Affordable Care Act

With close to 10,000 letters in tow, a group of community leaders traveled to Baton Rouge Friday morning to make an in-person delivery to Governor Piyush Jindal. The Jeremiah Group, a faith-based, non-partisan community organization, started their “Life, Liberty, and Healthcare for All” letter campaign in July. The signed letters urge Jindal to accept Medicaid expansion for Louisiana and were collected from residents across New Orleans.

Belay is among some 120,000 Blue Shield customers -- which represent about 60 percent of its individual market -- who received such a letter in recent weeks. Other insurance companies have cancelled policies, telling their customers that their existing policies fall short of the 10 “essential health benefits” the ACA requires all plans to include beginning Jan.1, 2014, the day the health care law is fully implemented. 

According to Randall Hagar, director of government relations with the California Psychiatric Association, a state mental health parity bill signed by Gov. Davis in 2000 required insurers to cover the diagnosis and treatment of a range of mental illnesses under “the same terms and conditions applied to other medical conditions.” The intent of the law was to eliminate the disparity in co-pays and higher deductibles.

No progress was made to end a budget impasse that resulted in a government shutdown since 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday. News of the shutdown, which includes the closure of all national parks and a work furlough for 800,000 federal employees, generated a big response in the ethnic press. Key areas of concern included the shutdown’s effect on federal workers, loss of funding for social services, ramifications for immigration reform, and environmental impacts. 

For the moment, Obama  now has a foil who's making it easier for him to stand up for his health care initiative and outline his budget priorities. And Cruz gets to show that he's first among equals when it comes to opposing anything linked to Obama. Meanwhile, federal employees will be furloughed, any salary that they forfeit won't be spent in a still-fragile economy, and Congress's inability to make a deal will eventually threaten another loss of confidence in the markets.

So now the Tea Party is saying, “Okay, we won’t threaten to shut down the U.S. Government and all its services.  Instead, we’ll put a gun to our head again to force Democrats to give us what we want or we’ll let the United States of America default on its debts.” What they’re talking about now is the federal debt ceiling.  Republican talking points try to argue that the debt ceiling is a matter of cutting out-of-control spending and decreasing the “debt burden.”  

A strong majority of ethnic voters and young people in California support the Affordable Care Act, according to the results of a new Field Poll. The broad support from ethnic voters and voters under 30 has tipped the scales toward popular support of Obamacare in the state. More than half of all California voters (53 percent) say they support the ACA, although white voters slightly oppose the health care law, with 49 percent opposing and 44 percent supporting.

Last week, 400,000 poor and underserved Louisianans, many them people of color, were shut out of potentially life-saving health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). A Louisiana House health committee voted down a measure that would have forced Governor Bobby Jindal to opt into the Medicaid expansion provision of ACA that is being subsidized by the federal government to cover vulnerable communities.