#FullRepeal Daily Digest

ABC News: Vet Finally Gets VA Appointment, Two Years After His Death

• The Department of Veteran Affairs is apologizing for finally responding to a hospital appointment request letter, two years too late.
• Suzanne Chase of Acton, Massachusetts, has been working to put the pain of losing her husband, Douglas Chase, to brain cancer, almost two years ago. In 2012, a year after her husband’s diagnosis, Chase attempted to move his care in Boston to a nearby veteran’s hospital in Bedford. She said they waited for four months with no reply but Doug died in August 2012.
• Just two weeks ago, Chase received a letter from the VA finally responding to her appointment request. “The letter invited him to make an appointment with primary care at the VA, if he so desired. Then at the bottom they said they wanted a quick response,” Chase told ABC’s Boston affiliate WCVB…As if adding salt to the wound, her Vietnam veteran husband was denied veterans funeral benefits because he was never actually treated at a veterans’ hospital.
• [RELATED] HotAir: Vet dies waiting 30 minutes for ambulance from hospital five minutes away
  • “A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. “Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.”
  • VA spokeswoman Sonja Brown defended the VA’s conduct in this case, telling reporters that the staff “followed policy in calling 911 when the man collapsed on Monday.” She added, however, that this policy is now under review.
  • It is unclear why the ambulance took so long to reach this veteran in need, and blaming the VA system in this instance may be entirely unfair. That said, it is also just another example that serves to reinforce the narrative that the VA system is hopelessly broken.
• [RELATED] HotAir: VA employees switched to processing ACA applications
  • In another indicator of how low a priority veterans have with this administration, a whistleblower in Atlanta has revealed that VA employees were switched from processing VA applications to those of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.
  • [Scott Davis explained] “We don’t discuss veterans. We do not work for veterans. That is something that I learned after working there. Our customer is the VA central office, the White House and the Congress. The veterans are not our priority. So whatever the initiatives are or the big ticket items, that is what we focus on.”

Politico: Obamacare's next threat: A September surprise

• Most state health insurance rates for 2015 are scheduled to be approved by early fall, and most are likely to rise, timing that couldn’t be worse for Democrats already on defense in the midterms.
• With Democrats looking to hang on to Senate seats in many Republican-leaning states, they’ll be hoping that the final numbers don’t come in anywhere near the 24.6 percent hike that report from the anti-Obamacare Heritage Foundation projected for a family of four in Arkansas, or even the 13.1 percent increase in Alaska or 12.4 percent in Louisiana. So far, although no state has finalized its rate, 21 have posted bids for 2015. Average preliminary premiums went up in all 21, though only a few by double digits.

Politico: Why liberals are abandoning the Obamacare employer mandate

• The main downside to eliminating the mandate, from the Democratic perspective? Money. Estimates of the mandate’s worth to Obamacare financing range from $46 billion to more than $100 billion over a decade. That helps pay for coverage expansion. Getting a bipartisan deal to scrap the policy is one hurdle; an agreement on how to make up the money could be even harder.
• [The Urban Institute] argued that repealing the requirement would remove “distortions” in the labor market. They estimated that about 200,000 fewer people would get health coverage, a relatively small decrease compared to the millions expected to get insured under the ACA. Urban noted that most big businesses already cover workers — and they do so voluntarily, with no mandate. And they said that’s unlikely to change. The left-leaning Commonwealth Fund made similar arguments. Harvard health care economist David Cutler, who helped lay the administration’s intellectual foundation for the health law, said eliminating the employer mandate is “not a huge deal” unless employers drop coverage en masse, which he sees as unlikely.
• Some unions, which have been unhappy with aspects of the health law, say the employer mandate is also a matter of fairness. “The ACA is already rife with carve-outs and loopholes for large employers, even though the law was designed to have them share responsibility,” said Tim Schlittner, a spokesman for United Food and Commercial Workers. “The administration should focus on improving the law for consumers and workers, not big business.”

The Morning Consult: Workers Worried Employers Will Move Them To Obamacare Exchanges

• Among likely voters, 63 percent said they’re at least somewhat concerned that their employers will shift their coverage to the federal exchanges, against 38 percent who said they’re not too concerned or not concerned at all.
• A majority – 52 percent – said they’d seriously consider looking for a new job if they had to move to the health exchanges, against 48 who said they wouldn’t.

The National Interest: The Great Liberal Hobby Lobby Freak-out

• It was not always this way. As I have written here before, liberals once overwhelmingly supported the legislation on which the Supreme Court’s ruling was based, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, its enactment praised by the New York Times editorial board.
• “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act reasserts a broadly accepted American concept of giving wide latitude to religious practices that many might regard as odd or unconventional,” the Gray Lady commented. When the subject was American Indians using peyote, the paper assumed that was a good thing. When it is applied to Catholics who object to contraception or evangelicals who oppose abortion—Hobby Lobby was willing to cover sixteen nonabortifacient contraceptive methods for its employees—that goes out the window.
• But when you have people wondering whether we should have six Catholics on the Supreme Court and musing about “concerns about the compatibility between being a Catholic and being a good citizen,” we have something closer to a Jack Chick tract than classical liberalism.
• [RELATED] The Weekly Standard: Voters Support Hobby Lobby Decision by 10-Point Margin
  • A new Rasmussen poll finds that 49 percent of American voters support a religious exemption to the federal government's contraception mandate, while 39 percent oppose such an exemption…43% of Likely U.S. Voters think businesses should be required by law to provide health insurance that covers all government-approved contraceptives for women without co-payments or other charges to the patient. Slightly more (47%) say companies should not be required to meet this contraceptive mandate included in the new national health care law. Ten percent (10%) are not sure.

The New York Times: The Price of Prevention: Vaccine Costs Are Soaring

• Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health budgets. Here in San Antonio and elsewhere, some doctors have stopped offering immunizations because they say they cannot afford to buy these potentially lifesaving preventive treatments that insurers often reimburse poorly, sometimes even at a loss.