Isans Are Split On The Supreme Court Overturning The Aca
In June 2020, the Trump administration issued a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ACA. The brief was filed in support of an ongoing challenge to the ACA by a group of Republican attorneys general in California v. Texas, a case that challenges the legality of the ACA in light of the zeroing out of the individual mandate penalty in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Acts. The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 and the possibility of the Senate confirming a new Justice appointed by President Trump before the presidential election has brought heightened attention to the potential outcome of this case and the future of the ACA. In October 2020, a majority of the public said they do not want to see the Supreme Court overturn the 2010 health care law, and eight in ten said they do not want to see the ACAs protections for people with pre-existing conditions overturned. There are partisan differences on both questions, with the majority of Democrats and independents saying they dont want the Court to overturn the ACA or pre-existing condition protections. However, among Republicans, three-fourths say they want to see the ACA overturned, but two-thirds say they do not want to see pre-existing condition protections overturned.
Figure 2: Majorities Do Not Want Court To Overturn ACAs Pre-Existing Condition Protections, Republicans Want Entire Law Overturned
Majority Of Millennials Under 30 Believe Costs Will Rise And Quality Will Fall Under Health Reform
Between 50 and 51 percent of young people believe their cost of care will increase under the health reform law; approximately one-in-ten tell us that their costs will likely decrease.; Young Americans who think their health care costs will increase are much less likely to enroll in the insurance program mandated by the 2010 legislation.; Sixty percent of those who say they are unlikely to enroll in the Affordable Care Act program believe that their costs under the program would increase, which is significantly higher than those who say they will enroll in the program
Young Americans under 30 tell us that the news media is a primary source of information related to the presidents health care initiative, with 67 percent of those who were asked about the Affordable Care Act saying that the news was a primary source, and 72 percent saying the same when they were asked about Obamacare.; Friends and social media were the second leading source followed by Healthcare.gov .; Those who are unlikely to enroll are significantly more likely to have received information about the programs through the news media and their employer .
Poll: Obamacare More Popular Than Ever
A sign in favor of the Affordable Care Act is held up outside the Supreme Court building after the … court’s ruling in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, June 28, 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the core of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, giving him an election-year triumph and preserving most of a law that would expand insurance to millions of people and transform an industry that makes up 18 percent of the nation’s economy. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
BLOOMBERG NEWS
The Affordable Care Act wins 55% support among the public for its highest rating since becoming law nearly a decade ago, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll released Friday.
Kaiser said the clear majority of support is the highest in more than 100 polls the nonprofit health foundation has conducted. The ACA was signed into law in 2010 by President Barack Obama and has expanded health insurance coverage to more than 20 million Americans.
The recent uptick reflects strong support among Democrats, 85% of whom now express favorable views, Kaiser said in its analysis. A narrow majority of independents also view the law favorably. While most Republicans still hold unfavorable views towards the ACA, the poll suggests that Republican voters have largely moved on from efforts to repeal the ACA and now rank opposition to a single-payer government health plan like Medicare-for-all among their top health priorities.;;
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Obamacare Repeal Requires Replacement After 2016 Election
Republicans had spent eight years trashing the Democratic health care overhaul, but now that they were in power, they ran up against the same political winds that forced ObamaCare tolook like such a political Frankensteins monster to begin with. Conservatives wanted a complete and total repeal of the law; moderative Republicans wanted to protect certain pieces of it.
America Should Deport Illegal Immigrants
Republicans believe that illegal immigrants, no matter the reason they are in this country, should be forcibly removed from the U.S. Although illegal immigrants are often motivated to come to the U.S. by companies who hire them, Republicans generally believe that the focus of the law should be on the illegal immigrants and not on the corporations that hire them.
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Universal Coverage Vs Market
Democrats generally continue to support the Affordable Care Act , but would like to fix its flaws and generally improve the law. Democrats want to empower states to use innovation waivers to create their own approaches to healthcare reform that are as good asor better thanthe current system. Many Democrats also support fixing the ACAs family glitch by basing affordability calculations for employer-sponsored coverage on family premiums rather than employee-only premiums, and most also support expanding premium subsidies to higher income ranges in order to soften the subsidy cliff.
But increasingly, Democrats are also getting behind the idea of a transition to some sort of universal coverage system. All of the Democrats who ran for the 2020 presidential nomination were in favor of universal coverage, although they had differing opinions on whether we should transition entirely to a single-payer system or use a combination of government-run and private health coverage .
Bidens healthcare proposal also calls for an end to surprise balance billing, premium-free coverage under the public option for people who are caught in the Medicaid coverage gap , and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.
