Heh.

Yesterday, via Twitter:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏@RepHartzler

Just signed up for ObamaCare. Ugh! ‘Only’ a 68% increase! So much for the ‘Affordable’ Care Act! 11:43 AM – 7 Dec 13

Interesting. No mention of her experience navigating the web site.

And, as is becoming the norm these days, there were a number of responses:

carl klopfenstine ‏@Carl23b4

@RepHartzler Had some really cheap shit before Huh?Can’t afford it get Medicaid Expansion in Missouri 11:48 AM – 7 Dec 13

That was within five minutes.

Steven McCain ‏@Steven_McCain

@RepHartzler Hope you socked away some of that $536,000 in farm subsidies! 11:50 AM – 7 Dec 13

That one was within seven minutes.

Bob Yates ‏@OldDrum

@RepHartzler Share with us your previous plan what it covered to your new plan. You are aware the GOP made you signup for Obamacare? 2:29 PM – 8 Dec 13

Yes, we would like to have a comparison of the previous plan with the new one. And the employer contribution, if any, for each.

That signup requirement would be Senator Chuck Grassley’s (r) idea:

Why Congress is (or isn’t) exempt from Obamacare

Gregory Korte, USA TODAY 6:44 p.m. EDT September 27, 2013

….Members of Congress are treated differently under Obamacare, but they’re not exempt. In fact, by forcing them to purchase health insurance through publicly run exchanges, they’re impacted more by that key provision than similar employees in private sector – or even in government.

But members of Congress will also be able to purchase their insurance under terms that are more favorable than other employees – in government or in business – who have access to employer-provided health care…

….During the 2010 debate over the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, proposed an amendment requiring members of Congress and their staffs to purchase health insurance though state exchanges. Democrats, viewing the amendment as a political stunt, co-opted the idea as their own and inserted it into the bill…..

( – promoted by Michael Bersin)

As anyone who watches Fox News, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, is going to be a train wreck. Hartzler tweeted the following:

My hat’s off to Sen. Ted Cruz & Senate Republicans highlighting how ObamaCare is a train wreck hurting hardworking Americans & killing jobs.

On Monday, I received the following e-mail from the HR department at the university I teach.

On Sept 20, 2014, [the] Board of Governors voted to go with our existing health care provider Blue Cross/Blue Shield.  Overall premium increase to the plan this year is 1.6%.  Remarkable given that 1% of that increase is attributed to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  Individual and family plan increases will range from 1.47% to 2% depending on the option selected.

A 1% increase is due to Obamacare.  Terrible.

That raised an interesting question: what have been the increases for the last several years?

I asked.  Do you want to guess?

Here is the response I got back:

The increase for 2012 was 5.1%, for 2013 was 4.65% and as . . . mentioned [in the previous e-mail] it will be an overall of 1.6% for 2014.

What a train wreck!!!!

After 5.1% and 4.65% increases, Obamacare results in a 1.5% increase.

Obviously we are on the road to perdition.

What is happening with your employer-provided healthcare?

By “we” I mean Missouri. And if you want to see what the insane clown posse that runs the statehouse has done to our reputation, check out this front page article on DailyKos. What’ll you find there? Remember Bill Clinton’s recent quip about states where it’s easier to get a gun than to get health insurance? Here’s proof that our legislators think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

The putative republican nominee (according to the inside the beltway free cocktail weenie circuit), yesterday:

Mitt Romney (r): ….It also means that if you don’t like what they do you can fire them. I like being able to fire people that provide services to me. If, if, if I, you know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need I want to, I want to say, you know, that, that, I’m gonna go get somebody else to provide that service to me. And, and so that’s one thing I’d change….

It was about health insurance:

Posted at 03:13 PM ET, 01/09/2012

Romney: ‘I like being able to fire people who provide services to me’

By Philip Rucker

….Romney’s comment came in response to a question about health-care policy before more than 300 area business leaders. The former Massachusetts governor was referring to being able to change insurance companies….

Mitt Romney (r) caught a lot of flack for his statement. Here’s the real problem with it:

More Choices, Better Coverage: Health Insurance Reform for Rural America [pdf]

….And in many rural states, one insurance company dominates more than 80 percent of the market, meaning that families are often limited to a choice between only one or two insurers. As a result, some rural residents are unable to purchase a health insurance plan that is right for them….

[footnote] American Medical Association. (2008,2009). “Competition in health insurance: A comprehensive study of U.S. Markets: 2008 Update,” American Medical Association.

“….If, if, if I, you know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need I want to, I want to say, you know, that, that, I’m gonna go get somebody else to provide that service to me….”

Who do you “fire” when you only have one choice? A multimillionaire with the resources, the ability to travel, and multiple homes across the country would have plenty of choices. Those with far fewer resources, not so much.

It’s not a really difficult trick to understand that difference.

Then again, if a corporation is a person one could suppose it could be “fired”.

In 2006, twice as many people died from lack of health insurance as died from homicide. The Springfield News-Leader put a human face on that statistic in an article about how many Missourians die each year because they lack health insurance:

The crisis of the uninsured is a personal one for Angela Ricketts. Her father died at age 57 from small cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma years ago, despite early symptoms that something was wrong.

