"For hundreds of thousands, Health Care Relief Begins Today"

[impik]

NYT:

Sometimes lost in the partisan clamor about the new health care law is the profound relief it is expected to bring to hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been stricken first by disease and then by a Darwinian insurance system.
On Thursday, the six-month anniversary of the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a number of its most central consumer protections take effect, just in time for the midterm elections.

Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.

It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, that must be covered without co-payments. And it allows consumers who join a new plan to keep their own doctors and to appeal insurance company reimbursement decisions to a third party.

The arrival of the long-awaited changes propelled President Obama, whose Democrats have struggled to exploit their signature achievement, into the backyard of Paul and Frances Brayshaw of Falls Church, Va., to explain his decision to pursue health care.

“The amount of vulnerability that was out there was horrendous,” Mr. Obama on Wednesday told a gathering of people chosen to illustrate the law’s new provisions. He said he concluded that “we’ve just got to give people some basic peace of mind.”

Mr. Obama also responded to Republican Congressional leaders who have campaigned on a threat to repeal the act. “I want them to look you in the eye,” he told his audience, and explain their opposition to a law that is projected to cover 32 million uninsured and reduce the deficit by $143 billion over 10 years.

The Republican strategy “makes sense in terms of politics and polls,” Mr. Obama said, an acknowledgment that the electorate is divided and that many swing districts are hostile. “It just doesn’t make sense in terms of actually making people’s lives better.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/health/policy/23careintro.html?_r=2&hp

[Lint Head]

1. I want someone to look me in the eye and say a health care bill was passed.

There was no health care bill passed. It was a health "insurance" bill. I heard someone on morning TV refer to insurance companies as 'health care providers'. Insurance companies do not provide health care. Doctors, Dentists and Durable Medical Equipment providers do.
Insurance companies are NOT providers. They are middle men that pay the bill after they take you inflated monthly payment.

There is a reason insurance companies own and exist in enormous skyscrapers.

[LWolf]

2. And for the rest of us, access to health care is further away than ever,

while we pay even higher premiums for insurance we can't afford to use.

[Clio the Leo]

3. kick nt