I'm glad I have health care because my broken heart needs to be fixed.
"State seeks relief from part of US health law" by Michael Levenson | Globe Staff, July 06, 2013
President Obama’s health care law has had perhaps no stronger base of support than Massachusetts. The heavily Democratic state pioneered universal health coverage, and its governor, Deval Patrick, is a staunch defender of the law and a close friend of the president.
But now Massachusetts is pleading for relief from a key aspect of the law, potentially putting the governor and the president in an awkward position.
Last week, Democratic state lawmakers sent a bill to Patrick’s desk that orders him to seek the Obama administration’s blessing to continue offering health insurance discounts to certain small businesses.
Without that permission, business groups say, the federal Affordable Care Act will cause many of those discounts to disappear, and 60 percent of the state’s small companies could see premiums increase.
Then the Obama administration LIED!
The bill is unusual in that it forces Patrick to effectively transmit business groups’ grievances with the president’s signature domestic imitative to his allies in the Obama administration.
The governor signed the legislation in private on Friday when the State House was empty and many voters were on vacation. He did not issue a press release, which he often does when he wants to promote bills he is signing.
It was a Slow Saturday kind of move!
“It’s a perfect example of when policy slams into politics,” said Joshua Archambault, director of health care policy at the Pioneer Institute, a conservative research group in Boston. “For the last three years, Massachusetts officials have been trying to build the case that the Affordable Care Act will be a complete windfall for Massachusetts, and that is proving simply not to be true.”
Yes, we were all lied to, but you can't believe anything a conservative says, so....
Small-business groups that helped push the bill through the Legislature see it as an important moment that could raise their complaints about the federal law to a national level....
I was told they had already been heard!
Patrick said last week that he asked the Obama administration for a waiver earlier this year and was told it would not be legal. He said he did not believe the bill would persuade the Obama administration to issue a waiver now. The bill also seeks to reconcile differences between Massachusetts’s mandatory health law and the federal version.
“It’s a request that we have made already,” Patrick said Wednesday. “If they want to pass a bill so that they have voted to ask me to do something I’ve already done, fine. No harm, no foul.”
What the hell does that mean? No harm, no foul? Meaning what, he's not going to be bothered with it?
Democrats who backed the bill in the Legislature said it is not enough for Patrick to have asked the Obama administration for a waiver without forcing the issue further....
The change could result in higher premiums for 60 percent of Massachusetts’s small businesses, according to an analysis of state insurance data by the Pioneer Institute....
Which means they will be cutting staff and hours to get out from under it.
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