PhDeac
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Excellent long Politico article about how Mississippi became the only state in which the percentage of uninsured Americans went up under Obamacare.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/mississippi-burned-obamacare-112181.html
Gary didn’t have health insurance either, not that she hadn’t tried. When the Affordable Care Act mandated that Americans buy coverage, she didn’t want to be a lawbreaker: She had gone online to the federal government’s new website, signed up and paid her first monthly premium of $129. But when her new insurance card arrived in the mail, she was flabbergasted.
“It said $6,000 deductible and 40 percent co-pay,” Gary told me, her timid drawl giving way to strident dismay. Confused, she called to speak to a representative for the insurer Magnolia Health. “‘You tellin’ me if I get a hospital bill for $100,000, I gotta pay $40,000?’” Gary recounted. “And she said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
Never mind that the Magnolia worker was wrong—Gary’s out-of-pocket costs were legally capped at $6,300. She figured that with a hospital bill that high, she would have to file bankruptcy anyway. So really, she thought, what was the point?
“This ain’t worth a tooth,” she said.
She canceled her coverage.
.
...
By the time the federal government offered the required coverage on its balky HealthCare.gov website, 70 percent of Mississippians confessed they knew almost nothing about it. “We would talk to people who say, ‘I don’t want anything about Obamacare. I want the Affordable Care Act,’” remembered Tineciaa Harris, one of the so-called navigators trained to help Mississippians sign up for health care. “And we’d have to explain to them that it’s the same thing.”
...
It is difficult to untangle the state’s dismal health from its past. For African-Americans, even going to a doctor can be a fraught historical act in Mississippi. There are the practical reasons that come from being poor and uninsured, but there is also a toxic legacy: the Jim Crow laws of living memory that barred blacks from most doctors’ offices, the widespread practice of sterilizing black women as a form of birth control, a practice so common it became known as “Mississippi appendectomies.” Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Mississippians today are less likely than the rest of the country to seek primary care for chronic conditions and more likely to turn to hospitals when those ailments become more serious and expensive.
...
Now he was keen to take up the conservative think tank’s ideas for how to aid one portion of those without health insurance: “The largest group of the uninsured in Mississippi when I was governor were the employees of small businesses,” Barbour told me. He tasked Chaney with laying out how Mississippi could set up an online marketplace where the state’s many small businesses could pool their purchasing power to shop for medical coverage.
The idea, at the time, was seen as a conservative one. It was part of the health reform law Republican Governor Mitt Romney had signed in Massachusetts in 2006, and Barbour was touting it as an economic development measure. “I went from not liking it to really falling in love with it,” Chaney told me. “You know, like you didn’t like the girl in the third grade and you ended up marrying her?”
By 2010, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, planning was well underway for a state-based, small-business exchange in Mississippi. “We had no elected officials who were against what we were doing,” Chaney insists today.
...
But the Affordable Care Act had descended on Mississippi like so many prior federal edicts: as an invasion from the North that fractured along racial lines, stoking long-held grievances against the federal government. In June 2012, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law’s core principle—requiring most Americans to obtain health coverage or pay a penalty—Mississippi Tea Party co-founder Roy Nicholson issued a florid order to the ground troops: “To resist by all means that are right in the eyes of God is not rebellion or insurrection, it is patriotic resistance to invasion.”
An anti-abortion activist who recently lost a bid for alderman in his hometown east of Jackson, Nicholson had founded the Mississippi Tea Party in 2009 with a fiery call “to resist the Socialist agenda” of the Obama administration, and the health law became his Exhibit A. (He would eventually resign as chairman of the group in 2013 after referring to the president as “Hussein Obama” and accusing him of “branding patriots, Christians and veterans as potential domestic terrorists that must be spied on, harassed and vilified.”) Obamacare was a perfect issue for the Tea Party, of a piece with its self-declared mission to scale back the government and slash federal taxes, a call that resonates strongly with Mississippians, who have the lowest per capita income—$33,073—in the nation. (Mississippi conservatives don’t tend to mention that Mississippi receives $3 for every $1 it sends to Washington; nearly half of the state’s annual budget depends on federal disbursements. “If you cut that out, we would cease to be a going concern,” says political scientist Marty Wiseman.)
...
Soon after Bryant was sworn in, the Obamacare fuse was lit by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a member of a national network of think tanks that reportedly receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers. As Mississippi’s plan for a state exchange garnered national press and became something of an embarrassment for the conservative faithful, the think tank’s president, Forest Thigpen, seized the moment to come out against the idea. The insurrection urged by Tea Party founder Nicholson was on, and those seen as helping to put the law into place were now to be considered traitors.
Mike Chaney didn’t see the ambush coming.
