Six words on health care

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Everyone’s got a story about health care, whether it’s a late night rush to urgent care with a sick kid or a nightmarish series of calls to the insurance company to settle a claim. Last week, we asked for your Six Word Economy Memoir and received some great responses. With the recent passage of the health care reform bill, this week we turned to health care stories, and here’s what came back:

Alan Atwood: $12,000 A Year is Too Much.

January Hentschke Thapa: I hope I never get sick!

Allison Olson: Realizing we’re very lucky. Fingers crossed.

@sporkening: hoping to die before exhausting coverage

Harlan Lewin: Why is obesity a fashion statement?

Minnesota Public Radio put a call out on the air for submissions. Their Public Insight Journalism network connects the station with viewers. Here are some of the responses from the Minneapolis area:

Colin Mansfield: Minnesota Care is my life saver

Theresa K.: Insurance is costly product, not guaranteeable.

Patrick S.: Public Sector Dad, Adulthood Is Sad.

Jennifer Hernandez: Broken ankle. Huge deductible. Ouch!

Oh, and mine? Yoga classes are cheaper than therapy.

Do you have one to share? Add it in the comments below.

Revisiting earthquake economics

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In the months since the Haiti earthquake, tent cities have sprung up in Port-au-Prince. Frontline and NPR’s Planet Money report on the communities that have developed out of economic necessity.

Planet Money’s Adam Davidson in Haiti:

Beyond housing, various industries are also having to adjust to the new economy in Haiti. Miami Herald and WLRN reporter Niala Boodhoo visited a rum distillery, a cocoa farm, and a microfinance organization to find out how the country’s production has changed.

Boodhoo joined The Takeaway for a chat about her findings in Haiti, including the food crisis and the issue of remittances – monies sent from families abroad to help their families in Haiti.

I think the immediate problem for a lot of people is food. You have a country where 2/3 of the labor force is engaged in agriculture but is still producing less than half the food that’s needed in the country.

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Shorting out

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This month’s Vanity Fair magazine was devoted to money – specifically those who benefited from the financial fallout and where they are now. How’s all that financial reform coming?

WAMU’s Diane Rehm spoke with journalist Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short and a Vanity Fair contributor, who wrote about bankers who earned huge windfalls from lofty investments during the recession.

Lewis told an audience last week:

“I was walking into a story that was very heavy, and in explaining the financial crisis, I was going to have readers wading through stuff that they wouldn’t really understand,” Lewis said. “There were a handful of people who had foreseen the crisis coming. It was a very small universe. They didn’t know each other. I tried to meet every one of them … Then I picked people from this universe who could tell the story.

At the major banks, cutting salaries was the public-facing way of showing that living off the financial woes of the rest of the country was going to have to change. Marketplace reports that while executive salaries at the major banks were cut by about 15 percent this year, that hasn’t been steep enough to force the people who were benefiting the most from shady deals out of those jobs.

Namely that about 85 percent of the individuals who had their pay set are still at their desk working for these very five same companies. This is strong evidence that the pay determinations are not resulting in some sort of brain drain from these companies.

To Wall Street’s chagrin, the Obama administration is looking at Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard bankruptcy expert and critic of the financial industry to head a new consumer protection agency.

The Senate Finance Committee is also responding to fears about soaring executive pay and irresponsible lending (by analyzing how banks and the risk they assume are regulated. NewsHour reports on the GOP side of that debate.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala: “…we’re all consumers. We don’t want anybody exploited in this country. Some — the states regulate a lot of things today. Will the federal government regulate them in the future? We’re not sure yet. But the main thing is to create a level playing field for all consumers.”

Despite regulation efforts, there’s still a lot of resentment out there. EconomyBeat.org shares a messy sentiment – literally a pile of dirt left in the lobby of major bank JP Morgan Chase – from the blog I Ought to be Working.

Milestone

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The House passed health care reform late last night. What will the new legislation mean to you? What are the biggest myths surrounding the bill and what do you need to know to take advantage of the upcoming laws? Last September we looked at how much of the economy is really spent on health care. Now that a bill has passed, how will those funds shift and how will health care reform change your costs?

