Category: From California Healthline.org

SACRAMENTO — When the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case Tuesday that could decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act, California will be leading the defense to uphold the federal law that touches nearly every aspect of the country’s health care system.

It’s usually the federal government’s job to defend a federal law, but President Donald Trump’s administration wants this law, also known as Obamacare, to be overturned.

So California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, backed by more than 20 other states, is defending the law against the challenge brought by a coalition of Republican state officials two years ago.

Becerra has been one of Trump’s most formidable adversaries, taking the administration to court scores of times over its policies, ranging from immigration and birth control to climate change. He is considered one of the leading contenders to fill the Senate vacancy that will open now that Sen. Kamala Harris of California has been elected vice president.

“Just as vigorously as a president and his administration are fighting to destroy the Affordable Care Act, we are fighting to save it for every American,” Becerra told reporters in a press conference Monday.

Should the court overturn the entire law, the impact would be felt widely. The law provides health insurance to more than 23 million Americans. It allows qualified people to buy subsidized insurance through federal or state insurance exchanges; permits states to expand their Medicaid programs to more people; prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting medical conditions; bans lifetime limits on coverage; adds benefits to Medicare; and allows children to stay on their parents’ plans up to age 26.

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At issue in California v. Texas is the federal tax penalty for not having health insurance, as the law requires. The Republican-led Congress in 2017 zeroed out the penalty but kept the rest of the health law intact, a move Becerra and some other legal experts say shows congressional intent to support the law. The Republican state officials, however, say the loss of the tax invalidates the mandate to have insurance — as well as the entire law.

Becerra said it’s possible the court may determine that the challengers don’t have standing to sue the government because no one has been harmed by a zero-tax penalty.

Although the court has twice upheld the federal health care law, the composition of the court has changed since its last ACA ruling in 2015. Trump has appointed three conservative judges since then. Two replaced other conservatives, but Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed in late October, took the seat of a liberal icon, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Abbe Gluck, faculty director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, said that if the court believes the health insurance requirement is unconstitutional without the penalty, it should just hold that section of the law invalid but not overturn the entire law.

But “I have learned that you can never predict what happens in court when it comes to the Affordable Care Act,” Gluck said. “And that is why there is this heightened sense of concern, because the statute has become so fundamentally important to one-fifth of our economy and the health care of virtually all Americans.”

Becerra talked to California Healthline’s Samantha Young about his defense of Obamacare and the far-reaching influence of the law. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What are the chances the Supreme Court could overturn the Affordable Care Act?

We’re confident they will see not just the legal logic behind it, but the wisdom and the practical success of the Affordable Care Act — all of which weigh heavily in favor of the justices recognizing that it’s not only legal but indispensable. When the justices look to the fundamentals of the Affordable Care Act, they’re going to find that it is constitutional.

Q: The makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court has changed since it last ruled on the ACA. Why do you think these justices will rule the same way?

That shouldn’t change the fact that the fundamentals of the law have remained the same. The fundamentals of the ACA are grounded, they’re solid, and they work. I would hope that nine justices reviewing the same law would look at that precedent.

Q: What should the public pay attention to during the oral arguments?

One thing interesting to watch is how the court interprets the actions taken by Congress in 2017 when they passed the tax break bill and zeroed out the individual mandate fee or penalty. Now, we’re looking at a president and at least one house in Congress that’s prepared to defend the Affordable Care Act. How might the court look at the fact that another Congress could reinstitute part of that mandate?

What does that do to the legal argument that having zeroed out the mandate somehow triggered the unconstitutionality of the entire law? I think that’s a question the court will have to examine.

Q: What happens if the U.S. Supreme Court declares the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional?

The worries return. Preventative care under Medicare would be gone. The days when Americans don’t have to worry about going personally bankrupt for having visited a hospital would pretty much be gone.

I’ve got three daughters. There was a time when all three of them as adults were on our health care coverage. That would be gone because the provision that allows adult children under the age of 26 to remain on a parent’s coverage would disappear. I could go on and on.

Q: Could states, including California, afford to step in on their own?

I don’t know if there’s any state who has the capacity to replace what the Affordable Care Act does. It’d be almost insurmountable. Part of that is because we can’t replicate some of the things that the federal government can do. We don’t have that federal jurisdiction, we don’t have that breadth and depth of reach.

Q: If the court overturns the ACA, can’t Congress pass piecemeal protections that have Republican support, such as coverage for preexisting conditions?

We have heard Republicans say “repeal and replace” for more than 10 years, and it’s been empty rhetoric from the beginning. I’ve gotta tell you that for parents who have children with preexisting medical conditions, it is no comfort to have someone promise you that they will replace a right that you know you now have for your child to visit a hospital. And, why would you throw that away for an empty promise that’s 10 years old?

Most Americans would say, Keep building on the Affordable Care Act. Let’s make it better, but don’t scrap what’s worked.

Q: How do you know the Affordable Care Act is working?

My former congressional district in Los Angeles ranked among the most uninsured congressional districts in the nation. In a matter of years, once the Affordable Care Act took place, the uninsured rate in that congressional district had gone down by 50%. It was just astronomical.

The Affordable Care Act made it possible for working families to secure coverage and that’s huge. That’s the kind of burden that’s lifted off your soul.

Q: Do you think having a President Joe Biden and a Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House will lead to an improved Affordable Care Act?

As a candidate for president, Joe Biden said that he would build on the success of the Obama-Biden presidency and make sure that we continue to increase the number of Americans who have access to affordable health care. The good thing is you finally have someone at the top of the totem pole who says we’re going to make it better. And that’s why this election was so important.

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Sacramento.- Cuando la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos esté escuchando el martes 10 un caso que podría decidir el destino de la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio (ACA), California liderará la defensa de la ley federal que impacta en casi todos los aspectos del sistema de salud del país.

Por lo general, es tarea del gobierno federal defender una ley federal, pero la Administración Trump quiere que ACA, también conocida como Obamacare, se revoque.

Por eso, el fiscal general de California, Xavier Becerra, respaldado por más de 20 estados, defiende la ley contra el desafío presentado hace dos años por una coalición de funcionarios estatales republicanos.

Becerra ha sido uno de los adversarios más formidables de Trump: ha llevado a la administración a los tribunales decenas de veces por sus políticas, que van desde la inmigración y el control de la natalidad hasta el cambio climático. Se le considera uno de los principales contendientes para llenar la vacante del Senado que se abrirá ahora que la senadora por California Kamala Harris ha sido elegida vicepresidenta.

“Tan enérgicamente como un presidente y su administración están luchando para destruir la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio, nosotros estamos luchando para salvarla para todos los estadounidenses”, dijo Becerra a los periodistas en una conferencia de prensa el lunes 9.

Si el tribunal anula toda la ley, el impacto se sentiría ampliamente. La ley proporciona seguro médico a más de 23 millones de estadounidenses. Permite a las personas que califican comprar seguros a través de los mercados estatales y el federal, y recibir subsidios.

También ha recomendado  a los estados expandir sus programas de Medicaid a más personas; previene que las compañías de seguros nieguen cobertura a personas con afecciones médicas preexistentes; prohíbe los límites de por vida en la cobertura; agrega beneficios a Medicare; y permite que los hijos permanezcan en los planes de sus padres hasta los 26 años.

El tema central en California vs. Texas es la multa fiscal federal por no tener seguro médico, como exige la ley. En 2017, el Congreso liderado por los republicanos redujo esta multa a cero, pero mantuvo intacta al resto de la ley, una medida que, según Becerra y otros expertos en leyes, muestra la intención del Congreso de apoyarla.

