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Some reassurance at least

08 Feb 2009 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Jesus is kept busy in this Sunday's gospel healing the many sick people who were brought to him. In one bright spot on a dark economic horizon, it will become vastly cheaper for most people to keep their health insurance after losing a job if a provision in the current stimulus proposal makes it into law. The billions to be poured into health care from the economic stimulus package will do little if anything about the chronic conditions behind the nation's stubbornly large ranks of uninsured, advocates for reform point out. Instead, the plan is a temporary lifeline for nearly desperate times. For those who qualify, relief would be substantial. Under a dramatic, temporary expansion of COBRA, the law that lets the unemployed keep health insurance from their old job for up to 18 months if they pay for it in full, costs would drop by about two-thirds for a year. Moreover, people who lose a job they've had for 10 years could stay on COBRA at their expense all the way to age 65, when Medicare takes over, if they don't get another job with insurance first. People 55 and over could do the same without meeting the 10-year requirement. It's so expensive for people to extend that insurance now that many don't do it. It can quickly eat up a majority of unemployment benefits. People who lose jobs at businesses that employ fewer than 20 people don't qualify for COBRA. For them, the government plan would bring many more jobless people under Medicaid's wing. The federal government would pay for that and give states much more money to run the cost-shared part of the program. In return, states taking the extra money would have to back down on some of the cuts they've made to the program recently. Altogether it's a pricey lifeline: $40 billion to subsidize health insurance for the unemployed and more than twice that to support Medicaid. Source: An article by Calvin Woodward for the Associated Press

unemployment benefits states health insurance health care uninsured cobra unemployed medicaid medicare
A prescription for health-care reform

21 Jun 2009 - Preaching the News for Sunday

"Whoever is in Christ is a new creation," the author of Second Corinthians confidently proclaims this Sunday. President Barack Obama took his case for creating a new system of health-care coverage to the American Medical Association (AMA) Monday. Obama told wary doctors Monday that the nation's health system is a "ticking time bomb for the federal budget" and said those who call his plan for a taxpayer-funded coverage option a step toward a government takeover of health care "are not telling the truth." Obama told the AMA the time is right to overhaul the system but acknowledged how difficult it will be. "You'll hear warnings about socialized medicine . . . long lines and rationed care, decisions made by bureaucrats and not doctors," he said. Obama countered that a public plan would not be a "Trojan horse for a single-payer system" in which government regulates all health care. AMA leaders said they share Obama's goal of covering the nation's more than 46 million uninsured people, but some members of the group said they have qualms about the details. Doctors fed up with red tape are not "confident that the government's going to be able to take over the whole system and do any better," said J. Gregory Cooper, a Cynthiana, Kentucky family doctor. Source: An article by Judy Keen for USA TODAY

barack obama uninsured health care reform ama american medical association j gregory cooper
Unhealthy delays on government website

27 Oct 2013 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The prayers of the lowly faithful reach God expeditiously, the first reading promises this Sunday. The efforts of the uninsured to work their way through the application process on the government’s new healthcare.gov website, however, have been seriously stymied since its October 1 launch. President Barack Obama promised Monday the problems would be fixed in an expeditious manner, but many are skeptical.In a response to mounting criticism, the White House said Wednesday that it plans to soften the deadline for when Americans are required to purchase health insurance and avoid being penalized until March 31, 2014.Other critics of the healthcare law, including U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have proposed delaying the individual mandate penalty until six months after the Government Accountability Office certifies that the problem-plagued healthcare website is working.As the Obama administration weighed the changes, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday that it will hold daily briefings to update reporters on the progress of what Obama has called the “tech surge” to rectify the hitches and glitches on the site.One survey found that only about 20 percent of people who tried to log on to government-run marketplaces were able to do so without any technical problems. Users have gotten error messages; the Spanish-language version of the site has been delayed; and programming costs have tripled. “There’s no sugarcoating it,” Obama said of the bug-ridden site Monday.Homily hint: What may be lost in the upheaval over the healthcare.gov boondoggle is the fact that millions of low-income or unemployed Americans have lacked decent healthcare at an affordable price regardless of their medical history. Let us remember that “the lowly” and the poor referred to in this Sunday’s readings deserve basic services many of us take for granted. Source: An article by Matthew DeLuca and Daniel Arkin for NBC News

uninsured obama administration marco rubio department of health and human services affordable care act healthcaregov