Can states ignore 'Obamacare'?
Why all the drama about "Obamacare" if states can just refuse to implement the program, as Gov. Rick Scott has threatened to do? Can Scott really do that?
In its decision late last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA), which is widely known as Obamacare, including the mandate that an individual must buy insurance. Chief Justice John Roberts, the deciding vote, said the mandate was legal if viewed as a tax.
The decision makes the ACA the law of the land, and individual states cannot choose to disregard the law.
But the law does include a couple of optional provisions that Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott, and some other governors who oppose the law, say they will refuse to implement:
The Medicaid expansion. The bill called for an expansion of the current Medicaid program, which exists to help low-income people. Medicaid gets money from the federal government but is managed and partly paid for by the states.
ACA called for an expansion of the current Medicaid coverage, with the federal government initially paying 100 percent of the new costs, then falling to 90 percent after three years. Under the ACA, states that did not go along with the expansion would lose all Medicaid funding.
But the court ruled that the government could not withdraw all Medicaid funding from a state that did not wish to expand the system.
Insurance exchanges. ACA calls for insurance exchanges to be set up in every state by 2014 to offer options for health insurance providers and to certify plans that help consumers better understand those options.
In states that do not participate in setting up exchanges, the federal government will step in and do it.
What does a bus monitor do?
Regarding the lady on the school bus being taunted by young boys, what was she supposed to be doing on the bus?
A bus monitor in the Greece (N.Y.) Central School District is tasked with several duties, according to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: maintaining order, enforcing district policy governing student behavior and reporting instances of "continuing disruptive student behavior" verbally and in writing.
Karen H. Klein, a 68-year-old grandmother from Rochester, drove a bus for 20 years before becoming a bus monitor three years ago. A 10-minute cellphone video of her enduring profane taunting from four seventh-graders went viral. She didn't report the behavior, and school officials learned of it after the video was posted online.
Klein has received more than $675,000 in donations contributed to indiegogo.com, which a Toronto man set up to raise money to send her on a vacation.
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