Osmel Martinez Azcue wanted to do the right thing, for both his own health and the health of the nation. When the Florida resident came down with flu-like symptoms shortly after returning from a trip to China, he immediately went to a local hospital to get tested for coronavirus.
A few weeks later, according to the Miami Herald, Azcue received an invoice for more than $3,000. His insurer claims he’s responsible for $1,400 of the total. He’s expecting even more bills to arrive over the next few weeks.
A 39-year-old Manhattan woman has tested positive for COVID-19, more commonly known as the novel coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said late Sunday. She is the first confirmed case in the city and in the tri-state area.
"The patient, a woman in her late thirties, contracted the virus while traveling abroad in Iran, and is currently isolated in her home," Cuomo said in making the announcement late Sunday.
The governor said that the woman is a health care worker, and that her background allowed her to take the appropriate precautions and seek testing. She flew back to New York on Tuesday but did not take mass transit home, Cuomo said Monday. As a precaution, the people on her flight and the ride-share driver are being notified about potential exposure, but Cuomo said the woman was not thought to be contagious at that time. She has respiratory symptoms but Cuomo described them as mild.
Disclosure: I publicly endorsed Joe Biden in the Democratic primary yesterday. It had nothing to do with this post, however. Shout-out to Pradheep Shanker for bringing this to my attention.
Updated w/my exchange with Rep. Khanna at the bottom
Update: I added "(nearly all)" to the headline for extra clarity given the subject of this entry.
Ro Khanna is a Democratic Congressman representing CA-17. He's also a top Bernie Sanders surrogate and a huge Medicare for All advocate.
About an hour ago, he was interviewed on NPR for about five minutes regarding the Caronavirus, tomorrow's California Presidential primary...and Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All plan.
About a month ago I wrote a flow chart, of sorts, explaining the different potential permutations of the absurd Texas vs. Azar (aka Texas vs. U.S., aka #TexasFoldEm) lawsuit which threatens the entire Affordable Care Act. Since then there's been a few more developments (actually, a few more non-developments), the timing of which change the potential landscape a bit.
Sometime this morning the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether they'll intervene in the case:
Hey everyone! The Supreme Court may announce at at 9:30am today its decision about whether to take the big Affordable Care Act case. If it says yes, it'll hear argument in the fall (around the election!). If it says no, it'll take another three years or so to get a final answer.
NOTE: Michigan's Democratic Presidential primary isn't until March 10th, a week after Super Tuesday. With that in mind, I was planning on waiting until after it passed before announcing my own decision. After Joe Biden blew the doors off everyone in the South Carolina primary, however, I've decided to move up my announcement, because it looks pretty clear that there's only three possible ways things can go now: A Bernie victory, a Biden victory or a bonkers contested convention where anything goes.
When I supported Elizabeth Warren for the first half of 2019 (mostly...I never formally endorsed her but was 90% of the way there), I did so with the understanding that, if elected, her actual administration would be more restrained in governing than her official policy positions would indicate (it would have to be due to the nature of Congress)...and I was fine with that.
I knew that Warren knows enough about how the sausage is made to understand that you can only move the Overton Window so far before you end up achieving nothing at all. She gave what I felt was a pitch-perfect response to the question of achieving Universal Healthcare at a CNN Town Hall in March 2019:
Last March I wrote an analysis of H.R.1868, the House Democrats bill that comprises the core of the larger H.R.1884 "ACA 2.0" bill. H.R.1884 includes a suite of about a dozen provisions to protect, repair and strengthen the ACA, but the House Dems also broke the larger piece of legislation down into a dozen smaller bills as well.
Some of these "mini-ACA 2.0" bills only make minor improvements to the law, or make improvements in ways which are important but would take a few years to see obvious results. Others, however, make huge improvements and would be immediately obvious, and of those, the single most dramatic and important one is H.R.1868.
The official title is the "Health Care Affordability Act of 2019", but I just call both it and H.R.1884 (the "Protecting Pre-Existing Conditions and Making Health Care More Affordable Act of 2019") by the much simpler and more accurate moniker "ACA 2.0".
Last March I wrote an analysis of H.R.1868, the House Democrats bill that comprises the core of the larger H.R.1884 "ACA 2.0" bill. H.R.1884 includes a suite of about a dozen provisions to protect, repair and strengthen the ACA, but the House Dems also broke the larger piece of legislation down into a dozen smaller bills as well.
Some of these "mini-ACA 2.0" bills only make minor improvements to the law, or make improvements in ways which are important but would take a few years to see obvious results. Others, however, make huge improvements and would be immediately obvious, and of those, the single most dramatic and important one is H.R.1868.
The official title is the "Health Care Affordability Act of 2019", but I just call both it and H.R.1884 (the "Protecting Pre-Existing Conditions and Making Health Care More Affordable Act of 2019") by the much simpler and more accurate moniker "ACA 2.0".
!! Azar refuses to promise a coronavirus vaccine will be affordable for anyone:
"We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can't control that price, because we need the private sector to invest.. Price controls won't get us there."
If the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended a coronavirus vaccine, the ACA would require that all insurance plans cover it with no patient cost-sharing. (That wouldn't apply to short-term plans expanded by the Trump administration, which do not comply with ACA rules). https://t.co/OK7SOm22Wh
For years now, I (along with many others) have criticized Bernie Sanders for the big blank section of his "pure" Medicare for All single payer healthcare proposal. He's kind of, sort of given some ideas about how he proposes paying for it in the past, but yesterday he finally released an updated, revised list of additional taxes, loophole cuts and so forth which he claims would cover the total cost.
According to a February 15, 2020 study by epidemiologists at Yale University, the Medicare for All bill that Bernie wrote would save over $450 billion in health care costs and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths – each and every year.
