

But it remains the case that there are nearly four unemployed job seekers for every available job opening, making unemployment benefits a critical source of income for those who can’t find work through no fault of their own. And contrary to conservative claims that unemployment benefits are a “lifestyle,” those unemployed workers receiving UI stay unemployed less than two weeks longer than those who receive no benefits at all, according to research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve.

In 2009, average unemployment benefits were just $310 per week, with some states paying much less (like Mississippi, with its $192 weekly benefit). As the IMF data shows, that simply isn’t keeping up with the standard set by other developed (or not so developed) nations.

Security

Human Rights Group Petitions Honduras To Not Criminalize Morning-After Pill

By Ali Gharib on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:49 pm

The online organizing website Avaaz.org alerts readers that the Honduran authorities are considering a law that would mandate imprisonment of teenage women for using the so-called “morning-after” emergency contraceptive pill — as well as doctors who provide the medicine. An Avaaz petition said:

Honduras is just days away from approving an extremist law that would put teenagers in prison for using the morning-after pill, even if they’ve just been raped. …

Some Congress members agree that this law — which would also jail doctors or anyone who sells the pill — is excessive, but they are bowing to the powerful religious lobby that wrongly claims the morning-after pill constitutes an abortion. Only the head of the Congress, who wants to run for the Presidency and cares about his reputation abroad, can stop this.

Avaaz is asking Congress President Juan Orlando Hernández to “not to criminalize contraception”:

Your proposed law 54 would make Honduras the only country in the world to punish the use or sale of the morning-after pill with jail sentences of 3-10 years. We urge you to reject this extremist law and respect women’s rights, or risk condemnation both in Latin America and across the world

A ban on the morning-after pill was originally passed in 2009, at the behest of powerful religious lobby groups. That law was upheld by the Honduran Supreme Court that year. “The measures Avaaz outlines in its email would further toughen the law, extending it to teenagers and rape victims.” reported World News Australia.

The blogosphere in the U.S., among global health news outlets and progressive sites, lit up with outrage. “There is terrible legislation being considered in Honduras,” wrote Mark Leon Goldberg at Healthy Lives. Eric Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money compared the move to the GOP in America, noting that Honduras also has a prison overcrowding problem.

On Avaaz’s website, 601,710 people have signed the petition, as of publication.

Alyssa

Growing Pains for Kickstarter, As the System Bans a Stalking Victim

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:37 pm

Kickstarter, the company that allows entrepreneurs (often artists) to raise the funding they need to support their projects through small donations, has achieved a lot of positive press for the things it’s given life to, from the second season of Jane Espenson’s web series Husbands to Womanthology, the collection of comics by women. While it’s great to see donors embrace daring, progressive projects, it seems that Kickstarter may not have policies that match up to its promise.

Artist Rachel Marone reports that, after a project she created was spammed by her long-term cyberstalker and she let her other donors know what the spammer’s motivations were, Kickstarter suspended the project, and banned and then unbanned her on the grounds that the notification was a violation of Kickstarter rules. When Marone’s manager wrote in to the company to ask for an explanation, Kickstarter’s Daniella Jaeger wrote this less than charming response: “If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.” Because clearly this is happening as a result of Rachel’s carelessness, or negligence, or lack of respect for the system.

One of the reasons that Kickstarter ought to be so special is that it offers people who have been excluded from conventional funding, whether because their projects aren’t the kind of thing that studios and networks are interested in airing because they’re too daring and unconventional a la Husbands, or because artists themselves have trouble cracking conventional funding sources. Stalking victims can, through no fault of their own, end up in the latter category. Stalkers harass their victims by contacting them directly, but they can also make life harder for them in general. Stalkers spread rumors about their victims. They contact their victim’s employers and try to discredit them, suggesting that their victims are crazy, unreliable, unprofessional, disloyal. If the stalker is more powerful than the victim, or more established, it can work. In an industry like entertainment, where employment is project-based rather than long-term, that kind of thing can be devastating.

Now, one of the risks of Kickstarter, of course, is that people will end up providing funding to unreliable donees or projects that aren’t actually viable. And providing a method of feedback for donors is important. But if Kickstarter’s brand is all about helping small donors fund worthy projects that major donors are dumb enough to miss out on, they should be concerned with making sure that their own system doesn’t replicate the pitfalls of conventional funders, and empower the same old abusable hierarchies.

NEWS FLASH

Colorado Dems Endorse Ballot Measure To Legalize Pot | A Colorado ballot measure to legalize marijuana and regulate it like alcohol will likely be one of the more closely watched referenda in the country, thanks to its real chance of becoming law. Adding to its momentum, Colorado Democrats officially endorsed Amendment 64 at the party’s convention in Pueblo this weekend. A majority at the Denver County Republican Assembly recently voted to support the measure as well. It wasn’t enough to make it part of the country GOP’s platform, but it gives the measure some bipartisan support. Fifteen counties in the state already have similar laws.

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:20 pm

Climate Progress

Government Saves Countless Lives From Tornadoes In Koch And Inhofe Country

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:15 pm

Our guest blogger is Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

Countless lives were saved this weekend by vigilant government officials who warned of deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska — states whose politics are dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues. Over 100 tornadoes struck down in 24 hours, but only six people died in Oklahoma, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s home state, thanks to warnings from the National Weather Service scientists he has worked to discredit:

The tornadoes were unrelenting – more than 100 in 24 hours over a stretch of the Plains states. They tossed vehicles and ripped through homes. They drove families to their basements and whipped debris across small towns throughout the Midwest. In some areas, baseball-size hail rained from the sky.

