A group of Republicans and Washington D.C. think tanks released a proposal Tuesday that aims to resurrect Obamacare repeal. The consistent chatter around the proposal has drawn ire from the White House and GOP leadership, as the midterms are just months away, and repeal efforts haven’t proved to be winning strategies.
The seven-page whitepaper titled “The Health Care Choices Proposal: Policy Recommendations to Congress” asks lawmakers to scrap the Affordable Care A...
health care
This 2011 quote from Jeff Sessions just became really awkward
The Trump administration’s Department of Justice will not defend in court the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s consumer protections, including the ban on discrimination against people with pre-existing medical conditions, it announced Thursday. While Attorney General Jeff Sessions is far from the first to opt not to defend a law he deems unconstitutional, many prominent Republicans — including Sessions himself — were highly critical of the practice jus...
More than 100 arrested nationwide for rallying for health care and environmental protection
Activists with the national Poor People’s Campaign faced backlash from government officials and law enforcement during nationwide protests Monday. More than 100 people in Kentucky, Kansas, California, New York, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. were arrested or blocked from entering government buildings.
The campaign, which marks 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized thousands of Americans...
Trump breaks key populist campaign promise to negotiate Medicare drug prices
On the campaign trail, candidate Trump promised to save hundreds of billions of dollars standing up to the pharmaceutical industry, and said he’d “negotiate like crazy” to bring down Medicare prescription drug prices.
Allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies for better prices has long been a goal for progressives, and when voters heard Trump stray from the Republican party orthodoxy, railing against Big Pharma as he asked for their support, many ...
New insurance rates prove Trump’s policies have increased Obamacare premiums
Early signs show health insurance companies are trying to exponentially raise prices for plans sold on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace — and for people who don’t qualify for federal assistance, there’s no relief in sight.
Insurers in Maryland and Virginia are asking for double-digit premium increases to 2019 monthly plans. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield CEO Chet Burrell said that Maryland’s exchange is in the “advanced stages of a death spiral.̶...
Trump administration stops short of approving the most restrictive Medicaid policy yet
The Trump administration just denied Kansas’ request to create an unprecedented “lifetime limit” on Medicaid, a federal insurance largely for the poor and disabled.
“We seek to create a pathway out of poverty, but we also understand that people’s circumstances change, and we must ensure that our programs are sustainable and available to them when they need and qualify for them,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma ...
The racial redlining in Michigan’s Medicaid work requirements
There are a lot of problems with work requirements for Medicaid.
They aren’t necessary because the majority of people who can work, work already; they would increase the ranks of the uninsured; and despite what supporters think, they wouldn’t actually pull people out of poverty but could further hurl them into it.
But there’s also another big issue: Medicaid work requirements could increase racial disparities in health care.
Last week, the Michigan Se...
Two transgender residents sue Wisconsin over discriminatory Medicaid rule
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) refused to cover Cody Flack’s top surgery.
Top surgery, a common reference for chest reconstruction surgery for transgender patients, is a widely accepted and effective surgical procedure for treating gender dysphoria. But DHS told Flack, who was born female but identifies as male, last summer that the procedure isn’t covered by Wisconsin’s Medicaid program. The state contends the surgery is “medically unneces...
Years of inaction and thousands of deaths later, Congress finally addresses maternal mortality
Each year about 700 to 900 mothers die, and thousands more nearly die, due to pregnancy or childbirth complications, many of which are preventable — and this year, there’s finally appetite among lawmakers to do something about it.
The Senate Health committee will vote on a bill next month that addresses the country’s soaring maternal mortality rate, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) announced on Tuesday. Congress has never passed legislation directly focused on this public health cri...
Trump’s big idea for health insurance excludes maternity care and barely covers addiction treatment
The Trump administration’s “affordable alternative” to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is short-term health plans, but a new Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) study published on Monday shows just how bare-bones this coverage actually is.
A KFF review of short-term health health plans offered on two large private insurance websites, eHealth and Agile Health Insurance, in 45 states and Washington, D.C. shows these plans rarely if at all pay for essential coverage: no plan...