Wendell Potter's Blog, page 16

Don’t Wait ‘Til Last Minute to Enroll in Obamacare

Subscribers should shop around before choosing health plan. Attention shoppers: After today, for those whose employers don’t offer health insurance, there will only be seven shopping days left for coverage that starts on January 1, 2015. December 15 is the last day you will be able to pick an Obamacare plan if you want to [...]

Exploding The Myths About American Health Care

New documentary takes ‘world’s best’ system to task. I don’t agree with Romney and Obama health care advisor Jonathan Gruber that Americans are stupid, but there is abundant evidence that we’re incredibly gullible. And we’re paying a big price for it. For the latest evidence, check out the documentary Remote Area Medical, which opens in [...]

Court Case Pushed By Think Tank Could Leave Uninsured Out In The Cold

Supremes to decide challenge to Obamacare based on a single sentence. At least four million Americans will rejoin the ranks of the uninsured—and consequently lose access to affordable health care—if the Supreme Court sides with opponents of Obamacare in a case that hinges on the interpretation of a single sentence in the law. But if [...]

Obama Administration Let Opponents Define the Affordable Care Act

The Democrats’ strategy seems to have been to say as little as possible about why reform was needed and how the final law would protect us from insurance industry abuses. When I saw the news coverage of White House health care adviser Jonathan Gruber’s remarks, in which he essentially called Americans stupid, I thought of [...]

Health Insurers Win Midterm Election!

Stock prices climb as companies target changes in Affordable Health Care Act. Republicans weren’t the only big winners in last Tuesday’s election. So were health insurance companies, many of which spent heavily to influence the outcome. There are several provisions of the Affordable Care Act that the insurance industry would like the next Congress to [...]

Erasing the ‘Obama’ From Obamacare

Republicans hell bent on ‘fixing’ Obama’s signature achievement really care about a single ‘tweak’: erasing the President’s signature. Even though Republicans will soon control both houses of Congress, don’t expect that Obamacare will go away. You can expect, though, that it will be tweaked. And I’m betting that when all is said and done, GOP [...]

Insurers Spending Cash, Spreading Fear in High-Stakes California Showdown

A well-funded distortion of Proposition 45. As I predicted two months ago, California voters have been bombarded by a group with a consumer-friendly name warning that a vote for a ballot initiative tomorrow would allow “one politician” to “interfere” with their health care treatment options. Proposition 45 would not do that, but California’s biggest health [...]

Health Insurers Press for High-Deductible, Low-Benefit Policies

As we head into the final stretch before next week’s midterm elections, Americans continue to have wide-ranging views of Obamacare, but even many who have an unfavorable view of it say they would rather see Congress improve it than get rid of it. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent tracking poll [...]

The ‘Good Old Days’ Before Obamacare

Pining for days when the ACA wasn’t ‘messing with your coverage?’ Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to see what you’re missing now. We Americans have short-term memory when it comes to health care. Either that or far too many of us have bought – hook, line and sinker – the false accusations and [...]

Comparison Shopping for a Health Plan

California leads the way in providing useful data; nonprofits often rank highest. During the last few weeks of this year, most of us will need to make a decision about our health insurance coverage for 2015, regardless of whether we get it through an employer or buy it on our own.  But unless you live [...]