Virgil Brown had put off seeing a doctor and undergoing tests because, as a self-employed home builder in Springfield, he couldn’t afford health insurance, Ricketts said.

One week after Brown’s wife got health insurance for both of them, he sought medical treatment for his worsening symptoms. By then, Ricketts said, “The mass was so large there was nothing they could do and gave him two months to live.”

That’s one life among thousands in Missouri every year that are cut short because they don’t have health insurance, said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA.

Nearly 10 working-age adults in Missouri die each week because they don’t have health insurance, according to a new report by Families USA, a national organization for health care consumers. The report was released Wednesday.

Ten a week, huh? What that works out to in our state is that 2800 died unnecessarily between 2000 and 2006.

Maybe Missourians should quit bitching and be grateful they don’t live in Texas, where seven working-age people die each day due to a lack of health insurance. I thought our state was at the bottom of the heap in everything. Turns out, it could be worse.

It’s been so bad for so long that many Americans can’t–or won’t–imagine it any other way. I talked Sunday to a Republican woman whose grown daughter, Christi, works for a small firm that won’t give her health insurance. Christi needs an operation on her shoulder, and I pointed out that even if she switches jobs and gets insurance, she’ll have trouble getting that covered. Insurance companies will call her problem a pre-existing condition.

But when I suggested to Paula that not only do employees need insurance, but also that employers need to be relieved of the burden of providing insurance, I was treated to a rant about the inefficiency of all government programs and what a nightmare government health insurance would be. “I don’t care if it is my daughter who has trouble getting covered,” she told me. “I can’t condone letting the government waste all our tax money.”

I could have pointed out how successful Medicare has been and how much better Medicare would function if it could draw on the pool of younger, healthier Americans to offset the cost of treating older ones. I could have pointed out that insurance companies, because they must have profits, are far more costly than Medicare.

But mere logic would have been wasted. If Paula can’t see that insurance companies are ripping her off by taking only the healthiest applicants, then she’d have to find her daughter’s very life threatened before she’d relent. And since Christi is my niece, I can’t wish for that.

All I can wish for is that enough of us have seen the light about how awful the health care crisis is that we can overrule people like my sister, who are too thoroughly propagandized to see their own best interests.

Thank you to those who are expending tireless effort in that quest. MOSP (Missourians for Single Payer) is sponsoring several events this weekend. The highlight of the weekend will be a speech Sunday morning, April 20th, at 11:00 by Donna Smith, who was featured in Sicko.

Or maybe Smith isn’t the highlight. You can read the schedule and decide for yourself what looks the most interesting:

Schedule of key events for Health Care Weekend are as follows:

Thursday, April 17, 11 a.m. to Noon, KWMU’s ” St. Louis on the Air” will feature Donna and Larry Smith, a couple highlighted in the 2007 documentary, SiCKO. She is the main speaker for Health Care Weekend.

Saturday, April 19, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. A street theater group will march in protest of deaths directly related to the nation’s broken health care system.

At 7:30 p.m. the Smiths will introduce a free public showing of SiCKO in the auditorium of the Ethical Society, 9001 Clayton Blvd. in Ladue.

Sunday, April 20, 11 a.m., Donna Smith, will give the Annual Platform Lecture on Health Care, also at the society.

( – promoted by hotflash)

Speaking of FRAMING, a pet peeve of ours is the general inability to de-couple the terms “health care” and “insurance coverage” when thinking about health care reform.  We would also be better served to stop thinking in terms of premiums and claims.  It is a good idea to start thinking about health care as necessary to a common good.  Maybe even a human right.

The insurance model with which we have struggled for the last umpteen years is filled with words like deductible, co-pay, preexisting condition, and eligibility.  All of these ideas, that we hold so closely in our conscious thoughts regarding health care, are nothing more than accepted (or more appropriately, unconscious) signals for additional out of pocket payments.  We shy away from “higher premium packages” accepting the responsibility of paying higher “co-pays and deductibles”, hoping to beat the odds. We “insure” ourselves against illness rather than committing to building a healthier society. We have been conditioned to think of health care in insurance-ese rather than in terms of care needs.  In short, we are prisoners of insurance industry framing. 

We would like to recommend a jailbreak.  Once safely on the outside, we could think in terms of “programs” instead of  “packages”, “wellness” rather than  “illness” and “needs ” as opposed to “allowable services”.  We could laugh in the faces of those who dourly offer the incantation of “Socialized Medicine” and call it “Freedom to be Healthy” instead.  We could stop worrying about how much “we” are paying to fund health care for Tom and Harry and instead look upon a healthier society as a shared goal which is necessary for a strong national defense. 

The jailbreak won’t come easily.  We will have to discard “preexisting” notions, “disallow” prior prejudices and rule “ineligible” insurance industry jargon. We will need to develop new framing ideas that underscore our dedication to health care reform.  If we should falter along the way, we need only recall the lost opportunity to reframe the Iraqi “War” as the Iraqi “Occupation”, thereby endowing  GWB with the ability to control the debate by stating , “We’re at war”!  Change comes one frame at a time. Lets start reframing this debate.