Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 114, No. 5, Ed. 1 Monday, August 7, 2017 Page: 4 of 16
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NATIONAL
4A
Monday, August 7, 2017
Denton Record-Chronicle
health care law role shifts
Trump’s
v
at the ready.
“We are going to hold HHS
accountable to fully implement
the law” said lawyer Mara You-
delman, who heads the Wash-
ington office of the National
Health Law Program, an advo-
cacy group. “The Affordable
Care Act is the law of the land,
and everyone who is working for
the administration should be
committed to upholding the law
of the land.”
Price so far has sent mixed
signals. His department recently
canceled contracts for commu-
nity groups to provide sign-up
assistance in 18 cities. His official
rhetoric about the law has been
harsh, maximizing its faults
without recognizing the health
benefits of 20 million more peo-
ple with insurance.
But the department did work
with Alaska on a waiver that’s
been praised for helping to sta-
bilize that state’s insurance mar-
ket. And early on, the agency is-
sued a regulation that made sev-
eral changes insurers had re-
quested to help things run more
smoothly.
Don’t overlook that
computer system
Few7 things w7ere as damag-
ing to Obama’s aura of cool com-
petence as the failure of Health-
Care.gov’s computer system
when it went live in the fall of
2013. Few7 people managed to
sign up that first day, and it took
w7eeks for a technological rescue
team to sort through layers of
problems, restoring acceptable
functionality.
After that chastening experi-
ence, Obama administration of-
ficials constantly kept tinkering
with the w7ebsite, trying to im-
prove its technical capacity and
usability7 for consumers.
It’s unclear w7hat the Trump
administration has been doing
since he took office in January.
No media preview7 of 2018 open
enrollment has been an-
nounced.
The administration may
have made its own job harder by
cutting in half the sign-up sea-
son for next year. This time,
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Associated Press
£
With
WASHINGTON
Republicans unable to advance
a health care bill in Congress,
President Donald Trump’s ad-
ministration may find itself in an
awkward role as caretaker of the
i
V
J
\
Affordable Care Act, which he
still promises to repeal and re-
place.
'
l
The Constitution says presi-
dents “shall take care that the
Jennifer Vashon, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife Division/AP
This tooth shown was extracted from bears that are harvest-
ed by hunters in Maine.
laws be faithfully executed.” So
as long as former President Ba-
rack Obama’s law is on the
books, that doesn’t seem to leave
much choice for Trump, even if
he considers the law to be “a di-
«
Rise in bear population
means thousands more
teeth to sort through
V
_
_
_
Alex Brandon/AP file photo
President Donald Trump speaks during an event about health
care July 24 in the Blue Room of the White House in Washing-
ton.
saster
“It’s either caretaker or un-
dertaker,” quipped economist
Joe Antos of the business-ori-
ented American Enterprise In-
stitute. “I think in the end it’s go-
ing to be caretaker’ because
they’ll finally realize nobody is
going to blame Obama. Having
the thing blow7 up is going to be
considered in the public eye to
be Trump’s fault.”
Every move by Trump’s
health chief will be scrutinized
by Democrats for evidence of
“sabotage,” a charge they’re al-
ready making. Meanwhile, the
administration will try to use its
rule-making power to bend
Obama’s law toward Republican
priorities.
The Trump administration’s
first sign-up season, for 2018
coverage, starts in about three
months, on Nov. L
Some things to watch for:
open enrollment will run from
Nov. 1 to Dec. 15. Previously, it
ran through Jan. 3L
Uncertainty over subsidies
The clearest signal Trump
could send of his administra-
tion’s good faith would be to re-
move the uncertainty around
billions of dollars in payments to
insurers. That money reimburs-
es the insurers for reducing co-
payments and deductibles for
people with modest incomes.
The “cost-sharing” subsidies
are called for in the health law,
but they are under a legal cloud
because of a lawsuit brought
earlier by House Republicans,
questioning whether the law in-
cluded a specific instruction for
the government to pay the mon-
ey. The case is on hold before a
federal appeals court; the ad-
ministration has continued
making monthly payments.
