Humana Change Of Address: Fill & Download for Free

With all due respect to the Honorable Senator (and everyone else), the Obama (nee Romney) health care plan isn't anything of the sort -- which explains a) why so many people who would otherwise not have health care available to them (I'm one of them) buy into the rhetoric about how terrible it is, and b) why true health care reform is impossible in the United States.RommeyObamaCare does nothing to address health care. It addresses the cost and availability of health insurance. Why? Two reasons, with lots of little arguments that stem from them:A) An overwhelming knee-jerk, mis-educated reaction to anything that remotely resembles universal medical care, despite the fact that three predominantly English-speaking countries (Great Britain, Canada and Australia) have universal health care systems and would gladly (in my experience) explain how it works. All someone has to do is use the word "socialized" and any further discussion quickly and inevitably falls into those characterized by Godwin's Law.B) The plan is all about health INSURANCE costs that are only indirectly related to health care costs. Insurance companies are like casinos with one significant difference: when someone hits the jackpot at a casino, they don't immediately run out and change all of the 25 cent machines to 35 cents. They know that they're going to have a certain percentage of losses, and because they're regulated, they know that they have to account for those losses as a cost of doing business. They're quite happy when someone hits a jackpot because they know the odds of it happening again before they recover the payout are virtually non-existent.Not so for the insurance companies. If Humana's rates to up -- the rates for Anthem/Blue Cross will go up. If United Healthcare makes a bad investment in Brazil -- the rates go up. If President Obama gets a cold and the stock market drops -- everyone's rates go up. If the CFO's wife puts Miracle Whip on a sandwich instead of mayonnaise -- the rates go up... and NOBODY can stop them. There's too much money involved.If there's anything really wrong with what the ACA does (or intended to do, before the lobbyists got to Congress), it's that it protects the insurance companies from a truly open market for their services (such as they are). To quote Mr Brecht, "Grub first -- THEN ethics."

First up … a link to the actual proposal:Obamacare Repeal and Replace — Policy Brief and ResourcesMy best summary? Disappointing but typical of GOP thinking.The disappointment comes from the wasted ink on lambasting the ACA. This was likely necessary to support the idea of repeal — but the whole report is only 19 pages — and only 11 pages of that are actual content. About 1/2 of that is simply trying to blame the ACA for failing when a large part of that failure was intentional GOP sabotage.The idea behind this Policy Brief is 2-fold:Reduce federal funding to states for Medicaid — placing more of burden on states to pick up that cost (or not). Keep in mind, unlike the federal government, states can’t run deficits and healthcare is typically a big line item already. The only option states would have would be to raise state taxes — or cut coverage.Americans who don’t get health coverage through work (or VA or Medicaid/Medicare or FEHP), would get a flat tax credit that would be scaled to age. This makes some sense, because the older we get, the more healthcare services we tend to need, but it makes no sense relative to income — and that’s the higher hurdle.[Footnote: The Brief was only just submitted to the CBO for scoring, so we don’t have the full list of fiscal or coverage liabilities yet. With that disclaimer, it’s still easy to anticipate the consequence if not the full scale.]The ACA was designed specifically to address this huge imbalance — between the cost of health coverage and income — and this GOP plan simply ignores the imbalance altogether. No explanation required — or submitted.As it is today, the Obamacare exchanges are (according to Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini) officially in a “death spiral.” Humana has declared that they will not participate in 2018 and I suspect Aetna (and others) aren’t far behind. Aetna lost $450M last year on the ACA exchanges — and those losses just aren’t sustainable.Giving people a flat tax credit (scaled by their age) does nothing to bridge the huge (and growing) gulf between the cost of health coverage — and income. While this chart is relative to Employer Sponsored Insurance (a different category of health insurance than Obamacare), it’s easy to see the huge divide as it has played out over the last 15 years:Looking ahead, I’m in the Peter Orszag camp of how this will play out.I expect to see Republicans stage a dramatic early vote to repeal, with legislation that includes only very modest steps toward replacement — and leave most of the work for later. Next, the new administration will aggressively issue waivers allowing states to experiment with different approaches, including changes to Medicaid and private insurance rules. At some point, then, the administration will declare that these state experiments have been so successful, Obamacare no longer exists.In other words, the repeal vote will be just for show; the waivers will do most of the heavy lifting. [1]This Policy brief is that “modest” step toward replacement.In the end, there will be lots of these “Mission Accomplished” moments, but millions will be unable to afford health insurance — and the category of people classified as “uninsured” will swell.The larger view is simply this: Our decades long battle with actuarial math has been epic, but it’s not winnable. As evidenced by this one chart, that battle is now a global embarrassment and perpetual national crisis.[1] Here's How Trump Will Change Obamacare

The catechism itself is a thumbnail outline of the teachings of the Catholic Church. On many topics, theologians have different personal opinions. Pope John Paul I was rumored to have taken issue with some statements in Humana Vitae, Paul VI’s famous encyclical addressing birth control. So the Cathechism of the Catholic Church is not a catalogue of teachings to which all Catholic theologians subscribe.SOME teachings, like the Assumption (which was the subject of an ex cathedral statement) or the Virgin Birth, or the Trinity will not change. The position on birth control concievably (no pun intended) could change.