Healthcare reform is URGENT
From the Center on American Progress:
The economic recovery package that President Obama signed into law yesterday in Denver contains many important health care provisions such as funding for Medicaid and health IT as well as subsidies for the recently unemployed. However, the bill does not represent a total victory for progressive health care advocates, as lawmakers negotiating the bill compromised on a number of key health care components. For example, negotiators bowed to objections from conservatives and stripped provisions that would have allowed workers "to stay on Cobra until they qualified for Medicare" or enroll in Medicaid if they couldn’t afford COBRA premiums "even with the new subsidies." At the same time, Americans in large numbers are losing health care coverage. In fact, according to a new Center for American Progress Action Fund report, the unemployment rate grew by 0.8 percentage points in December and January while 100,000 people a week, or 14,000 people a day lost their health coverage. The ranks of the uninsured will continue to grow as the recession persists. As Berkeley professor Jacob Hacker pointed out, the stimulus "won’t provide the cure" to the health care crisis. "What we need is a new New Deal."