-----------
That's just from the first 2 of 5 pages. Very good read.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/mississippi-burned-obamacare-112181.html
Gary didn’t have health insurance either, not that she hadn’t tried. When the Affordable Care Act mandated that Americans buy coverage, she didn’t want to be a lawbreaker: She had gone online to the federal government’s new website, signed up and paid her first monthly premium of $129. But when her new insurance card arrived in the mail, she was flabbergasted.
“It said $6,000 deductible and 40 percent co-pay,” Gary told me, her timid drawl giving way to strident dismay. Confused, she called to speak to a representative for the insurer Magnolia Health. “‘You tellin’ me if I get a hospital bill for $100,000, I gotta pay $40,000?’” Gary recounted. “And she said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
Never mind that the Magnolia worker was wrong—Gary’s out-of-pocket costs were legally capped at $6,300. She figured that with a hospital bill that high, she would have to file bankruptcy anyway. So really, she thought, what was the point?
“This ain’t worth a tooth,” she said.
She canceled her coverage.
.
...
By the time the federal government offered the required coverage on its balky HealthCare.gov website, 70 percent of Mississippians confessed they knew almost nothing about it. “We would talk to people who say, ‘I don’t want anything about Obamacare. I want the Affordable Care Act,’” remembered Tineciaa Harris, one of the so-called navigators trained to help Mississippians sign up for health care. “And we’d have to explain to them that it’s the same thing.”
...
It is difficult to untangle the state’s dismal health from its past. For African-Americans, even going to a doctor can be a fraught historical act in Mississippi. There are the practical reasons that come from being poor and uninsured, but there is also a toxic legacy: the Jim Crow laws of living memory that barred blacks from most doctors’ offices, the widespread practice of sterilizing black women as a form of birth control, a practice so common it became known as “Mississippi appendectomies.” Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Mississippians today are less likely than the rest of the country to seek primary care for chronic conditions and more likely to turn to hospitals when those ailments become more serious and expensive.
...
Now he was keen to take up the conservative think tank’s ideas for how to aid one portion of those without health insurance: “The largest group of the uninsured in Mississippi when I was governor were the employees of small businesses,” Barbour told me. He tasked Chaney with laying out how Mississippi could set up an online marketplace where the state’s many small businesses could pool their purchasing power to shop for medical coverage.
The idea, at the time, was seen as a conservative one. It was part of the health reform law Republican Governor Mitt Romney had signed in Massachusetts in 2006, and Barbour was touting it as an economic development measure. “I went from not liking it to really falling in love with it,” Chaney told me. “You know, like you didn’t like the girl in the third grade and you ended up marrying her?”
By 2010, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, planning was well underway for a state-based, small-business exchange in Mississippi. “We had no elected officials who were against what we were doing,” Chaney insists today.
...
But the Affordable Care Act had descended on Mississippi like so many prior federal edicts: as an invasion from the North that fractured along racial lines, stoking long-held grievances against the federal government. In June 2012, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law’s core principle—requiring most Americans to obtain health coverage or pay a penalty—Mississippi Tea Party co-founder Roy Nicholson issued a florid order to the ground troops: “To resist by all means that are right in the eyes of God is not rebellion or insurrection, it is patriotic resistance to invasion.”
An anti-abortion activist who recently lost a bid for alderman in his hometown east of Jackson, Nicholson had founded the Mississippi Tea Party in 2009 with a fiery call “to resist the Socialist agenda” of the Obama administration, and the health law became his Exhibit A. (He would eventually resign as chairman of the group in 2013 after referring to the president as “Hussein Obama” and accusing him of “branding patriots, Christians and veterans as potential domestic terrorists that must be spied on, harassed and vilified.”) Obamacare was a perfect issue for the Tea Party, of a piece with its self-declared mission to scale back the government and slash federal taxes, a call that resonates strongly with Mississippians, who have the lowest per capita income—$33,073—in the nation. (Mississippi conservatives don’t tend to mention that Mississippi receives $3 for every $1 it sends to Washington; nearly half of the state’s annual budget depends on federal disbursements. “If you cut that out, we would cease to be a going concern,” says political scientist Marty Wiseman.)
...
Soon after Bryant was sworn in, the Obamacare fuse was lit by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a member of a national network of think tanks that reportedly receives funding from the billionaire Koch brothers. As Mississippi’s plan for a state exchange garnered national press and became something of an embarrassment for the conservative faithful, the think tank’s president, Forest Thigpen, seized the moment to come out against the idea. The insurrection urged by Tea Party founder Nicholson was on, and those seen as helping to put the law into place were now to be considered traitors.
Mike Chaney didn’t see the ambush coming.
-----------
That's just from the first 2 of 5 pages. Very good read.