After the Senate’s GOP
health bill failed, the president
sent out a series of twreets in
which he seemed to threaten to
stop the payments.
“If a new7 Healthcare Bill is
not approved quickly, BAIL-
OUTS for Insurance Compa-
nies...will end very soon!” said
one of Trump’s Twitter messag-
gation. GOP leaders in Congress
w7ant the payments continued.
Without a subsidy guarantee
from Trump, some insurers have
been seeking double-digit pre-
mium increases, on top of raises
that reflect underlying medical
costs.
ratoiy in Manhattan, Montana,
which processes the most teeth
of any lab in America. The lab
contracts with state wildlife de-
partments and processed nearly
260.000 black bear teeth from
2009 to 2016, up from less than
220.000 from 2001to 2008, ac-
cording to data provided by Nis-
By Patrick Whittle
Associated Press
BRIDGTON, Maine - Car-
olyn Nistler is at the forefront of
a boom in a resource that plays a
key role in the management of
American wildlife: bear teeth.
Nistler, owner of a Montana
lab, and others are sorting
through a windfall of teeth taken
from American black bears,
which use their powerful jaws to
crush hazelnuts and chew7 salm-
on flesh. The growing popula-
tion of the bears in the United
States has scientists sorting
through thousands more teeth,
which are important to get a
handle on the health of Ameri-
ca’s bruins.
“Populations are growing,”
she said. “We’ve increased facil-
ities to accommodate so turn-
around time isn’t longer.”
States use bear teeth for re-
search about metrics such as
how7 old the animals w7ere at the
time they died, which can be an
indicator of how healthy bear
populations are. The teeth are
most often harvested from
bears killed by big game hunt-
ers, who seek the burly animals
for sport all over the country.
Some are also taken from road-
kill animals.
Nistler owns Matson’s Labo-
“This month-to-month un-
certainty is just corrosive,” said
former HHS Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius, who served in the Oba-
ma administration.
tier.
A growing bear population
has created more hunting op-
portunities, which leads in turn
to more bear teeth for research-
ers, Nistler said.
Indeed, the tooth boom
comes as the black bear popu-
lation is expanding in many
states, especially in East Coast
states like Maine, where the
population has grown from
30.000 in 2010 to more than
35.000 now according to state
wildlife managers. Bear popu-
lations are also growing in
Massachusetts, New Jersey
and elsewhere. Black bears live
in 41 states.
The nationwide population
was more than 400,000 in
2008, winch is most likely dou-
ble the population in 1900, and
it has expanded even more in
the last nine years, said Lynn
Rogers, a bear expert with the
North American Bear Center in
Ely, Minnesota.
Losing ground?
Obama’s law reduced the
U.S. uninsured rate to a historic
low7 of about 9 percent.
That w7as widely seen as an
indicator of progress under the
health overhaul, and one of the
main problems for the recent
Republican bills is that they
would have significantly in-
creased the number of unin-
sured people.
Amid confusion about the
future of the ACA, there are
signs that coverage is already be-
ginning to erode.
A major survey called the
Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being
Index recently estimated that
the number of adults without
health insurance grew by about
2 million this year.
What happens next is in the
hands of the Trump administra-
tion.
Intense scrutiny
Consumer
state officials, Democrats, insur-
ers, and groups representing
various health care interests will
keep close tabs on the actions of
Health and Human Services
Secretary Tom Price and Ms
deputy, Seema Verma, who runs
the federal agency that adminis-
ters health insurance programs.
Intimately familiar with
HealthCare.gov, former Obama
administration officials will be
looking over the shoulders of the
Trump team — Twitter accounts
organizations,
es.
Experts say the money is not
a bailout, but a government obli-
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 114, No. 5, Ed. 1 Monday, August 7, 2017, newspaper, August 7, 2017; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1131690/m1/4/: accessed June 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .