Chicago Reporter (https://www.chicagoreporter.com/tag/affordable-care-act/)
As officials revisit one of Rahm Emanuel’s most controversial policies, providers have different ideas for how to restore care to the many patients who have fallen through the cracks.
With the GOP threatening health care coverage, especially for Medicaid recipients, activists are demanding answers from local lawmakers who are quietly supporting the bills.
The mayor’s advice for his party to “take a chill pill” obscures his record and demonstrates his complete disconnect to the current political climate.
Here’s a roundup of how the Trump administration’s stated policy goals would interact with local laws on immigrant and religious protections, healthcare, housing, education and law enforcement.
A City of Chicago health care subsidy for retirees is being phased out at the same time as President-elect Donald Trump seeks to repeal Obamacare.
Local grassroots activists say the presidential election heightens the need to align causes between groups fighting against oppressive economic and social systems.
About 1million Chicagoans live in a ‘pharmacy desert,’ and underserved residents in many South and West Side neighborhoods could stay sick longer without better access.
On the eve of the second enrollment period for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, there is good news, bad news and still many unknowns about the federal law’s impact. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation, widely known as “Obamacare,” into law with the goal of improving access to health care for millions of Americans. State and federal officials began working toward that goal in earnest in October 2013, when Americans could begin signing up for health insurance, for the first time, on the marketplaces created by the law. But one year later, we don’t know exactly how many uninsured Americans signed up for health insurance and, more importantly, who is still without coverage. The good news: Rates of uninsured people have dropped in every state.
Two years after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel shut down half of the city’s mental health clinics, the Mental Health Movement is charging that the city “is sabotaging its remaining services by refusing to serve people getting health benefits through the Affordable Care Act.” Tens of thousands of Chicagoans signed up for CountyCare, Cook County’s early rollout of ACA’s Medicaid expansion, but the city chose not to join the CountyCare network. A health department spokesman told the Tribune last month that current clients who enroll in Medicaid will be able to keep seeing their therapists. But a clinic staff member told me recently he’d been instructed not to accept CountyCare enrollees as new patients and to transfer patients who joined CountyCare to private providers. “The city is pushing people out and they’re not following up to see if they are getting care,” said N’Dana Carter of the MHM.
Eight in 10 uninsured Latinos qualify for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Chicago metropolitan area has among the highest concentration of uninsured Latinos in the nation, with nearly six in 10. There are about 288,000 uninsured Latinos in the city. Many of these Latinos could have some type of coverage under the Medicaid expansion and the health insurance market, which started last month as part of the Affordable Care Act.
A third of uninsured Latinos — or about 3 million — are eligible for state-expanded Medicaid. Twenty-five states have opted out of the plan.