{"id":3091,"date":"2011-12-19T17:57:42","date_gmt":"2011-12-19T17:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3091"},"modified":"2011-12-19T17:57:42","modified_gmt":"2011-12-19T17:57:42","slug":"punting_on_heal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3091","title":{"rendered":"Punting On Health Care"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Health care advocates are frustrated with the Obama administration&#8217;s decision to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/national\/health-science\/minimum-essential-health-benefits-will-be-largely-set-by-states\/2011\/12\/16\/gIQAx5FHzO_story.html\">let states define the essential health benefits<\/a> that will be offered through the exchanges. The politics of this move are plain enough: the Affordable Care Act remains relatively unpopular and the administration doesn&#8217;t want to expose itself to charges that it&#8217;s &#8220;taking over&#8221; the health care system as an election year approaches. But it also undermines one of the ACA&#8217;s core goals: providing a uniform set of health benefits to all uninsured Americans. Instead, we&#8217;ll likely see the same disparities that currently exist across state Medicaid programs. Some states will require insurers to offer comprehensive benefits while others will be content with bare-bones packages that fail to address the needs of people with more significant health care needs. <\/p>\n<p>This is bad policy and I&#8217;m deeply disappointed in Obama for choosing this path. It will only complicate matters for those of us working to implement the next law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Health care advocates are frustrated with the Obama administration&#8217;s decision to let states define the essential health benefits that will be offered through the exchanges. The politics of this move are plain enough: the Affordable Care Act remains relatively unpopular and the administration doesn&#8217;t want to expose itself to charges that it&#8217;s &#8220;taking over&#8221; the <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3091' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-NR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}