Sin embargo, funcionarios estatales republicanos dicen que la pérdida de la penalidad invalida el mandato de tener un seguro, así como toda la ley.

Becerra dijo que es posible que el tribunal determine que los impugnadores no tienen legitimidad para demandar al gobierno porque nadie ha sido perjudicado por una multa que cuesta cero.

Aunque la corte ha ratificado dos veces esta ley, la composición de la corte ha cambiado desde su último fallo sobre ACA en 2015. Desde entonces, Trump ha nombrado a tres jueces conservadores. Dos reemplazaron a otros conservadores, pero Amy Coney Barrett, quien fue confirmada a fines de octubre, ocupa el asiento de un ícono liberal, la jueza Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Abbe Gluck, directora del Centro Salomón de Derecho y Políticas de Salud de la Escuela de Derecho de Yale, dijo que si el tribunal cree que el requisito del seguro médico es inconstitucional sin la penalidad, debería simplemente declarar inválida esa sección de la ley, pero no anularla por completo.

Pero “he aprendido que nunca se puede predecir lo que sucede en la corte cuando se trata de la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio”, dijo Gluck. “Por eso hay más preocupación, porque el estatuto se ha vuelto tan fundamentalmente importante para una quinta parte de nuestra economía y para la atención médica de prácticamente todos los estadounidenses”.

Becerra habló con Samantha Young de California Healthline sobre su defensa del Obamacare y el enorme alcance de la influencia de la ley. La entrevista ha sido editada por extension, y para mayor claridad.

¿Cuáles son las posibilidades de que la Corte Suprema derogue la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio?

Confiamos en que no solo verán la lógica legal detrás de esto, sino también la sabiduría y el éxito práctico de la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio, lo cual pesa mucho a favor de que los jueces reconozcan no solo que es legal, sino indispensable. Cuando los jueces examinen los fundamentos de la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio, encontrarán que es constitucional.

La composición de la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos ha cambiado desde la última vez que se pronunció sobre ACA. ¿Por qué cree que estos jueces decidirán de la misma manera?

Eso no debería cambiar el hecho de que los fundamentos de la ley siguen siendo los mismos. Los fundamentos de ACA son sólidos y funcionan. Espero que nueve jueces que revisan la misma ley observen ese precedente.

¿A qué debe prestar atención el público durante los argumentos orales?

Algo interesante de observar es cómo la corte interpreta las acciones tomadas por el Congreso en 2017, cuando aprobaron el proyecto de ley de exención de impuestos y redujeron a cero la tarifa o multa por el mandato individual. Ahora, estamos ante un presidente y al menos una cámara en el Congreso que está preparada para defender la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio. ¿Cómo podría considerar el tribunal el hecho de que otro Congreso podría restablecer parte de ese mandato?

¿Cómo se relaciona esto con el argumento legal de que haber reducido a cero el mandato de alguna manera provocó la inconstitucionalidad de toda la ley? Creo que es una cuestión que el tribunal tendrá que examinar.

¿Qué pasará si la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos declara inconstitucional la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio?

Volverán las preocupaciones. La atención preventiva de Medicare desaparecería. Los días en que los estadounidenses no tenían que preocuparse por la bancarrota por haber pisado un hospital prácticamente se esfumarían.

Tengo tres hijas. Hubo un tiempo que, como adultas, las tres estaban en nuestra cobertura de atención médica. Eso desaparecería porque la disposición que permite que los hijos adultos menores de 26 años permanezcan en la cobertura de los padres desaparecería. Y podría seguir y seguir.

¿Podrían los estados, incluido California, darse el lujo de intervenir por su cuenta?

No sé si hay algún estado que tenga la capacidad de reemplazar lo que hace la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio. Es casi imposible. Parte de eso se debe a que no podemos replicar algunas de las cosas que puede hacer el gobierno federal. No tenemos esa jurisdicción federal, no tenemos esa amplitud y profundidad de alcance.

Si el tribunal anula ACA, ¿el Congreso no puede aprobar protecciones parciales que cuenten con el apoyo de los republicanos, como la cobertura de afecciones preexistentes?

Hemos escuchado a los republicanos decir “revocar y reemplazar” durante más de 10 años, y ha sido una retórica vacía desde el principio. Para los padres que tienen hijos con afecciones médicas preexistentes, no es reconfortante que alguien les prometa que reemplazarán un derecho que saben que ahora tienen para que sus hijo vayan al hospital. Y, ¿por qué desecharías eso por una promesa vacía que ya lleva 10 años?

La mayoría de los estadounidenses dirían: sigue construyendo sobre la base de la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio. Mejorémosla, pero no descartemos lo que ha funcionado.

¿Cómo sabe que la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio está funcionando?

Mi antiguo distrito congresional en Los Ángeles se encontraba entre los distritos congresionales con más cantidad de personas sin seguro de salud de la nación. En cuestión de años, una vez que entró en vigor la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio, la tasa de personas sin seguro en ese distrito se redujo en un 50%. Fue simplemente astronómico.

La Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio hizo posible que las familias trabajadoras pudieran obtener cobertura y eso es enorme. Ese es el tipo de carga que se quita del alma.

¿Cree que tener a Joe Biden como presidente y a Kamala Harris como vicepresidenta en la Casa Blanca llevará a una mejora en la Ley de Cuidado de Salud a Bajo Precio?

Como candidato a presidente, Joe Biden dijo que se basaría en el éxito de la presidencia de Obama-Biden y se aseguraría que sigamos aumentando el número de estadounidenses con acceso a una atención médica asequible. Lo bueno es que finalmente tienes a alguien en la parte superior del tótem que dice que lo vamos a mejorar. Por eso esta elección fue tan importante.

If they’ve been listening to President Donald Trump, seniors may be expecting a $200 debit card in the mail any day now to help them pay for prescription drugs.

He promised as much this month, saying his administration soon will mail the drug cards to more than 35 million Medicare beneficiaries.

But the cards — if they are ever sent — would be of little help. Policy experts say that what Medicare beneficiaries really need, as well as younger Americans, are sweeping federal changes to close the gap between what their health insurance pays and what drugs cost them.

The nation’s 46.5 million enrollees in Medicare’s Part D prescription drug program — except for those who qualify for low-income subsidies — face unlimited out-of-pocket exposure to drug costs even though the Affordable Care Act finally closed the infamous “doughnut hole.” After Part D enrollees have spent $6,550 and reached the catastrophic threshold in a given year, they still must pay 5% coinsurance on the list price of their drugs.

Congress was considering legislation to lower drug prices and cap out-of-pocket costs until early this year, when the COVID-19 pandemic took center stage. But partisan disagreement, federal budget concerns and opposition from drug manufacturers and other health care industry groups hampered the efforts.

Many observers question the value, timing and legality of Trump’s drug card plan, with the promise coming just ahead of an election in which the president wants to shore up the support of older voters.

“A $200 card is better than a sharp stick in the eye, but it won’t be that meaningful,” said Tom Scully, the Medicare chief under President George W. Bush who in 2004 implemented a two-year, $1,200 drug card program passed by Congress as part of the law creating the Part D prescription drug benefit.

Two hundred dollars won’t go very far. One million Part D plan enrollees have out-of-pocket drug spending way above the program’s catastrophic coverage threshold, with average annual costs exceeding $3,200, according to KFF. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.) Last year, Part D enrollees’ average out-of-pocket cost for 11 orally administered cancer drugs was $10,470, according to a 2019 JAMA study.

“A lot of people don’t have $2,000 or $3,000 to pay out-of-pocket when they go to the pharmacy,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a drug policy expert at Vanderbilt University.

