As Washington debates whether the country should repeal the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, applicants are rushing to get covered, reportedly driving applications to a record high.
“I’m glad that the people understand the importance of getting coverage,” Donna Christensen, the former delegate for the U.S. Virgin Islands’ at-large district, told Cheddar on Wednesday.
But many still remain uninsured. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 28.2 million people under the age of 65 did not have coverage in 2016.
For context, that's a smaller proportion than before Obamacare passed. The federal agency said that the percentage of people uninsured now stands at 9 percent, compared to 16 percent in 2010.
Many uninsured and current beneficiaries of the Act worry that a repeal would be in place by 2019 and that time is running out. However, Christensen argues that this is not the case. She says it’s going to be very hard for Congress to repeal ACA.
“The Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land,” the ex-congresswoman said, stating that she doubts a repeal would ever happen.
“It was not easy to get the law passed, but it’s going to be more difficult to take it away,” Christensen said.
She encouraged the uninsured to seek coverage by December 15th this year, pointing out that benefits will be valid into the next year.
Congressional Budget Office director Keith Hall put out a blog post on the federal agency’s website on Wednesday. He says that according to the CBO’s most recent baseline, repealing Obamacare's individual mandate would reduce the nation’s federal budget deficit by $338 billion within the next decade. That's less than the previous estimate of $416 billion, made last December.
By midday Wednesday, the Dow had plunged roughly 500 points, before rebounding slightly, while the S&P and Nasdaq Indexes were also down.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday, October 2, 2019.
One man was shot in the chest with a live round by police in Hong Kong on Tuesday during widespread and violent protests that coincided with celebrations across China marking 70 years of the Communist state.
The current instability led the Geneva-based organization to cut its forecast for trade volume growth to just 1.2 percent in 2019, an over 50 percent drop from an earlier estimate.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the author of the pending Smithsonian Women's History Museum Act, told Cheddar that it's "difficult to empower women, if you don't even recognize them."
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.*
The latest tally represents about a 50 percent surge in illnesses and deaths since the CDC last took stock of the damage. As illnesses mount, regulators have stopped short of issuing a ban on vaping, recommending instead vape users abstain from vaping until the cause of the illness is identified.
The embattled Justice Department's top official, Attorney General William Barr, and the president's personal attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are now under a great deal more scrutiny.
The House of Representatives made history on Wednesday, passing landmark legislation that would protect U.S. banks that provide services to legitimate cannabis businesses in states where cannabis is legal.
As pressure mounts to detect and combat the spread of deepfakes, startups like Canny AI are embracing the technology and attempting to commercialize it.