PBS NewsHour breaks down the basics:

The legislation will require nearly every American to carry health insurance starting in 2014 and will impose a penalty fee on those who don’t. It will set up a series of state-based insurance exchange marketplaces where people who do not have access to employer-based insurance will be able to shop for plans, and will also offer new tax subsidies to make that insurance more affordable for millions of Americans who earn up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

It will also impose new regulations on the insurance industry, including barring insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on pre-existing conditions, and barring companies from using technicalities to drop customers who become ill.

Many of the bill’s provisions, such as the insurance exchange marketplaces and new subsidies, won’t go into effect until 2014. But some of the new insurance regulations will begin this year, such as a provision that allows young adults up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ plans.

Want to discuss the bill with your friends and colleagues but don’t know where to begin? PolitiFact lists the top ten facts about health care reform and dispels some pervasive myths.

The government will not take over hospitals or other privately run health care businesses. Doctors will not become government employees, like in Britain. And the U.S. government intends to help people buy insurance from private insurance companies, not pay all the bills like the single-payer system in Canada.

So what will happen? Kaiser Health News provides a consumers’ guide to health reform, detailing when various provisions will take effect and answering pressing questions about how health insurance affordability will change and what types of insurance will be available.

WNYC’s The Takeaway spoke with health care professionals and small business owners about how the changes in health care reform will affect them.

“I’m hoping that by adding 32 million people to the insurance pool that premiums will eventually come down by bending the cost curve,” John Brown, VP of Brown Furniture Company, told The Takeaway.

For more on how health care reform could change your coverage, check out this New York Times “choose your own adventure”-style interactive and follow your health care options through the bill.

You can also add a question about health care for Capitol News Connection’s reporters to ask on the Hill.

If you have a health care story or thoughts on how reform could help or hurt your current situation that you’d like to share with EconomyStory, please add it in the comments below. We’ll be featuring stories from readers during the coming weeks.

Down for the count

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The census only happens once every 10 years, and the information it brings in can change how local areas are represented in Congress and in turn the federal dollars they receive. So as forms get sent out across the country, let’s take a look at how census dollars impact communities and how some areas are getting the word out to make sure they don’t miss out on funding opportunities.

In Edgecombe County, North Carolina missing out on being counted is exactly what happened during the 2000 census and it’s affected the area ever since. NewsHour and Patchwork Nation report:

Flooding from Hurricane Floyd put 40 percent of Edgecombe under water and forced thousands of people from their homes and into temporary housing only about 5 months before the Census began.

As a result, Edgecombe County leaders say many residents were missed in the 2000 count. In a county that’s been suffering through high unemployment and other economic malaise for more than 15 years, missing parts of the population in the Census–and the millions of federal dollars that could cost–is a major thing.

Beyond the data collected and the state funds that will be distributed as a result, another real-time effect of the census is new jobs right now. There are thousands of opportunities for temporary work as a census collector, but even with high unemployment rates, finding bilingual workers is a challenge, the Wall Street Journal found:

In Texas, the Census is still looking for 25,000 applicants from so-called hard-to-count communities—population groups that have low participation rates in the Census due to language or cultural barriers and educational gaps, among other factors.

In Los Angeles, Voto Latino has come up with some creative solutions to reach out to immigrant communities, NPR reports:

One of Voto Latino’s strategies was to develop a new mobile phone application to be used in Los Angeles County. Users download it, learn about the census and then take a quiz on what they’ve learned….
“The reason we’re starting to use this mobile online piece of it is that we found that 25 percent of iPhone users are of Latino decent,” says Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino’s executive director. She adds that most of them are young.

People living in rural areas and transient populations, like students, are also hard to find and account for. WPSU in Central Pennsylvania has both, and lost two Congressional seats after the 2000 census as a result. This time around, the state is hoping to reverse that.

How did the census come to be? This video is one of the most comprehensive I’ve seen on census history, so watch and learn about the history of the census from 1790 through 2000.