Steven Hadfield, 68, of Charlotte, North Carolina, has a rare blood cancer requiring treatment with Imbruvica, with a list price of $132,000 a year. He also needs two different medications for Type 2 diabetes, including insulin at $300 a bottle, a blood pressure drug and a muscle relaxer to relieve leg cramps.

He continues to work at Walmart and holds three part-time jobs. He pays more than $4,000 a year for his drugs, out of his $12-an-hour wages and monthly $1,100 Social Security check. The only way he can afford Imbruvica is through the manufacturer’s copay cards.

If he left his Walmart health plan and signed up for Medicare Part D drug coverage, he would have to pay thousands of dollars more because, under Medicare rules, he would no longer be able to use copay cards. “My whole Social Security check would go to drugs, and I’d have nothing left for my car or anything,” he said.

Asked about Trump’s $200 drug card, Hadfield said, “I’d be happy to get anything, but they need to do more. Our representatives need to create some kind of program to lower prices.”

The Republican-controlled Senate refused to consider a sweeping drug cost bill passed by House Democrats a year ago that would have capped Part D out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 a year, penalized drugmakers for raising prices above inflation rates and let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Trump threatened to veto it.

In addition, Senate Republican leaders wouldn’t take up a bipartisan bill backed by the White House capping Part D out-of-pocket costs at $3,100 and also imposing penalties for price hikes above inflation.

The lack of action hasn’t stopped Trump from claiming, mostly inaccurately, that he has implemented policies that have reduced drug prices and saved seniors lots of money.

“Day after day I’m fighting to defend seniors from Big Pharma,” Trump said Oct. 16 in a Florida speech promising drug price cuts of 50% to 80%. “We have this terrible system that’s taken years and years to rig.”

The president’s centerpiece proposal is to index the drug prices paid by Medicare to lower prices paid by foreign countries. But his administration has not yet issued a rule to carry that out, and any such rule would face a strong legal challenge from drugmakers.

Joe Biden’s drug cost platform includes allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, limiting launch prices for new drugs, capping price increases at the inflation rate and letting consumers buy cheaper medicines from other countries. His plan would also likely spark opposition from drug companies.

Trump’s $200 drug card appears to be in trouble within his own administration. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said last week that details will be finalized shortly and that the cards will be mailed to seniors in November or December.

But the general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services warned in an internal memo the plan could violate election law. Congressional Democrats have called for an investigation, saying Trump is “attempting to buy votes.”

In a draft document obtained by Politico, the White House set the cost of the drug card plan at nearly $8 billion. To avoid having to seek congressional approval for the expenditure, Trump’s advisers want to call it a demonstration project, testing whether lowering Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket drug costs boosts their compliance in taking medications.

It’s also unclear whether the Office of Management and Budget will approve the plan because Medicare demonstrations must be designed so they do not increase the federal budget deficit. Yet the money would have to come from the government’s general revenues or Medicare payroll taxes or premiums, likely causing a negative budget impact.

“It will be difficult to learn anything from this demonstration project that we do not already know from other studies,” Dusetzina said.

“It’s a whole lot of money that would be more effectively focused on people with cancer and serious chronic illnesses who are struggling with high out-of-pockets,” said Daniel Klein, CEO of the Patient Access Network Foundation, which provides grants to help patients with drug costs.

Maureen Allen, 80, a retired marketing specialist who lives in Talking Rock, Georgia, said she could apply the $200 card to her annual cost of more than $2,000 for the anti-blood clot drug Eliquis and other medicines.

“It would help me with one month of Eliquis,” she said. “We’ll take the card because we need the money. But don’t think for a moment it will have the slightest impact on my vote.”

This article is part of a series on the impact of high prescription drug costs on consumers made possible through the 2020 West Health and Families USA Media Fellowship.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Nursing homes, small physician offices and rural clinics are being left behind in the rush for N95 masks and other protective gear, exposing some of the country’s most vulnerable populations and their caregivers to COVID-19 while larger, wealthier health care facilities build equipment stockpiles.

Take Rhonda Bergeron, who owns three health clinics in rural southern Louisiana. She said she’s been desperate for personal protective equipment since her clinics became COVID testing sites. Her plight didn’t impress national suppliers puzzled by her lack of buying history when she asked for 500 gowns. And one supply company allows her only one box of 200 gloves per 30 days for her three clinics. Right now, she doesn’t have any large gloves on-site.

“So in the midst of the whole world shutting down, you can’t get PPE to cover your own employees,” she said. “They’re refilling stuff to larger corporations when realistically we are truly the front line here.”

More than eight months into the pandemic, health care leaders are again calling for a coordinated national strategy to distribute personal protective equipment to protect health care workers and their patients as a new wave of disease wells up across most of the country. The demand for such gear, especially in hot spots, can be more than 10 times the pre-pandemic levels. While supply chains have adjusted, and the availability of PPE has improved dramatically since the mayhem of the spring, limited factories and quantities of raw materials still constrain supply amid the ongoing high demand.

In this free-market scramble, larger hospitals and other providers are stockpiling what they can even while others struggle. Some facilities are scooping up supplies to prepare for a feared wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations; others are following new stockpiling laws and orders in states such as California, New York and Connecticut.

“They’re putting additional strain on what’s still a fragile hospital supply chain,” said Soumi Saha, vice president of advocacy for Premier Inc., a group-purchasing organization that procures supplies for over 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems of various sizes. “We want available product to go to front-line health care workers and not go into a warehouse right now.”

Over a quarter of nursing homes in the country reported a shortage of items such as N95 masks, gloves or gowns from Aug. 24 through Sept. 20. A recent survey from the American Medical Association found 36% of physician offices reported having a difficult time securing PPE. And about 90% of nonprofit Get Us PPE’s recent requests for help with protective gear have come from non-hospital facilities, such as nursing homes, group homes and homeless shelters.

“I can completely understand that large health systems don’t want to find themselves short on PPE,” said Dr. Ali Raja, co-founder of Get Us PPE and executive vice chairman of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Smaller places simply not only can’t stockpile but also can’t get enough for their day-to-day usage.”

From the outset of the pandemic, the fight for PPE has been about who has had the most money and connections to fly supplies in from China, sweet-talk suppliers or hire people who could spend their time chasing down PPE. At various points, hospitals with sufficient supplies have shared their wealth, as has California, which sent millions of masks to Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Alaska this summer.

But the fight for PPE is becoming even more challenging as states, such as California, pass stockpiling requirements, Saha said. Premier asked California Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto a bill that requires hospitals, starting in April, to have stockpiles of three months’ worth of PPE, or face $25,000 fines. However, Newsom signed the bill into law in September, and Saha worries it could become model legislation for other states.

For an average hospital, a 90-day supply is $2 million worth of equipment filling about 14 truckloads, said Chaun Powell, Premier’s group vice president of strategic supplier engagement — or about a football field and a half of warehouse space.

Traditional supply chains were ill equipped to handle the onslaught of demand caused by the pandemic, which has led to the frantic search for PPE. When distributors face such shortages, they rely on past orders to allocate who gets what share of their existing products, so no single buyer buys up everything. Nursing homes and clinics never used this much protective gear in the past, so they lack an ordering history and get put at the back of the line. That has forced many of them to rely on lower-grade masks like KN95s and other workarounds, Saha said.

Shortages of PPE put facilities’ workers and patients at risk, while also limiting their ability to treat their communities. At least 1,300 U.S. health care workers have died of COVID-19.

In Kirksville, a college town in northern Missouri, Twin Pines Adult Care Center Administrator Jim Richardson said his nursing home is running low on gowns. It also is reusing N95s after staffers treat them with UV light. Although major medical supplier Medline Industries has supplied him with extra products at times, he’s still had to turn to eBay.