The Republican Party has not rolled out a new healthcare platform for 2020, and is instead utilizing the same platform they had in 2016. So in general, their approach can be expected to be the same as it has been for the past several years.
What Obamacare Republican Candidates Go Mum On Health Care Law
WASHINGTON Sen. Cory Gardner ran his first Senate campaign railing against the newly enacted Affordable Care Act, but six years later, the once-maligned law is getting little mention in his bid for re-election.
The Colorado Republican isnt alone.
After years of campaigning against Obamacare, Republicans trying to retain control of the Senate appear to be conceding that attacking the ACA is no longer politically advantageous, a shift compounded by the millions of people who now depend on the law for their coverage, including protections for pre-existing conditions.
Now with Obamacare being entrenched into people’s daily lives, they just don’t want their health care messed with, and so it becomes hard for Republicans to articulate on that point, said Doug Heye, who worked on repeal efforts in 2014 as deputy chief of staff to then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.
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Republicans Who Think Nobody Would Miss Obamacare Should Ask People Who Depend On It
Some of the Republicans agitating to repeal Obamacare say they arent worried about taking health insurance away from more than 20 million people. Their theory: The program is wildly unpopular and even the people with coverage wouldnt miss it, no matter what takes it place.
People have crappy insurance, Rep. John Shimkus told Politico last week. This fear that theyre going to lose something that they dont think they have anyway is crazy.
Anna Meyers would beg to differ.
Meyers, 42, lives in the eastern part of North Carolina. She and her husband, 59, have been getting insurance through healthcare.gov for the last three years. Meyers also has a son, 14, who has autism. He gets coverage through Medicaid a program that Republicans say they would like to shrink just as soon as they are done with Obamacare.
Meyers works as an office manager for an accountant. Her husband does repair work for a company that manages rental homes. Between the two of them, she figures, their income is about $40,000 a year maybe less when his business is slow.
We dont get to go out to the movies a whole lot, Meyers explained to me on the phone. But we do travel a lot on the weekend, in our car, and see some of the bigger towns in the area just to get out.
Also, there is date night once a week. They drop her son at her parents house, and then bring home takeout. Smithfields Chicken is a favorite.
The Majority Of People With Obamacare Seem To Value It
Republicans Have A Health Plan Finally
The House Republican Study Committee has come out with a viable plan.
Getty
For the past ten years Republicans in Congress have been largely AWOL on health care.
If memory serves, there has never been a hearing to showcase the victims of Obamacare. Nor has there been a hearing to show how sensible reforms could make the lives of those victims better.
When it came to legislation, the GOP only had two ideas: either abolish Obamacare entirely or toss it to the states. Neither approach actually solved a health care problem. They just allowed Republicans in Washington to wash their hands of the issue and pass the problems along to someone else.
Until now.
The House Republican Study Committee has accepted the challenge and delivered. In a 68-page document, it identifies the worse problems in our health care system and shows how they can be solved.
The proposals are bold, impactful and easy to understand. Here is a quick summary.
Personal and portable health insurance. In an ideal world, if people like the insurance they get from an employer, they would be able to take it with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Under the Obama administration, this practice was not only illegal, employers who bought individually owned insurance for their employees faced huge fines.
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Harris On Voting Rights
As voting rights bills fizzle in Congress, Vice President Kamala Harris looks to fire up voters for 2022, Noah Bierman reported. Sen. Joe Manchin this week floated a compromise voting rights proposal that he said he hoped Republicans would support, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky slammed the door on that effort. Given Senate rules that require 60 votes for passage of most legislation, McConnells opposition would probably doom a bill. Many Democrats hope that issue will motivate their supporters in key races in the midterm election.
What Can Trump Do
Mr Trump has signed an executive order directing federal departments to take actions to ease the regulatory requirements from Obamacare.
The directive, which offered few specific details, appeared to be more of a broad mission statement.
However, the order could undermine the law’s individual mandate by granting more exemptions to people who do not want to buy health insurance.
Though it will take Congress to repeal major parts of Obamacare, Mr Trump could also cripple it with a stroke of a pen.
As president, he could simply drop the federal government’s appeal against a lawsuit, House v Burwell, which Republican House of Representatives members won in April 2016.
That legal action argued the Obama administration was unconstitutionally spending money that Congress had not formally appropriated by reimbursing health insurers who provide coverage to low-income policyholders.
If Mr Trump opts to drop the government’s challenge, insurers who are currently giving deep discounts to half their customers would lose their reimbursements. And that, say analysts, would send Obamacare into a death spiral.
