As of this month, even with the near-death experience of the government website that was built specifically to handle open enrollment through the Affordable Care Act, the White House has announced that more than 8 million Americans have enrolled in the Affordable Care marketplaces during the enrollment period starting on October 1, 2013, and millions more have received eligibility to receive insurance coverage through Medicaid by the close of the open enrollment period on March 31, 2014. Since implementation of the law was put into effect in stages 2 years ago, 2 million Americans who had been denied insurance for years due to pre-existing conditions, and children up to 26 years old have been enrolled in health care coverage, bringing the total number of people who are now covered under the Affordable Care Act to about 10 millions.According to Medicaid.gov, eligibility for Medicaid is calculated based on a percentage of the Federal Poverty Level or FPL. According to that office, 60 million of Americans are covered under Medicaid. Those include children, senior, pregnant women, and the disabled. The Federal Poverty Level for a family of four was $23,550 in 2013. For over four decades, politicians debated the rise of healthcare cost in the United States.

 

The debate over the number of uninsured Americans, which was estimated to be 40 million in 2000, and reaching 47 million in 2008. By 2011, it was estimated that the United State had the highest healthcare cost with approximately 50.2 million uninsured citizens. Coverage varied from state to state. Only 12% of the population was covered under Medicare, 13% under Medicaid, and individual insurance coverage was at 5%, while voluntary employer contribution to employees’ healthcare covered 54 of working families. According to various studies conducted by the World Health Organization, the United States was the only leading industrialized nation that did not provide health insurance coverage to its citizens. In 1997, during the Clinton Years, the total number of people who died for lack of medical care was estimated to be close to 100,000 every year.A 2009 Harvard study published in the American Journal of Public Health found more than 44,800 excess deaths happen every year in the United States due to lack of health insurance.

                                                                  Republican Party Tea Party Leader                  

                                    Extremist Radio Talk Show Rush Limbaugh_Photo: Longislandpress.com

 

Before the Affordable Care Act of 2010, Congress passed several piece meal bills aimed at addressing the abysmal state of health insurance coverage, the escalating cost of healthcare, and the overwhelming fraud in Medicare and Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals. In 1986, President Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) to provide emergency health care treatment to anyone in need, regardless of citizenship, legal status, or the ability. The bottom line here was to cut down on unnecessary suffering and premature death due to lack of health insurance coverage, and to allow undocumented residents to access health services rather than hiding from hospital and spreading diseases. This was followed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) signed by President Clinton.The act was designed to protect health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. This act required the establishment of national standards for electronic health care records and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers. This act is also known by the names of its sponsors as the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act, Senator Ted Kenney (D-MA) and Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS). This takes us to The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 and The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005; both bills were signed into laws by President George W. Bush. The 2005 bill was meant to encourage reporting and open discussion relating to adverse or fatal events, near misses, and dangerous conditions in the healthcare delivery system. The law also established patient’s privilege and confidentiality, and set standards for patient’s protections and “Safety Work Product” (as defined in the act). Finally, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, (HITECH) Act, was enacted in 2009 and signed by President Obama under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to promote and expand health information technology. 

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then Senator Obama campaigned broadly on his plan to enact a health insurance policy to provide coverage to the 50 million uninsured Americans. The president often told and retold the painful story of watching his dying mother struggle with insurance paperwork, more than she was able to die in piece from the ravage of cancer. The electoral was fully aware of the president’s agenda, as he retold the story at almost every stop in his campaign. In March 2010, Congress passed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and President Obama signed it into law. Going against the will of its democratic liberal base that wanted a single payer system, Obama adopted a model, which had been developed and marketed earlier to Congressional Republicans by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation in a paper published by Stuart Butler in 1989. The “individual mandate,” which is at the core of president Obama’s health care law requires that every American buy health insurance, if they don’t have it through their work, or pay a penalty. By the time Obama was elected in 2008, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts Governor and 2012 Republican presidential candidate, had already instituted this healthcare model for all Massachusetts residents.

But this time, Republicans said, hell no! It was 2010, and the Tea Party was on the rise; The fever was at a pitch. Suddenly, mainstream Republicans had become radical secessionist: President Obama was described in right wing newsletters, fund-raising letters, on more than the 500 hundred radical radio talk shows, websites, and the merchant of Omaba-derangement and a whole-seller of Obama-dementia itself, Fox News, as an illegal Kenyan citizen, the devil personified, Hitler incarnated, a socialist, a communist Muslim dictator, some sort of half human and half something that was born for one and only purpose, and that is to ‘destroy our way of life.’ “He does not like America;” “He hates White people;” “He’s stupid and lazy;” “He hides terrorists in the White House – maybe Osama Bin Laden.” “He’s a food stamp president;” “We can’t trust him;” “He’s a lying outlaw;” “Oh! Wait a minute – He’s Black! No, half-black! No, half-white! No, wait – we don’t know and we don’t care, we just hate him! And on and on…”

In 2012, the president got re-elected even though they continued to chant in harmony about how the health care law is “a job killer,” “a train wreck,” “it’s going to kill senior, and women and children,” “the government is going to plant you with microchip,” “death panel is on its way,” IRS agents will be doing your surgeries, and Obama himself will be deciding who should be treated for what illness and who should be left to die. So, they dubbed the law “Obamacare.” House Republicans voted more than 50 times to repeal, undermine, or kill the Affordable Care Act prior to the implementation of the last stage of the program, the open marketplace enrollment, which was set to begin on October 2013. On that day, as the federal fiscal year was schedule to start and the government had reached the amount of money it needs to pay its bills, otherwise referred to as the ‘debt ceiling,’ Congressional Republicans mounted a government shutdown and kept the United States government shut down for nearly three weeks, in a last ditch effort to demolish the law.

The Angry Faces of the Modern Republican Party

Photo_newrepublic.com

This all happened in an effort by Republicans to bloc and boycott a plan that sought to

·         Guarantee healthcare eligibility to all Americans.

·         Prevent insurance companies from denying people insurance coverage           on the basis pre-existing health conditions.

·         Provide comprehensive benefits, such as those enjoyed by federal               employees

·         Cover essential medical services, including preventive, maternity and           mental health care.

·         Offer affordable premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.

·         Provide subsidies for individuals and families who do not qualify for             Medicaid but still need financial assistance to buy into the new public                                                                              plan or purchase a private health care plan.

·         Make it simple to enroll by providing ready access to coverage.

·         Make it possible for individuals to carry their insurance coverage from job to job or region to region through the               National Health Insurance Exchange

·         Establish quality standards by requiring insurers report data to ensure that standards for quality, health information           technology and administration are being met.

 

After moving from the state of surprise with the election of president Obama, to a state of mania after his re-election, the party of failed ideas whose time has come and gone, moved across the border from the state of denial and occupied the states of frenzy and panic. Even the American press failed to realize the act of total desperation that was embodied in the ill-fated maneuver by the GOP/ Tea Party members to bring the United States Government to a squelching halt. Stopping the implementation of the open enrollment was absolutely, positively critical to undoing the law. The Republicans knew that even the deployment of weapons of mass distortion, such as outrageous lies and the most embarrassing rhetoric would not allow them to go to millions of Americans and ask them to turn their health insurance card over to a party of nihilists. These fanatics are also paranoid and apocalyptic. They construct conspiracy theories, circulate them, and then put them through a process of mutation and transmutation through a Republican rat labyrinth, and lost in the state of delusion, they believe hearing the voices of the majority of Americans cheering them on, when in reality, the sound they hear is that of their own voice echoing back to them; And this has been known in recent time as the right wing echo chamber.