“I’m a little-bitty facility and I’m bidding against a Life Care nationwide,” he said. “Guess who Medline is going to take care of?”

COVID-19 cases are rising in Kirksville following the students’ return to campus, Richardson said. Visitors are starting to return to the nursing home, and flu season is beginning.

Dr. Michael Wasserman, immediate past president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, said the lack of supplies for smaller providers like nursing homes speaks to the nation’s priorities when it comes to caring for older adults.

“Here we are in October, and the fact that there is not an abundance of PPE for every nursing home in the country is a literal abomination,” he said. “Without PPE, you lose to this virus.”

Stuart Almer, president and CEO of Gurwin Jewish Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, has managed to scavenge the 60-day stockpile required by New York state law for his facility on Long Island, but it’s come at a great financial cost. And he worries that as long as hot spots and stockpiling persist, massive price fluctuations and delivery concerns will continue.

He learned early on no one was coming to save him. Even deliveries from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which he appreciated, were too small in quantity and not always easy to use. The heavy floor-length gowns it provided needed to be trimmed.

“Really, we’re on our own,” he said.

American Medical Association President Dr. Susan Bailey said in an emailed statement that federal officials need to step in: “We urge the administration to pull every lever to ramp up PPE production — for N95 masks, gowns, and testing supplies — and coordinate distribution.”

Get Us PPE’s Raja argued for a more fair, robust, centralized and transparent allocation process that doesn’t rely on donations to fill gaps. What good does it do a community to have a hospital stockpile, he asked, when the nursing home down the street has no PPE?

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Johnathon Talamantes, of South-Central Los Angeles, broke his hip in a car accident on Oct. 22 and underwent surgery five days later at a public hospital near downtown.

His post-op recovery will keep him in the hospital, L.A. County+USC Medical Center, beyond Election Day, and as he prepared himself for the surgery, he wondered what that would mean.

“One of the first things I asked my nurse this morning was, ‘Oh, how am I going to vote?’” Talamantes, 30, said from his hospital bed the day before the operation.

He initially thought of asking his mom to rummage through a pile of papers at the home he shares with her and bring him the mail-in ballot that he, like all registered California voters, received for this election.

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But then staffers at LAC+USC told him about another option: They could help him get an emergency ballot and cast his vote without having to get out of bed. So Talamantes told his mom not to bother.

“I don’t want her coming down here, because of the COVID restrictions,” he said.

California law protects the rights of voters who are in the hospital or other care facilities, or confined at home. It allows them to get help from anyone they choose — other than an employer or a union representative — and to cast an emergency ballot.

At least 37 other states allow emergency voting for medical reasons, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But practices vary.

In some states, only family members can assist hospitalized patients with voting from the hospital.

In California, New York and several other states, hospital employees and volunteers can help a patient complete an emergency ballot application. They can pick up the ballot for the patient and deliver the finished ballot back to the election office or deposit it in an official drop box.

In North Carolina, by contrast, it is a felony for a health care worker to assist a patient with voting.

In 18 states, the law allows local election boards to send representatives directly to patients’ bedsides, though six of those states have canceled that service this fall because of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Kelly Wong, founder of Patient Voting, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing turnout among registered voters unexpectedly hospitalized around election time.

The group’s website features an interactive map of the United States with state-by-state information on voting while in the hospital. It also allows patients to check whether they are registered to vote.

Wong, an emergency room resident at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, recalled that when she was a medical student working in an ER, patients who were about to be admitted to the hospital would tell her, “‘I can’t be admitted; I have let the dogs out, or I’m the sole caretaker of my grandmother.’” Then during the election of 2016, she heard, “‘I can’t stay. I have to go vote.’”

“That really caught my attention,” Wong said. She did research and learned patients could vote in the hospital using an emergency ballot — something none of her co-workers knew. “Our patients don’t know this, she said. “It should be our job to tell them.”

Some U.S. hospitals have been assisting patients with voting in major elections for two decades or more, part of a broader tendency in the health care industry toward civic engagement.

Community clinics register voters in their waiting rooms or at public registration drives. In an increasing number of ERs, patients and their families are offered the chance to register. Many hospitals, including LAC+USC, this year will have mobile voting units on-site, open to staff members, patients who are well enough to walk, and their families.

These efforts come against the backdrop of health care’s starring role in the nation’s heated political drama: COVID-19 has become a top presidential campaign issue, while the U.S. Supreme Court, its conservative majority fortified this week, prepares to hear a case — one week after the election — that could be the death knell for the Affordable Care Act.

The pandemic has made inpatient voting a challenge because of tight restrictions at hospitals and the many employees furloughed, laid off or working at home. And a significant increase in early voting and the use of mail-in ballots in many states may reduce the number of patients who need help.

“The majority of our patients, I am hoping, will have voted already, because that will alleviate the stress — for them, it’s one less thing to worry about,” said Camille Camello, associate director of volunteer services at the nearly 900-bed Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which has a program to help inpatients vote. In past elections, she said, over 200 patients have requested ballots.

At LAC+USC, administrators have been trying to ensure patients know they can get help voting. Posters line the walls of common spaces and staffers are handing out flyers with voting information to every patient who is admitted, said Gabriela Hernandez, the hospital’s director of volunteer services.

Hernandez said she and about 25 volunteers have been walking the halls in the inpatient units of the hospital for the past month, asking patients if they want help voting.

Patients who say yes get emergency ballot applications, which the hospital has been sending to the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder for verification. The ballot applications will continue to be made available to patients up to the morning of Election Day.

Hernandez and her team will collect the ballots and distribute them to patients, then return them to the registrar before the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day.

Other hospitals have a more collapsed timeline.

At St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California, hospital staffers will start asking patients Monday if they want voting assistance and bring them ballots on Election Day, said Gian Santos, manager of volunteer services at the hospital. In the 2016 election, only about seven or eight patients voted that way, Santos said.

St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, plans to do everything — applications and ballots — on Election Day.

For big hospitals, inpatient voting can be a massive undertaking. People often require assistance in multiple languages, and the hospitals frequently contract with translation services to accommodate them.

Many hospitals receive patients from numerous counties — and across state lines.

Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan plans to assist as many as 200 patients from nine counties in New York state and three in New Jersey, said Erin Smith, an obstetrical nurse navigator who, along with fellow OB nurse navigator Lisa Schavrien, is leading the effort.

The hospital will assign one or two “runners” to each of the 12 county election boards, Smith said. For her, enabling vulnerable patients to exercise their right to vote is worth the effort.

“If we’re not helping them do it, how many thousands of people are not voting in elections because they were in a car accident, because they had appendicitis, because they had unexpected brain surgery?” Smith asked.

“If we’re not making it happen in the hospital, it kind of feels to me like voter suppression.”

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Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on SoundCloud.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said this week that “we’re not going to control the pandemic,” effectively conceding that the administration has pivoted from prevention to treatment. But COVID-19 cases are rising rapidly in most of the nation, and the issue is playing large in the presidential campaign. President Donald Trump is complaining about the constant news reports about the virus, prompting former President Barack Obama to say Trump is “jealous of COVID’s media coverage.”

Meanwhile, as the case challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act heads to the Supreme Court on Nov. 10, open enrollment for individual health insurance under the law begins Sunday.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Joanne Kenen of Politico, Tami Luhby of CNN and Anna Edney of Bloomberg News.

