The National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study Wednesday showing that the Affordable Care Act continues to significantly increase the number of young adults who have health insurance.
Because of the health care law, young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance plans through age 26. This policy took effect in September 2010. Data from the National Health Interview Survey shows that since September 2010, the percentage of adults aged 19-25 covered by a private health insurance plan increased significantly, with approximately 2.5 million more young adults with insurance coverage compared to the number of young adults who would have been insured without the law.
In Southern states, including Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, this means about 900,000 more young adults are covered by health insurance because of the law.
“Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, 2.5 million more young adults don’t have to live with the fear and uncertainty of going without health insurance,” said Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Moms and dads around the country can breathe a little easier knowing their children are covered.”
Angered by the “Let Him Die” chant at the Tea Party debate Monday evening, Keith Olbermann and former congressman Alan Grayson discuss the appropriate response to this outrage. Grayson questions the Tea Party’s Christian ideology, saying, “They glorify and sanctify other people’s pain.”
Hint: The Conservative South is Less Happy Than the Rest of the Country
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
Only in America, a country founded on the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is there a statistical measure of “well-being” where highly paid social scientists spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out just how happy we are as a people.
Unfortunately, we don’t have data from July 4, 1776 to gauge how we compare with our ancestors on that score. There were no pollsters in those days, and only a few newspapers and a primitive voting system to gauge public opinion.
There are some important lessons to be drawn from such measures of public opinion, however, if you look deeper than the basic numbers.
It should come as no real shock that the happiest people in the happiest state in the country live in Hawaii, a dreamy set of tropical islands where the climate is wonderful all year around, the unemployment rate is only 6.3 percent (compared to 8.9 percent nationally) and only 8 percent of the population is uninsured (compared to 17 percent nationally).
According to the latest Gallup well being scores, the people of Hawaii expressed the highest wellbeing among states with a score of 71 out of 100.
It is sort of sad, when you think about it, that even in the happiest state of them all, the score is only a C on any standard academic report card. The country as a whole only averages a D score of 66 percent on Gallup’s well-being index.
Was there ever a time when the country was closer to being 100 percent happy? Maybe in the 1960s or the 1990s, times when the economy was booming and the future looked bright? Unfortunately, Gallup was not conducting these polls then, so we will never know.
As I sit here sipping my coffee and pouring over the data this Sunday morning, I’m wondering what it would take to improve these scores? There are some clues in the numbers. More on that in the end.
The House Republicans seem to be saying yes. Apparently, taking away women’s access to reproductive health services is an important way to create jobs and get the economy moving again.
That may explain the urgency of Rep. Mike Pence’s disgraceful legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and other providers by stripping them of Title X family-planning funding, since creating jobs is the stated priority of the Republicans in Congress. The Republicans also want to take away the new cost-savings and consumer protections in the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, because this too will apparently create jobs.
This is the same GOP that wants to undermine the new law, including re-opening the abortion compromise that unambiguously maintained the prohibition against federal funds paying for abortions. This is all so important to the Republicans that they made one of the bills relating to this issue H.R. 3, among the very first taken up by the House in the 112th Congress. No wonder people are asking Speaker John Boehner, “When are the jobs?”
By 2014, the new health care reform law will mean thousands of dollars in health insurance premium savings and out-of-pocket health care costs for working families and small businesses, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“For too long, skyrocketing health care costs have made it hard for businesses to provide coverage for employees and have made it difficult for families to afford coverage,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “The report shows that the health care law will bring major savings for families as it begins to take shape. Without the Affordable Care Act, consumers and businesses would face higher premiums, fewer insurance choices, and rapidly rising health care costs.”
From 1999 to 2009, premiums more than doubled, rising by more than $7,500 for the average family that gets insurance through an employer. The high cost of health care made it difficult for many small businesses to offer insurance to their workers. The percentage of small employers offering health insurance dropped from 65 percent to 59 percent between 1999 and 2009.
A federal judge in Florida has ruled that the health care overhaul law passed by the Democratic Congress last year should be considered unconstitutional, although two other federal judges ruled the other way, setting up a showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The White House called the ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson “a plain case of judicial overreaching,” according to the Associated Press.
In reacting to the news, Health Care for America Now, the nationwide coalition that helped drive the successful fight for the Affordable Care Act, called the ruling “Judicial activism on steroids.”
“Judge Vinson gave Republican governors and attorneys general what they wanted, a decision that advances the GOP’s extremist agenda to return control of our health care to the insurance companies. This is judicial activism on steroids,” the group’s executive director Ethan Rome said in a statement. “The U.S. Supreme Court will have the final say on the legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and it has corrected such lower-court mistakes when other major laws like Social Security, the minimum wage law and the Voting Rights Act were passed.”
The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this week in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Trumka urged President Obama to make next week’s State of the Union address “a call to action, a call to invest in our future, to create jobs, to be the country we can and must be.”
“We have just been through one lost decade — when America’s standard of living fell, when our wealth shrank, when millions lost their homes, when young people could not find work America cannot afford another lost decade,” Trumka said.
The new Republican House majority was just sworn in Thursday, but it didn’t take long to find out whose side they’re on.
“They’re showing us from Day One that it’s politics as usual — they’re on the side of the insurance companies and other big businesses that spent gobs of money to elect them,” says Manny Herrmann, online mobilization coordinator for the AFL-CIO. “Instead of helping put America back to work, instead of helping rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and instead of fixing our foreclosure mess, the new House Republican majority wants to undo all the progress we’ve made over the past two years, starting with a vote next week to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act.”
Repealing health care reform would strip away the crackdowns fought for on insurance company abuse. It would lead to the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people a year because they wouldn’t be able to get affordable insurance. It would add $10 billion a year to the deficit. And it’s also a waste of precious time — a cheap shot to score political points.
“But the new Republican majority in the House is more interested in playing political football with our health than in protecting children, seniors and middle-class Americans,” Herrmann says. “We can’t go backward. We can’t go back to letting insurance companies refuse coverage to sick children, limit our medical care or bring back lifetime and annual caps on benefits that drive more families into bankruptcy.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
