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| Covered California Will Come for Your Assets |
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Posted by: Julia C
> Email: j----------------@yahoo.com
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> I was really surprised to get the letter and form to register to vote from Calif Covered.
Covered California wants to make every voter a Democrat. Individual recipients were not only receiving voter registration, but the registration box next to "Democrat" was already checked.
Not only that, but the state legislature just killed a bill which would prevent felons from serving as Covered California navigators.
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> I'm already a registered voter and have been at my current address for 20 years!
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> I can't believe they hired a "Voter Registration Coordinator" to send out these letters!
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> Also, check into the notice people are getting about the Medi-Cal Estate Recovery Program!
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> It says the cost of Medi-cal services including insurance premiums paid and payments made to managed care plans can be recovered by the State. I would like to know if the program is paying for my insurance premiums to HealthNet, since I had them as my insurance a for a few years before I had to drop them because the premiums became unaffordable for me.
Wow!
Now Covered California wants to uncover every nook, cranny, and corner of a person's personal wealth just to pay the bills.
Obamacare is not just unaffordable, not just uncaring, but now patients need protection from the very government which claimed that their legislation would protect them.
As for Covered California, there is so much more which needs to be uncovered. Still.
Why are righties so worried about additional voters, anyway? Worried that there's more of US than YOU?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteArtie, buddy! You're deleting comments! What do you against freedom of speech, buddy? Huh?
DeleteAt first blush, Dean Angstadt sounds like the kind of guy the right loves to hear about. He’s a self-employed logger who lives in a small town north of Philadelphia and he knew with certainty he wanted nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. When his friend Bob Leinhauser urged Angstadt, who had no insurance, to sign up for coverage, he replied, “I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it.”
ReplyDeleteBut Angstadt also had a faulty aortic valve. And as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday, that left him with a choice: “Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion’s share of the cost of the life-saving surgery – or die.”
In 2011, Angstadt had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted to help his ailing heart pump more efficiently. Not long after, the almost 6-foot, 285-pound man’s man was back in the woods, doing the Paul Bunyan thing.
But last summer, his health worsened again. It was taking him 10 minutes to catch his breath after felling a tree. By fall, he was winded after traveling the 50 feet between his house and truck.
“I knew that I was really sick,” said the Boyertown resident. “I figured the doctors were going to have to operate, so I tried to work as long as I could to save money for the surgery. But it got to the point where I couldn’t work.”
Angstadt hoped to work long enough to save the money he needed for surgery, but because he needed surgery, he couldn’t work. What he needed was affordable health insurance – which wouldn’t penalize him for a pre-existing condition – but Angstadt was convinced he “didn’t trust this Obamacare.”
Eventually, his buddy convinced him to do the smart thing. Angstadt filled out the application, signed up for the Highmark Blue Cross silver PPO plan, and paid his premium of $26.11.
And it may have very well saved his life.
Angstadt’s plan kicked in on March 1. It was just in time. Surgery couldn’t be put off any longer. On March 31, Angstadt had life-saving valve-replacement surgery.
“I probably would have ended up falling over dead” without the surgery, Angstadt said. “Not only did it save my life, it’s going to give me a better quality of life.” […]
“For me, this isn’t about politics,” he added. “I’m trying to help other people who are like me, stubborn and bullheaded, who refused to even look. From my own experience, the ACA is everything it’s supposed to be and, in fact, better than it’s made out to be.”
He added, “A lot of people I talk to are so misinformed about the ACA.”
You don’t say.
This is exactly the kind of success story that terrifies anti-healthcare activists. Angstadt had fallen for the con – he viscerally opposed the reform law and wanted nothing to do with it. Conservatives had told him not to enroll, not to trust anything Democrats say, and to stay uninsured on purpose, and he stuck to the plan.
But facing a crisis, Angstadt grudgingly gave it a try. And now he knows the conservative pitch was wrong.
We can talk about just how offensive it was for the right to urge American consumers to put themselves at risk and stay uninsured to advance a political cause, but stories like these also speak to a discouraging future for ACA critics: the longer the law is in effect, the more Dean Angstadts there will be, slowly realizing that conservatives were selling a bill of goods.
For the right, it’s a recipe for long-term failure.
There’s a reason so many politicians embrace carefully managed, pre-scripted events: they never know what actual people are going to say. The spontaneity may be refreshing for the rest of us, but for politicians and their aides, it’s frustrating when the public goes “off-message.”
ReplyDeleteAlmost exactly two years ago, this happened to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Pennsylvania, when aides arranged for the candidate to chat with a group of regular folks about the economy. One voter said, “None of us like to pay more taxes, but sometimes that’s necessary.” Another added, “It’s a necessary evil.” “Right, right,” a third person said as the group nodded.
The Republican presidential hopeful didn’t do too many unscripted events after that.
This week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) ran into similar trouble. The Republican governor, facing a tough re-election fight, is heavily invested in condemning the Affordable Care Act, so he visited a South Florida senior center for a roundtable chat with retirees he assumed would agree with him.
Oops.
The 20 seniors assembled for a roundtable with Scott at the Volen Center were largely content with their Medicare coverage and didn’t have negative stories to recount. And some praised Obamacare – a program that Scott frequently criticizes.
“I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott.
Eisen told the governor he wasn’t sure “if, as you say,” there are Obamacare-inspired cuts to Medicare. But even if there are, that would be OK. “I can’t expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut.”
Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, of Boca Raton, told the governor that people who are too young for Medicare need the health coverage they get from Obamacare. If young people don’t have insurance, she said, everyone else ends up paying for their care when they get sick or injured and end up in the hospital.
Twisting the knife, Rubin added, “People were appalled at Social Security. They were appalled at Medicare when it came out. I think these major changes take some people aback. But I think we have to be careful not to just rely on the fact that we’re seniors and have an entitlement to certain things…. We’re all just sitting here taking it for granted that because we have Medicare we don’t want to lose one part of it. That’s wrong to me. I think we have to spread it around. This is the United States of America. It’s not the United States of senior citizens.”
The underlying point of Scott’s visit was to try to complain about Medicare Advantage reforms and how awful recent “cuts” must be for seniors. But when the governor asked one elderly woman if she’d seen any changes, she said, “Not really.” Another member of the roundtable said he’s “very happy” with the current coverage. A third person said he’s had “no problems.” A fourth said she and her husband are “very pleased.”
When Scott asked if they’ve found doctors opting out of Medicare, most said, “No.”
It was at this point that the governor probably decided he no longer wants to talk to regular people who don’t have a script to follow.
For the record, as Scott probably knows, these so-called “cuts” to Medicare Advantage aren’t really cuts to beneficiaries. At issue are Medicare cost-savings embraced by the Obama administration through the Affordable Care Act. The so-called “cuts” are changes to the way in which the government reimburses insurance companies, which have been overpaid in the Medicare Advantage program.
What’s more, congressional Republicans – not exactly a moderate bunch – have already endorsed and voted for these “cuts.”
It’s likely the governor understands this, but hopes to fool voters. If yesterday was any indication, his efforts aren’t going well.