[khn_slabs slabs=”241884″ view=”inline” /]

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

• Whichever candidate wins the presidency next week will have a heavy lift in mounting a strong public response to battle COVID-19. Polls suggest about a third of people do not believe some of the basic science about the virus or its prevention, such as that using masks can help stem transmission.
• Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who once served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Trump, called for a temporary national mask mandate in his column in The Wall Street Journal. He suggested that masks should not be a political issue.
• Gottlieb’s column has been supported by other commentators who suggest that masks need to become a social and cultural norm and compare the debate over their use to similar debates in the past about seat belts, smoking bans and harsh punishments for driving while intoxicated. Those measures all faced opposition from people who complained about civil liberties but gradually became accepted. The difference now is that public health advocates are looking for a quick acceptance of masks.
• Part of the resistance to wearing face masks is that many people don’t understand their purpose and presume masks are for their own protection. But public health officials advocate masks as a way to protect others, especially vulnerable people, from any virus a mask wearer might shed, often without even realizing it.
• Drugmakers and health experts are rolling back expectations about the timing of a COVID vaccine as the trials seek more data. One issue may be that not enough people in the placebo groups have contracted the coronavirus. That could be because people who volunteer for such an endeavor may be more aware of health issues and cautious about the disease.
• Once a vaccine is approved, FDA and other federal health officials will face a number of complicating issues. Among them: How should trials of other vaccine candidates continue and how should the vaccine be distributed?
• Enrollment for insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces begins Sunday, but many consumers could be forgiven for not knowing that. There is precious little marketing or advertising for the plans, and some people think the Supreme Court is going to overturn the ACA, anyway, and its plans will go away. That’s not known yet and it may well be summer 2021 before there is an answer on that.

Also this week, Rovner interviews KHN’s Anna Almendrala, who reported the latest NPR-KHN “Bill of the Month” installment, about a patient who did everything right and got a big bill anyway. If you have an outrageous medical bill you would like to share with us, you can do that here.

Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The New York Times’ “A Chance to Expand Medicaid Rallies Democrats in Crucial North Carolina,” by Abby Goodnough

Joanne Kenen: The New Yorker’s “A President Looks Back on His Toughest Fight,” by Barack Obama

Tami Luhby: KHN’s “Florida Fails to Attract Bidders for Canada Drug Importation Program,” by Phil Galewitz

Anna Edney: The Wall Street Journal’s “Health Agency Halts Coronavirus Ad Campaign, Leaving Santa Claus in the Cold,” by Julie Wernau, James V. Grimaldi and Stephanie Armour

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to What the Health? on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, or Pocket Casts.

“Because our family couldn’t afford health insurance, Obama/Biden penalized us about $10,000, then took that $10,000 and used it to pay for others’ free Obamacare. Trump ended that theft.”

In a Facebook post, Oct. 20, 2020

A viral Facebook post claims that former President Barack Obama’s health insurance law penalized a family a large amount of money for not buying health insurance and that President Donald Trump was responsible for stopping the practice.

This story was produced in partnership with PolitiFact. It can be republished for free.

The post features writing on the back of a car windshield that says, “Because our family couldn’t afford health insurance, Obama/Biden penalized us about $10,000, then took that $10,000 and used it to pay for others’ free Obamacare. Trump ended that theft.”

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about  PolitiFact’s partnership with Facebook.) We found a similar post on Instagram.

The post appears to refer to the individual mandate penalty, a tax under the Affordable Care Act placed on those who chose not to get health insurance. At the end of 2017, Republican-backed tax legislation, also supported by Trump, zeroed out the fine. Beginning in 2019, people could no longer be penalized for not having health insurance. Thus, the mandate hasn’t been in effect for about two years.

But $10,000 — the hefty amount this family was supposedly penalized for not having health insurance — raised questions for us. And was that money really used to pay for other people’s health insurance? We decided to look into it.

The History of the Individual Mandate

The ACA was implemented in 2010 during the Obama administration. The aim of the health care law — often referred to as Obamacare — was to ensure everyone had health insurance.

To that end, the law used what health policy experts call a “carrot-and-stick” approach. For low-income and middle-income individuals who had difficulty affording health insurance, the government would provide tax subsidies to reduce the cost of insurance — that was the carrot. And to make sure everyone enrolled in a health insurance plan, those who didn’t sign up were fined, under what was known as the individual mandate provision. That was the stick.

The individual mandate, which didn’t kick in until 2014, was unpopular with the American public, according to polling at the time. A 2017 KFF poll showed that 55% of Americans supported the idea of eliminating the requirement that everyone must have health insurance or pay a fine. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

Although one of Trump’s key campaign promises was to repeal and replace the ACA, efforts to do so failed in 2017 when the Republican-held Senate failed to get the votes it needed.

Instead, in their 2017 tax bill, Republicans set the penalty for the individual mandate to $0. Starting in 2019, Americans no longer had to pay a fine for not having health insurance. Trump signed the 2017 tax bill into law. So, it is true that Trump and congressional Republicans were responsible for neutralizing the penalty.

However, experts pointed out that the individual mandate is still in place, it’s just that the penalty is set to $0. In fact, the end of the penalty is behind the justification for a court case attempting to overturn the ACA, brought by Republican attorneys general and supported by the Trump administration. The plaintiffs argue that the health care law is no longer constitutional because the penalty no longer “produces at least some revenue” for the federal government. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case Nov. 10.

The Math

The viral social media posts claim that the family “couldn’t afford health insurance” and was penalized $10,000.

Health policy experts told us that while the social media post doesn’t give all the specifics needed to know if this was absolutely true, it seems unlikely a penalty would be this high.

One issue is the post doesn’t specify whether the $10,000 penalty was incurred in one year or over multiple years. It also doesn’t say how many individuals were part of the family.

Assuming the $10,000 penalty was incurred in one year, multiple experts told us that the family would have had an annual income above $400,000 and at least one person would have had to be uninsured for the entire year. That math is based on the penalty structure in place in 2018, the last year the mandate was enforced.

In 2018, the penalty was calculated one of two ways. The fine was the greater of the two results:

• $695 for an adult and $347.50 for a child, up to a max of $2,085 per family annually, or
• 2.5% of family income above a certain tax filing threshold (KFF estimated the tax filing threshold was $10,650 for a single individual or $21,300 for joint filers in 2018).

The first way to calculate the penalty obviously doesn’t apply since the max was $2,085 per year. So, the second would be the only way to get a $10,000-a-year penalty. To arrive at such a number, you would have to take 2.5% of the family’s income. In this case, 2.5% of a $400,000 income gets you close to $10,000.

And experts said it is highly unlikely that a family with a $400,000 income would have had difficulty affording health insurance.

“So I would highly doubt the veracity of what is written on that car windshield,”Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow in health reform and private insurance at KFF wrote in an email. “People with that much income almost always have job-based health benefits and, if not, generally are inclined to insure themselves very well in order to protect assets — otherwise, if hospitalized and uninsured, they could owe many multiples of the penalty amount in medical bills.”

Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, also pointed out that a $10,000 penalty would have been rare.

“Very few American families would have paid anything close to that amount in penalty for not having insurance — the average penalty per person in 2017 was around $700,” Oberlander wrote in an email. “Moreover, only a small percentage of Americans ever paid the penalty for not having health insurance — in 2017, 4.6 million persons,” or about 1% of the population. (In 2017, 325 million people lived in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.)

It’s also unclear whether it would have just been cheaper for the family to pay for health insurance rather than incur a $10,000 penalty, said Matthew Fiedler, a health policy scholar at the Brookings Institution.

“It depends on the ages of the members of the family, where they live, what year (or years) we are talking about, and the family’s income,” Fiedler wrote in an email. “There are conceivable scenarios where the family could have found a bronze plan for $10k or less. But there are also plenty of plausible scenarios where they could not have. Without knowing more about the family’s circumstances, it’s just hard to say with any confidence.”

Where Did the Penalty Money Go?

Experts also told us that the post’s assertion that the penalties paid for not having health insurance were directly applied to fund other people’s health insurance was off the mark.

