Congressman Allen West, along with anybody else up for election in November, is really ticked off about the U.S. Supreme Court's upholding the terrible progressive Marxist Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
West, however, is the only one calling it the "Patient Protection Unaffordable Tax Act (PPUTA)," which is a lazy acronym that is also pretty funny if you know Spanish. He tweeted Wednesday that it's a "tax law masquerading as a health care law," and a statement claims "the sad truth is this law does little to improve health care." In case you were thinking about believing him, here are six things PPACA does that improve health care that are, uh, improvements -- in case, you know, "poor people not dying from lack of care anymore" isn't good enough.
1. Insurers can't discriminate based on health status.
This one's different from the one that disallows coverage based on pre-existing conditions -- this prevents insurance companies from dropping you for things like acquired disabilities and actually requiring medical care instead of just paying premiums. Also no longer allowed: discrimination based on "evidence of insurability," which includes -- yes -- being denied coverage for prior domestic abuse. (Section 2703)
2. Poor people will have access to health care.
Already mentioned above, but it's important. If Florida wasn't gleefully opting out of the Medicaid provisions in the health-care law, Kaiser estimates an extra 683,000 Floridians would get insurance under the program -- and costs to the state would rise about 1.9 percent through 2019. Last week, Talking Points Memo found that the states that would see the greatest reductions in uninsured citizens were also the conservative states most likely to bail on the whole program. Is that not enough of a reason to like it? That sick people will get to go to the doctor? (Title II, Subtitle A)
