Obamacare accomplishments to date

1. 71 Million Kids & Adults With Private Insurance Have Received No-Cost Preventive Care.*
2. Discrimination By Insurance Companies For Children With Pre-Existing Conditions Was Banned.*
3. Consumers Received $1.1 Billion in Rebates From Their Insurance Companies.**
4. 3.1 Million More Young Adults Have Health Insurance Through Their Parent’s Plan.**
5. Seniors Have Saved More Than $6.1 Billion on Their Prescription Drugs Since 2010.**
6. 34 million seniors have received a free preventive service***
7. 105 million have had lifetime limits on insurance removed***

* “Health Reform-The Affordable Care Act Three Years Post-Enactment,” Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2013.
** "Health Reform in Action," WhiteHouse.gov, accessed 6/5/13.
*** HHS webinar, August 7th, 2013

Health re-form: Why I love Obamacare

Self-employed; too young for Medicare.  If that doesn't describe you, you have no idea how byzantine health insurance can become.  You'll never find anything like it in the writings of Franz Kafka, because it is too terrifying. When I applied for individual insurance, it took 6 hours to fill out the form.  After three hours of follow-up phone conversations, the insurance company refused to cover the female half of my family (who, thank God, are healthy) at any price.  My family finally got covered, praise the Lord, although I should point out that there is something wrong if divine intervention is needed in this neck of the woods.

Given what it took to get coverage, a competitor couldn't pay me enough to go to the trouble of switching companies, something that my insurance companies (one for the males, and one for the females) surely take into account when they relentlessly raise their prices.  

When printed, the form I had to fill out was 20 pages.  As if that weren't Kafkaesque enough, the insurance company required payment of a full month's coverage in advance, even though they reserved the right to decline coverage, a right that, in about two weeks time, they exercised.  Moreover, if I made a mistake in reciting our medical history, they reserved the right to cancel the coverage in the future.  Naturally, when I applied to a different insurance company for coverage of the female half of my family, I had to start over with a different form of roughly the same length.

Thanks to Obamacare, that form is about to get a lot shorter.  The draft form for 2014 coverage is only 4 pages. Looking through it, there are precisely the right number of questions about medical history, which is to say, none. As far as I can tell, I need to fill out page 2 for myself, fill out page 3 for my family, and then sign and date page 4.  And the single form will work for any of four insurance companies offering coverage in my region.

It's just a draft.  And it doesn't include obvious things like credit card and expiration date, or for that matter income, so as to determine if I qualify for tax credits (I don't), or which insurance company I want to go with, or which plan.  But wall, handwriting is on.  Thanks to Obamacare, in 2014 the individual health insurance market will be able to function properly.

What should Trayvon Martin have done?

Amy Davidson poses an excellent question in her New Yorker article.

In a later article, she quotes Obama:

And for those who resist that idea, that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

We can be our best only if we bear at least some of the costs of the choices we make.

What Accountable Health Care Means

Did you know that starting in January 2014…

From Get Covered America:

(1) All health insurance plans will have to cover doctor visits, hospitalizations, maternity care, emergency room care, prescriptions, and more.

(2) To see a complete list of benefit categories that all insurance plans will cover, visit www.getcoveredamerica.org/new-healthcare-benefits

(3) You might be able to get financial help to pay for a health insurance plan.

(4) If you have a pre-existing condition, insurance plans can no longer deny you coverage.

(5) All insurance plans will have to show the costs and what is covered in simple language with no fine print.

Eloquence

Maureen Corrigan, a contributor to NPR's Fresh Air program, normally reviews full-length books that contain tens of thousands of words.  On Memorial Day, 2013, she turned her attention to words that weigh in at a mere 186, soaking wet (metaphorically speaking).  By comparison, Lincoln's Gettyburg Address, known for its brevity, was 271.

The story starts with her father getting honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1945, expecting never to hear from that institution again.  The economy faced significant disruption as military activity wound down and millions of veterans searched for work amid the uncertainty. (After the war my own father, a chemical engineer, finally found work as an insurance actuary.)

Ms. Corrigan:

And how special he must have felt in late December of 1945, when a letter [http://www.npr.org/assets/img/2013/05/28/corrigan-letter_archive.jpg] from Washington, D.C., came for him at his sister's house in Llanerch Hills, Pa. My father was living with his sister and her family because, by then, both of his parents had died. The letter, signed in fountain pen, was from the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. It began:

My dear Mr. Corrigan:

I have addressed this letter to reach you after all the formalities of your separation from active service are completed. I have done so because, without formality but as clearly as I know how to say it, I want the Navy's pride in you, which it is my privilege to express, to reach into your civil life and to remain with you always.

...

The beauty of the letter's opening paragraph literally took my breath away.

Those words took my breath away too, not because they are eloquent, although they are, but because someone - Forrestal, or perhaps the Second Assistant to the Undersecretary of Naval Whatever - thought to send such a letter.  If every veteran WWII U.S. sailor received one in that pre-computer, pre-xerox age, as apparently was the case, this was a massive endeavor; at its WWII peak the U.S. Navy had 3,405,525 active duty sailors.

Eloquence emanates from the idea behind the words, not the words themselves. In Gettysburg, the power of Lincoln's words derive from surprise. A whole bunch of people had assembled there to do something; Lincoln said that they couldn't do what they had set out to do, and that they should do something else instead.

Forrestal can't hold a candle to Lincoln, not least because the fate of the nation did not hang in the balance. Nevertheless his eloquence also comes from an idea: to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the timing is the message. The letter needed to be civilian-to-civilian, therefore the timing was critical, indeed so critical that timing becomes the very focus of the letter.

Best Charles Ramsey tweet

Here's the best tweet regarding Charles Ramsey, the man who kicked in the door in order to free Amanda Berry:

Patton Oswalt:  Dear Charles Ramsey: I am not a little pretty white girl, but I totally want to run into your black arms. #hero