The individual mandate penalties were assessed during each annual tax filing, and then payments were made the year after there was a lapse in insurance coverage.

Those penalties were collected just like any other tax payment.

“As a strict accounting, keep in mind, everything gets dumped into the Treasury regardless of the source, and then it is appropriated out of the Treasury by Congress,” said Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health care policy at the Heritage Foundation. “It’s not like money goes into one account and then another.”

So, while it’s certainly possible that the penalty money could have been used to help pay for some of the ACA subsidies for other people, the money also could have gone to any other number of things the government pays for, like the military, disaster relief or education.

“You don’t know exactly where your taxes or penalties go,” said Evan Saltzman, an assistant professor in economics at Emory University. “Maybe a small share went to Obamacare, but that’s a stretch. You can’t track where every dollar you spent on your taxes is going.”

It’s also misleading to say that other individuals received “free Obamacare” from the penalty payment. The experts said that while Medicaid expansion, which was a part of the ACA, does provide health care coverage for low-income people who are eligible, those who bought insurance on the marketplace would still likely have paid for some part of their coverage after subsidies were applied.

Our Ruling

A viral social media post claims that a family was penalized $10,000 for not being able to afford health insurance. It also claimed the penalty money was taken to pay for others’ “free ObamaCare” and Trump stopped that practice.

It is true that Trump and Congress did zero out the individual mandate requirement, so people could no longer be penalized for not having health insurance. But after that, skepticism abounds.

For instance, it’s very unlikely that a family would face a $10,000 penalty in one year. Moreover, if such a family did face this penalty for not having health insurance, they would likely be in a high-income bracket for which health insurance tends to come from an employer or be affordable. And the charge that the penalty was used to provide “free coverage” for others doesn’t fit with federal accounting processes.

Experts said, though, that the lack of specifics about this family’s situation makes it difficult to be completely definitive.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

SOURCES

Census Bureau, QuickFacts United States,  accessed Oct. 27, 2020

The Commonwealth Fund, “The Effect of Eliminating the Individual Mandate Penalty and the Role of Behavioral Factors,” July 11, 2018

Email interview with Christine Eibner, the Paul O’Neill Alcoa chair in policy analysis at Rand Corp., Oct. 23, 2020

Email interview with Jonathan Oberlander, professor of health policy and management at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Oct. 25, 2020

Email interview with Karen Pollitz, senior fellow in health reform and private insurance at KFF, Oct. 26-27, 2020

Email interview with Matthew Fiedler, fellow with the USC Brookings-Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy at the Brookings Institution, Oct. 26, 2020

5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ technical revisions of opinion, accessed Oct. 27, 2020

H.R.1 — 115th Congress (2017-18), accessed Oct. 27, 2020

IRS.gov, “Individual Shared Responsibility Provision — Reporting and Calculating the Payment,” accessed Oct. 27, 2020

KFF, “Explaining California v. Texas: A Guide to the Case Challenging the ACA,” Sept. 1, 2020

KFF, Individual Mandate Penalty Calculator, Nov. 17, 2017

KFF, “Kaiser Health Tracking Poll — November 2017: The Role of Health Care in the Republican Tax Plan,” Nov. 15, 2017

LeadStories.com, “Fact Check: Trump, Congress DID End Tax Penalty for Non-Insured, but $10,000 Penalty NOT Likely,” Oct. 22, 2020

Phone interview with Edmund Haislmaier, Preston A. Wells Jr. senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Oct. 23, 2020

Phone interview with Evan Saltzman, assistant professor in economics at Emory University, Oct. 23, 2020

PolitiFact, Repeal Obamacare Trump-O-Meter, July 15, 2020

Rand Corp., “How Does the ACA Individual Mandate Affect Enrollment and Premiums in the Individual Insurance Market?” published in 2015

Sen. Lindsey Graham has never been a fan of the Affordable Care Act — even though it’s helped dramatically lower the number of uninsured people in his home state of South Carolina.

The Republican, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, attacked the law at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Democrats have made the nomination a referendum on the health law, which will be the subject of a Supreme Court hearing on Nov. 10. They fear the court may overturn the entire law, which has led to huge expansions in coverage and blocked insurers from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions, among other consumer protections.

Graham suggested that South Carolina was getting the short end of funding because the health law is sending a disproportionate amount of its money to states represented by Democrats in Congress.

“Under the Affordable Care Act, three states get 35% of the money, folks. Can you name them? I’ll help you: California, New York and Massachusetts. They’re 22% of the population. Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein’s from California, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s from California, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic Senate, is from New York, and Massachusetts is [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren. Now, why do they get 35% of the money when they’re only 22% of the population? That’s the way they designed the law: The more you spend, the more you get.”

His statement got us wondering if those numbers are true.

Complicated Math

We asked Graham’s office for evidence to support his statement. His spokesperson responded with data he said was from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as well as the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, a congressional advisory board.

To look at total spending under the ACA, Graham’s office analyzed federal money that went to pay for the Medicaid expansion, tax credits given to consumers to subsidize premiums of insurance plans on the marketplace, cost sharing reduction subsidies (which were given to insurers to defray some of the costs they were required by the ACA to pick up for marketplace customers with very low incomes) and the Basic Health Program, which is an option in the ACA that lets states offer low-income residents different coverage than plans offered on the marketplaces.

Graham’s office did not share the actual reports used for the analysis, but staffers said they used 2016 data, even though more recent data was available. The numbers were based on calculations made in 2017 when Republican lawmakers sought to repeal and replace the ACA. Their analysis showed $118 billion in total 2016 federal spending on the ACA, with California, New York and Massachusetts receiving about $43 billion, or about 37% (slightly higher than what Graham cited at the hearing).

Nearly two-thirds of the funding was attributed to the expansion of Medicaid to all adults below the federal poverty level. The Supreme Court ruled that pursuing the expansion was an option left to states’ discretion — South Carolina opted against it. The federal government paid all those Medicaid costs from 2014 through 2016 for new enrollees and then gradually reduced its share to 90% today.

We decided to independently look at the spending using the latest available numbers. We reviewed federal data compiled by KFF as well as data provided directly from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the states, when necessary. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

It is important to note that the Trump administration ended the cost sharing reduction payments in October 2017. So, KHN’s analysis did not include spending for that program.

We analyzed the latest Medicaid expansion funding from 2018 and the latest Obamacare tax credit spending and also Basic Health Program spending from 2019. Only two states participate in that program, New York and Minnesota.

Adding up the latest data and the federal share of funding came to nearly $140 billion. Of that amount, New York, California and Massachusetts — which represent about 20% of the nation’s population — received a combined $40 billion, or about 29%.

The largest category of federal funding by far was the nearly $27.5 billion the three states together received from Medicaid expansion.

New York received about $5 billion in fiscal 2019 for the Basic Health Program.

Sifting through older datasets, one key discrepancy stands out in the figures used by Graham. He lists Massachusetts as receiving $6.1 billion in federal exchange subsidies — almost 20% of the national total — while federal data used by KFF in 2016 cites $360 million.

Graham insinuated that South Carolina wasn’t getting its fair share of money, calling the law “a disaster for the state.”

But the refusal by the state’s Republican leaders for the past seven years to expand Medicaid — which would have brought in billions of federal dollars — is the main reason for the funding disparity. South Carolina is one of 12 states that have not adopted Medicaid expansion.

That decision has left hundreds of thousands of the state’s residents uninsured because they have incomes too high for Medicaid but too low to qualify for federal subsidies to help them buy insurance plans sold on the ACA marketplaces. To qualify for a subsidy, consumers’ income must be at least at the federal poverty level, or $12,760 in 2020.