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Board Of Governors Professor School Of Public Affairs & Administration
The Trump administrations efforts to sabotage the ACA and their consequences receive detailed attention in a recently released Brookings book, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism. For present purposes, I highlight six major sabotage initiatives which emerged in the wake of congressional failure to repeal and replace the ACA.
1. Reduce outreach and opportunities for enrollment in the ACAs insurance exchanges. Established to offer health insurance to individuals and small business, the exchanges have provided coverage to some 10 million people annually. The Obama administration had vigorously promoted the ACA in part to attract healthy, younger people to the exchanges to help keep premiums down. The Trump administration sharply reduced support for advertising and exchange navigators while reducing the annual enrollment period to about half the number of days.
2. Cut ACA subsidies to insurance companies offering coverage on the exchanges. ACA proponents saw insurance company participation on the exchanges as central to fostering enrollee choice and to fueling competition that would lower premiums. The law therefore provided various subsidies to insurance companies to reduce their risks of losing money if they participated on the exchanges. The Trump administration joined congressional Republicans in reneging on these financial commitments.
A Majority Of Young People Disapprove Of The New Health Care Law
With the deadline to enroll in the presidents new health care law quickly approaching and a large effort underway by the administration and interest groups to encourage more young people to either enroll or not enroll in health coverage, we were interested in gaining a better understanding of young Americans views toward the new law.; To help better understand the messaging, we conducted a split sample asking respondents about approval, quality, cost, and how they were hearing about the law identifying it for n=1,024 respondents as the Affordable Care Act and for n=1,065 respondents as Obamacare.; While we did not find drastic differences between the two names there were some that existed and they are noted below.
Most significantly, when young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 were asked if they approve or disapprove of the comprehensive health reform package that the president signed into law in 2010, a solid majority disapproved.; When the law was referred to as the Affordable Care Act, 39 percent of young Americans under 30 approved, 56 percent disapproved; and when the law was referred to as Obamacare, the numbers were nearly identical with 38 percent citing approval and 57 percent citing that they disapproved.; These findings mirror recent ABC News/Washington Post polling reporting that 40 percent of adults nationwide support the federal law making changes to the health care system, while 57 percent oppose it.
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Support For The Affordable Care Act
Then along comes Donald Trump and threatens to cut off subsidies for low-income Americans, ostensibly as a method to force Democrats in Congress to come to the negotiating table. A New York Times editorial summarised it: It sounds more like a two-bit Hollywood villain promising carnage if he doesnt get his way. Holding his own voters hostage to prove a point is not really the best political move for someone elected by a combination of low-wage workers from rural and industrial America and high-income families. But the Republican health plan what pundits are labeling TrumpRyan care advocates decreasing financial support for those worse off while decreasing taxes for the rich. And just to top it off, support for the ACA is currently at its highest point ever with 55% of Americans approving of it a complete reversal prior to the November election.
Even one of the most conservative columnists in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer a nonpractising psychiatrist wrote a column in April where he admitted that the ACA had changed the zeitgeist. It is universalising the idea of universal coverage. Acceptance of its major premise that no one be denied health care is more widespread than ever.
Now, how is that for progress!
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Despite what they say on television about protecting the most vulnerable, one by one the Republican senators are all getting in line behind Trumps Supreme Court nominee. We dont yet know who that is, but we can assume how he or she will vote on Obamacare.
People with pre-existing conditions like me are again terrified of losing our insurance, this time in the midst of a pandemic. Weve lived through years of scary uncertainty and now months of sheltering in place. Enough is enough. We are all health care voters now. Well see whether our wavering senators are health care voters, too.
Laura Packard is a Denver-based health care advocate and cancer survivor. She is the founder of Health Care Voices, a non-profit grassroots organization for adults with serious medical conditions, co-chair of Health Care Voter, and runs the pharma accountability campaign for Hero Action Fund. Follow her on Twitter:
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Less Than One Third Of Uninsured Millennials Under 30 Plan To Enroll
Regardless of the term used in describing the federal health reform package, less than one-in-four young Americans under the age of 30 report that they would definitely or probably enroll in insurance through an exchange if and when they are eligible. Forty-seven percent tell us that they will probably not or definitely not enroll under the ACA program, 45 percent say the same under Obamacare.;
Among the 22 percent of people under 30 who do not have health insurance presently, 29 percent say they will roll in the program described as Obamacare, and 25 percent say the same when its referred to as the Affordable Care Act.One of the most telling predictors of likelihood to enroll is political affiliation.; Less than ten percent of Republicans plan to enroll in an exchange, less than 20 percent of Independents — and between 35 and 40 percent of Democrats, depending on the name associated with the law.; Obamacare proves to be five percent more beneficial when Democrats are considering enrollment compared to the Affordable Care Act .
