Affordable Care Act Battles Rage at the State Level

Quality, affordable healthcare for your life. Guaranteed 

That is what single payer promises like it delivers in every other industrialized nation.  Is that what the Affordable Care Act will deliver?  Below discusses where is stands after the election.


Via: The Advisory Board Company

With the election over, the battle now rages over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act at the state level.  The above map shows which states are currently are and are not (mostly southern) participating in the Medicaid expansion (which the Supreme Court decision last summer made optional) and which are implementing exchanges.  Pennsylvania is still undecided on both counts.  You can see the links below and the tabs above for background info.  

A reminder about the healthcare sustainability salon & sing on Sat. Dec. 1 where this and other health care issues will be discussed.    

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Dec 1 Health Care Sustainability Salon & Sing.

On Dec 1 there will be an event at Maren Cooke's house in Squirrel Hill off of Beechwood Blvd called a Sustainability Salon & Sing.  This salon is modeled after the salons of 18th century enlightenment Paris.  Below is what appeared her blog about the event with and at the bottom is an image of her on the roof of her house plus a panoramic image of her roof with solar panels.  There will be a potluck dinner, tours of her house, activities for kids, the speakers listed below including those from healthcare for all/PUSH, and a group folksing afterward.  All in all a very enjoyable and intellectually stimulating evening.  

Dec 1: Health Care Sustainability Salon & Sing

Health Care and Sustainability:  Several speakers will share what they've been doing to improve how health care is done in this country -- from a sustainability point of view.

Most directly, local physician Dr. Noe Copley-Woods will talk about the waste endemic to current medical practice, and efforts to green it here and around the world (e.g. Health Care Without Harm).

Since we're also seeking sustainability as a society, folks from Health Care For All/PA will share what that organization is doing to improve access to health care.

And we'll talk about the connection between end-of-life choices and sustainability, with a musical dimension:  there are many differences (including environmental cost) between dying in a hospital hooked up to machines, undergoing umpteen procedures, and dying in hospice care, surrounded by loved ones...  Cindy Harris, leader of the Pittsburgh Threshold Choir, helps ease that process with bedside song.

Check back here for updates on topics, speakers, and logistics.  The basics are: 3-10 p.m. at our home in Frick Park;  RSVP by email (with "salon" in the Subject line);  potluck food and drink for afternoon noshings and dinner, which is followed by an informal folksing.

Pennsylvania Voters Want a Better Health Care Law

Exit polls are a wealth of information on the thinking of the voters in an election.  For this year's election all of the networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and AP) used the same exit poll to save money with a national sample of 26,517.  The methodology for the exit poll can be read here.  There were some questions left blank on the survey, particularly the later issue questions such as the ones for the one for the health care law "What should happen to the health care law?".  Nationally only 5,043 completed that question which was late on the questionnaire.  Above I linked to the ABC news page for the exit poll which shows the sample size for each question and how they voted for each candidate.

For Pennsylvania there was a total sample of 2,908 in the exit poll.  Of the this sample, 1,019 responded to the health care law which is 20.2% of the total responses to this question.  The table below shows that a different pattern emerges for the question in the national responses compared to Pennsylvania. 

	National 2012 N=5,043	Pennsylvania 2012 N=1,019	Pennsylvania 2010 N=2,627 (tot. sample)
Expand  or keep it the same	44%	51%	52%
Repeal some or all of it	48%	46%	45%
Margin of Error (+/-)	1%	3%	2%

According to the national exit poll it would seem that a plurality of voters would like some or all of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) repealed but only 19% of the total sample responded to the question.  This only a problem if the responders are similar to the population as a whole.  That this result is not consistent with other national polls which were done around the time of the Supreme Court interpretation found a similar split to the Pennsylvania result. 

For the Pennsylvania exit poll, a slight majority of respondents believed the ACA should be expanded or kept the same.  This result is the same as the 2010 exit poll from the Senate race between Pat Toomey and Joe Sestak.  That year was considered a landslide for Republicans.  35% of the total state sample responded to this question as well as other question suggests either that this and other issues resonate more with this state's voters or that there is a sampling issue in other states.  Regardless these results suggest that there is still fertile ground for health care activists in Pennsylvania among the electorate.

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PodCamp 7 Presentation on Social Media for Non Profits

Zack Tanner from WQED gave a talk at PodCamp about how they use social media to improve their practice in the face of budget cuts from the federal and state governments.

Crowdsourcing at Red Blue Voice.com

Last weekend was a productive one at PodCamp.  I met several activists interested in using social media to get their message out.  I went to some informative sessions and the session I gave on presenting statistics in social media went well.  There were others that I missed because they were going on at the same time.  The day began with the keynote address by the creators of the YouTube series Pittsburgh Dad.  This is enlightening because it shows how new media is challenging old media.

Of particular interest for was the session I went to on Crowdsourcing by Josh Lucas.  He is one of the the creators of Red Blue Voice (Now defunct but kick starter works) which allows groups and individuals to advocate for issues and causes. Kickstarter is another type of crowdsourcing site which Tony Buba used to raise funds for the film on Braddock Hospital closing called We Are Alive.

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