“A big driver of the flow of federal funds is related to that decision about whether to expand,” said Larry Levitt, KFF’s executive vice president for health policy. “It is not inherently in the design of the law.”

If South Carolina expanded Medicaid, about 330,000 more residents would be covered and the federal government would give an additional $1.6 billion in annual Medicaid funding to the state, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. State Medicaid spending would rise by $250 million.

Even without expanding Medicaid, the uninsured rate in South Carolina has dropped from 20% in 2008 to about 13% in 2019, according to Census data.

More than 9 in 10 people in the state who get coverage through the ACA marketplace get tax credits to help them pay their monthly premiums.

In fact, South Carolina gets a larger share of those premium tax credits than most states. South Carolina, the nation’s 23rd-largest state by population size, ranks 11th in the number of residents getting those subsidies and ninth in receipt of the federal ACA premium subsidies, according to the federal data.

Disadvantage for ‘Fiscally Responsible States’

Kevin Bishop, a spokesperson for Graham, said the point of the senator’s remarks is that the ACA “is structured so that states that either expanded [Medicaid] or have favorable state eligibility will have a disproportionate share of funds. This gives an advantage to high-spending states.” States that are more “fiscally responsible” are at a disadvantage, he said.

Bishop acknowledged that ACA spending does change each year.

Levitt noted that Graham’s critique omitted an important perspective about other states. The senator did not mention that enrollees in two Republican-controlled states with large populations, Florida and Texas, receive more in ACA premium subsidies than people in New York or Massachusetts. However, neither of those Southern states has expanded its Medicaid program.

Still, experts noted that Graham’s comment that the more states spend the more they get from the ACA is partly true.

It accurately reflects the ACA’s Medicaid formula. As states expand Medicaid eligibility, they pick up more expenses and also receive more money in a federal match.

Joe Antos, a health economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Graham is correct that the Medicaid expansion was designed to help direct additional funding to wealthier states such as New York, California and Massachusetts. Those states, as well as some others, had broader Medicaid eligibility rules than poorer states before the law was enacted, so their Medicaid rolls were relatively larger already.

That’s why the Medicaid expansion was set at 138% of the federal poverty level, rather than 100%, he said. The higher amount meant those states could get a larger reimbursement for people already in their program.

But he said states that chose not to expand Medicaid under the law can’t blame the law for getting fewer federal dollars.

“If a state did not expand, it’s on them for having less federal funding,” Antos said.

Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the expansion of Medicaid for those more progressive states significantly increased their funding. “New York made out like a bandit,” he said, noting the state had one of the nation’s largest Medicaid populations before 2010.

Our Ruling

Graham points to higher federal spending on ACA programs in three states that are represented by top congressional Democrats and complains that South Carolina is not faring as well. While his numbers are four years old, the latest numbers are just a few percentage points lower than what he cited — 29% compared with 35%.

He also left out some critical information — most important, that South Carolina didn’t pursue federal funding through Medicaid expansion.

His argument that the law was designed to help some states largely controlled by Democrats fails to note that many Republican-controlled states have received heavy federal funding, too, either because of ACA tax subsidies or Medicaid expansion, or both.

He also didn’t acknowledge that South Carolina does have a strong record of receiving federal subsidies for consumers buying insurance on the ACA marketplace.

We rate Graham’s statement as Half True.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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To make ends meet, Martha Tapia works 64 hours a week at two Orange County, California, nursing homes. She is one of thousands of certified nursing assistants who perform the intimate and physical work of bathing, dressing and feeding the nation’s fragile elderly.

“We do everything for them. Everything you do for yourself, you have to do for the residents,” Tapia said.

And she’s one of many in that low-paid field, predominantly women of color, who work at more than one facility.

In March, when the coronavirus began racing through nursing homes, the federal government banned visitors. (That guidance has since been updated.) But even with the ban, infections kept spreading. A team of researchers from UCLA and Yale University decided to examine the people who continued to enter nursing homes during that time: the employees.

Keith Chen, a behavioral economist and UCLA professor, said the key question is this: “The people who, we can infer, work in this nursing home — what other nursing homes do they work at?”

Using location data from 30 million smartphones when the visitor ban was in place helped the scientists “see” the movements of people going into and out of nursing homes. The data showed a lot of nursing home workers are — like Tapia — working at more than one facility. Chen said the findings suggest that staffers who work in multiple nursing homes are one source of the spread of infections.

“When you learn that over 20 of your workers are also spending time in other nursing homes, that should be a real red flag,” Chen said.

The Toll on Patients and Beyond

More than 84,000 residents and staff members of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have died of COVID-19 across the U.S., representing 40% of all coronavirus fatalities in the country, according to KFF’s most recent analysis. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

In California, the analogous toll is more than 5,700 deaths, making up 35% of all coronavirus fatalities in the state.

The UCLA team created maps of movement and found that on average each nursing home is connected to seven others through staff movement. Limiting nursing home employees to one facility could mean fewer COVID-19 infections — but that would hurt the workforce of people who say they work multiple jobs because of low wages.

After each of her shifts, Tapia worries she’ll bring the coronavirus home to her granddaughter. She tries to take precautions, including buying N95 masks from nurses. She knows it’s not just patients who are at risk. Nursing home workers such as Tapia are also contracting COVID-19 — in California alone, 153 of them have died since the pandemic began.

At the nursing home where she works in the morning, Tapia gets an N95 mask that she must only use — and reuse — in that facility. At her other nursing home job, in the afternoons, she gets a blue surgical mask to wear.

“They say they cannot give us N95 [masks],” she said, because she works in the “general area” where residents haven’t tested positive for the coronavirus.

She doesn’t want to work at multiple nursing homes, but her rent in Orange County is $2,200 a month, and her low pay and limited hours at each nursing home make multiple jobs a necessity.

“I don’t want to get sick. But we need to work. We need to eat, we need to pay rent. That’s just how it is,” Tapia said.

Staff Connections Equal Infections

The UCLA study also found that some areas of the country have a much higher overlap in nursing home staffing than others.

“There are some facilities in Florida, in New Jersey, where they’re sharing upwards of 50 to 100 workers,” said UCLA associate professor Elisa Long, who, along with her colleagues, examined data during the federal visitor ban from March to May. “This is over an 11-week time period, but that’s a huge number of individuals that are moving between these facilities; all of these are potential sources of COVID transmission.”

They also found the more shared workers a nursing home has, the more COVID-19 infections among the residents.

“Not only does it matter how connected your nursing home is, but what really matters is how connected your connections are,” Long said.

The researchers say they’ve informally dubbed these highly connected nursing homes as each state’s “Kevin Bacon of nursing homes,” after the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlor game.

“We found that if you’re going to see a nursing home outbreak anywhere, it’s likely to spread to the Kevin Bacon of nursing homes in each state,” Chen said.

The team hopes that local health departments could use similar cellphone data methods as an early warning system. Using the test results from the “Kevin Bacon of nursing homes” as an indicator would be the first step.

“As soon as you detect an outbreak in one nursing home, you can immediately prioritize those other nursing homes that you know are at increased risk,” Chen said.

Prioritize Masks and Hand-Washing

The California Association of Health Facilities represents most nursing homes in the Golden State. In response to the study, the group said its members can’t prevent workers such as Tapia from taking jobs elsewhere, and they can’t pay them more, because California doesn’t pay them enough through Medicaid reimbursements.

Mike Dark, an attorney with the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, doesn’t buy that argument. He said the state already tried paying nursing homes more in 2006 — and that made them more profitable but not more safe and efficient. He said he’s skeptical that extra funding to pay staff would reach those workers.