And yet, in a stroke that some officials have attributed to a more vigilant and persistent warning system, relatively few people were killed or injured.

Wichita, Kansas, the headquarters of Koch Industries, suffered $280 million in damage from a ferocious twister, but the “ever-increasing government” demonized by the Koch brothers prevented any loss of life.

Greenhouse pollution from the fossil fuel industries that control the region’s politics is making our weather more extreme and dangerous. The heat trapped by carbon pollution is powering these earlier and more intense storms with record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As Dr. Jeff Masters wrote on Friday:

This is the warmest March value on record for the Gulf of Mexico, going back over a century of record keeping. During the first two weeks of April, Gulf of Mexico waters remained about 1.5°C above average, putting April on pace to have the warmest April water temperatures on record. Only one year in the past century has had April water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1.1°C above average; that year was 2002 (1.4°C above average.) All that record-warm water is capable of putting record amounts of water vapor into the air, since evaporation increases when water is warmer. Because moist air is less dense than dry air, this warm, moist air flowing northwards from the Gulf of Mexico into the developing storm system over the Plains will be highly unstable once it encounters cold, dry air aloft. The record-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico are a key reason for the high risk of severe weather over the Plains this weekend.

Related Post:

NEWS FLASH

Democratic Trustee Dismisses Study Claiming Obamacare Will Add To Deficit | Jonathan Chait asked the other Medicare actuary — Robert Reischauer — what he thought of Charles Blahous’ claim that the Affordable Care Act would add at least $340 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade. Reischauer didn’t have anything nice to say: “Under accepted CBO and OMB scoring practices, legislated reductions in Medicare HI spending both reduce the deficit and strengthen the HI trust fund. That has been the case under both D and R Congresses and administrations. Chuck’s ‘revelation’ is not a new charge. Some argued this point when the ACA was enacted. It remains as misleading today as it did earlier.” Interestingly, during an appearance on Washington Journal on Friday, Blahous admitted, “I certainly didn’t do [the study] wearing my hat as a Trustee.” Instead, he developed the study for the Koch-funded Mercatus Center.

Related Posts

LGBT

Study: Opponents Of Marriage Equality Don’t Think Gays Will Harm Their Relationships

By Guest Blogger on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:02 pm

Conservatives like to claim that same sex marriage endangers marriage, despite all evidence to the contrary. But a new experiment finds that opponents of marriage equality don’t actually believe that gay couples will harm their unions.

A study led by Eastern Kentucky University psychologist Matthew Winslow examined 120 undergraduate students, asking them how threatened they felt by marriage equality. Winslow’s examination focused on the “third-person perception,” a psychological effect where people believe that others are more influenced by outside sources like the media than they themselves are. Surveying 120 college students, Winslow did find that many of his subjects believed they – and their relationships – were less affected by those kinds of outside pressures than others’ were. While the students Winslow surveyed who supported same-sex marriage did experience this effect, it was more pronounced among opponents:

The group most likely to see itself as impervious and others as vulnerable was composed of people with a personality trait called right-wing authoritarianism. People with this trait strongly value tradition and authority, and dislike people not in their own social group.

Right-wing authoritarians’ perceptions of themselves as strong and others as weak might help explain this group’s strong opposition to gay marriage, Winslow said. But the study, published April 10 in the journal Social Psychology, also highlights that everybody judges themselves as a little bit better than the next guy.

“If everyone believes that other people are more affected than they are, that’s just not logical,” said Winslow, who suggested that focusing on putting yourself in others’ shoes might help banish this bias.

Winslow has a simple solution for marriage equality opponents: “If you believe you are not going to be affected by [same-sex marriage], just recognize that probably other people believe the same way, so the good news is that probably people aren’t going to be affected by it that much.”

-Zachary Bernstein

Justice

Wisconsin Justices Won’t Fast-Track Voter ID Case, Potentially Dealing A Blow To Gov. Walker

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 16, 2012 at 4:00 pm

In a somewhat unexpected move today, the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court denied expedited review to a pair of trail court decisions blocking that state’s Voter ID law, despite the fact that two courts of appeals asked the justices to take the cases right away. Although this decision says nothing about how the Wisconsin justices view the voter ID law, their decision not to fast track the case increases the likelihood that the fate of the state’s voter ID law will not be decided until after Gov. Scott Walker (R) faces a recall election on June 5th.

If there is no further action on Wisconsin voter ID until after the recall election, that will be a serious blow to Walker’s efforts to save his job. Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, low-income voters, students and other groups that tend to vote for Democrats, and thus Wisconsin’s law will boost Walker and other Republicans within that state if it is allowed to go into effect. In March, however, one of the judges who ruled against the voter ID law also held that the law could not be enforced while it is on appeal. Thus, unless this order is reversed by a higher court, Walker will not benefit from voter ID’s disenfranchisement of left-leaning demographics.

NEWS FLASH

POLL: More Americans Think Their Taxes Are ‘About Right’ Than Think They Are Too High | A new Gallup poll shows that less than half of the country believes they are paying too much in taxes, matching its lowest level in well over a decade. 46 percent of respondents complained that their taxes were too high, down from 50 percent a year ago, while 47 percent said their taxes were about right. The political divide over taxes is apparent in Gallup’s poll as well, with 54 percent of Republicans saying they pay too much compared to just 34 percent of Democrats.

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