As of now, the future of the health care law has been cemented in place because it managed to clear the two hurdles that could’ve derailed it: (1) it was upheld by the Supreme Court, and (2) Obama won reelection and the Democrats held the Senate, making repeal impossible.
So now that all of that has finally been put to rest, how is your state doing insofar as implementation of the ACA is concerned? Here in CA, the law has never really been controversial, and the lawmakers here have been moving aggressively to put it in place ever since it first passed back in 2010. Now that Mitt Romney has gotten his ass kicked in the election, CA is essentially in full-go mode.
It’s not. :rolleyes: Governor Quixote is apparently preparing to spend more of my money tilting at his windmill, even though the feds will be setting up an exchange for us anyway.
MO has passed both a constitutional amendment and a proposition that bans Obamacare (whatever that means). So we’ll likely get the federal exchange. It’s unclear whether the Governor (a Democrat) can opt in to the Medicaid expansion or not - I’m guessing he’ll try and then go to court about it.
During the discussions on Health Care Reform, I found one item (very nasty IMHO) that usually identifies how a state will implement the law.
I remember reading an article that pointed out that Health insurance companies or groups that operate a tight ship and have a low overhead are usually in favor of the reform and are in states that will implement the law, Kaiser in California had IIRC just about 10-15% overhead costs in their delivery of health care to Californians and cheaper than many other groups in other states, Kaiser would be able to get a lot of business in the whole of the USA if the exchanges are implemented.
Guess where the biggest inefficient price gougers of health care are located? Texas was one of them. Is there a need to report how they are implementing the health care law?
Makes sense, but due to restrictions on selling health insurance across state lines, aren’t Kaiser in California and Kaiser in any other state completely separate companies?
AFAIK there will be options for multi-state or out-of-state health insurance purchasing, I would think that if there are separate companies with the same name they will just adopt other names when they appear in the exchange of a different state or the companies will organize and join forces. (A similar situation is with banks, Wells Fargo in Arizona was not the same Wells Fargo in California, I have noticed though that they are however getting their act together in their account systems).
We had our open enrollment conference for employee benefits last week, and the one change directly related to ACA was that all preventitive women’s health issues (pap smear, birth control pills, etc) have a $0 co-pay.
I’m in northern CA, so you can imagine that many of us were infuriated that these sluts were being catered to, and stormed right out of that meeting to gather our pitchforks and torches.