“We know from past experience that money tends to go into the pockets of the executives and administrators who run these places,” Dark said.

He agreed that health workers such as Tapia should be paid more but cautioned against one idea being floated in some policy circles: limiting workers to one nursing home.

“Then you can wind up depriving some of the crucial health caregivers that we have in these facilities of their livelihoods, which can’t be a good solution,” he said.

Instead, he said, regulators need to focus on the basics, especially in the 100 California nursing homes with ongoing outbreaks, since it’s been shown that infection control measures work.

“Right now there’s poor access to [personal protective equipment]. There’s still erratic compliance with things like hand-washing requirements,” he said. “If we spent more time addressing those key issues, there would be much less concern about spread between facilities.”

Jackie Fortiér is health reporter for KPCC and LAist.com. This story is part of a partnership that includes KPCC, NPR and KHN, an editorially independent program of KFF.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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In a tweet to his 78,000 followers Sunday, U.S. Rep. Harley Rouda, a Democrat from Orange County, California, described his Republican opponent Michelle Steel’s attendance at an indoor fundraiser without a mask as “sickening.”

Democratic U.S. Rep. Gil Cisneros also blasted his Republican opponent, Young Kim, on Twitter for attending the “superspreader fundraiser,” calling it a “slap in the face to frontline workers” and his constituents in southern Los Angeles County and northern Orange County.

After President Trump’s superspreader event in Orange County last week, @YoungKimCA decided to host her own. The superspreader fundraiser—a crowded, indoor event with no social distancing/no masks—goes against CDC guidelines. It’s a slap in the face to frontline workers & #CA39. pic.twitter.com/1z2wd5Ohj4

— Gil Cisneros (@GilCisnerosCA) October 26, 2020

Earlier in the month, another Democrat, U.S. Rep. TJ Cox of Bakersfield, told a television debate audience that his GOP challenger, David Valadao, “is in lockstep with Donald Trump” and that Valadao aims to undo federal health protections.

These charges by incumbent lawmakers — who represent vast areas of California, from its inland farmlands to its coastal mansions and urban working-class neighborhoods — reflect a disciplined and widely used strategy Democratic congressional hopefuls are deploying across California and the nation: By associating their Republican opponents with the out-of-control coronavirus pandemic and threats to the Affordable Care Act, they hope to convince voters the Democratic Party is the one that can better protect Americans’ health.

In doing so, they are linking their challengers to President Donald Trump, who is deeply unpopular in the Golden State, with just 32% of likely voters approving of the way he is handling his job, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California survey.

“Democrats have been able to tie the national conversation around the coronavirus pandemic with health care and with the economy and social unrest,” said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University. “That allows Democrats to turn or hold individual districts.”

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But the strategy isn’t a slam-dunk for Democrats, especially in the districts they flipped in 2018 — including seven in California. Despite the changing demographics in the once Republican strongholds of Orange County and the Central Valley, McCuan and other political analysts said Republican victories are possible if even a small number of residents who voted Democratic in 2018 swung back to the GOP.

Republicans have already taken back one of those seats. U.S. Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita) beat Christy Smith in a May special election — 55% to 45% — to fill the vacancy left after Katie Hill resigned from Congress amid allegations of inappropriate relationships with staff members. Voters in the district that includes Santa Clarita and Simi Valley will pick between the same two candidates in Tuesday’s election.

In these competitive districts, political analysts say the winner will come down to voter turnout and Trump’s approval ratings, which is now inextricably tied to his handling of the public health crisis. Nationwide, 26 congressional seats are ranked as toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report, which tracks races.

“A lot of it’s about the president,” said Wesley Hussey, a political science professor at Sacramento State. “And part of the component of the presidential election is health care, and that does trickle down to congressional races.”

Calls to the state Republican Party and the National Republican Congressional Committee were not returned. And none of the Republican challengers to the Democrats interviewed for this story responded to repeated interview requests.

In California’s southern Central Valley congressional district currently held by Cox, political analysts predict another nail-biter. Cox ousted Valadao from Congress in the last election by just 862 votes, in part by tying the three-term incumbent to Trump and criticizing Valadao’s votes to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

Now, Cox has added Trump’s handling of the pandemic as a reason for voters to reject Valadao again.

“He is in lockstep with Donald Trump,” Cox charged in a televised debate Oct. 20. “And I don’t know how you can stand behind a guy that’s saying, ‘Hey, we did a fantastic job and 200,000 Americans have died so far.’”

In the recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, California voters rated COVID-19 as the state’s top concern.

The tweets that Cisneros and Rouda penned Sunday, which included photos of their opponents at a fundraiser without masks, capitalize on that concern. Rouda, for example, reminded voters that his opponent, as the head of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, publicly questioned the local public health officer’s springtime recommendation that residents wear masks.

“Michelle Steel is Orange County’s top official and she violated public health orders to attend an indoor, maskless fundraiser just to receive a check,” Rouda told California Healthline on Monday. “The example she is setting shows that she lacks the leadership needed for her current position and the position she’s running for.”

Steel spokesperson Lance Trover accused Rouda of politicizing the pandemic, saying Steel has helped secure personal protective equipment for front-line workers, and food assistance and testing for the county’s most vulnerable residents.

Steel has publicly criticized Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom for opening California’s economy too slowly, and her campaign has shared photos of Rouda socializing on a beach and in a restaurant without a mask. (Rouda said the only other people in the beach photo were close family members, and that the restaurant photo was taken before the pandemic.)

“Harley Rouda is a hypocrite who has spent the entire summer seeking to politicize the work of Orange County in battling the coronavirus,” Trover said.

While wearing a mask may resonate in California’s swing districts, there remain solidly red areas of California where defying a government mandate can score a candidate political points. U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents a sprawling conservative district spanning multiple northern and central counties, has called masks useless, balked at wearing one at a congressional hearing and asserted that state lockdowns have led to increased deaths.

So in addition to focusing on McClintock’s COVID response, his opponent, Brynne Kennedy, a first-time candidate and small-business owner, is targeting another health issue: his opposition to the ACA.

In her travels throughout the mostly rural district, Kennedy is highlighting his votes — 66 by her count — to weaken or overturn the Affordable Care Act.

“This is radically out of step with where our district is,” said Kennedy, whom political analysts describe as a long-shot candidate. “Talking about that to people, that’s very concerning to them, and it’s absolutely on the ballot this year.”

Kennedy’s focus on protecting the federal health care law, particularly preserving access to insurance for people with preexisting medical conditions, mirrors the messaging of her fellow Democrats.

And it’s putting a lot of Republicans on the defense, especially with Trump on the campaign trail advocating for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, said GOP political consultant Rob Stutzman.

“Republicans are making a point of telling voters that they will support protecting preexisting conditions,” Stutzman said. “It’s clearly a vulnerability.”

U.S. Rep. Josh Harder (D-Modesto) has been talking about preexisting conditions since he first campaigned for his seat two years ago, referencing his brother’s health issues as a young child. He believes health care is once again the single-biggest issue in his race.

But Harder has recrafted his pitch from 2018, when he talked about backing “Medicare for All,” a position now seen as a vulnerability in swing districts where Republicans have labeled their opponents as liberal or socialist.

Now, Harder and other Democrats are talking about shoring up the ACA and creating a “public option” that would allow every American to enroll in a government-sponsored plan.

Harder said he is asking voters to reelect him to ensure Congress has the votes to protect the federal health care law if the Supreme Court invalidates it.

“We need to make sure that people understand that the stakes couldn’t be higher,” he said. “The only way that we get a legislative solution that prioritizes people with asthma, cancer and other preexisting conditions is if we elect Democrats to the House, to the Senate and the presidency.”