Think you know everything there is to know about the federal Affordable Care Act after last week’s Supreme Court decision? That’s easy enough to find out. The Kaiser Family Foundation created a 10-question online quiz.
These are a few of the questions from the group:
—Will the new law require nearly all Americans to get health insurance by 2014 or risk a fine? (Yes.)
—Will the health reform law provide financial help to low and moderate income Americans who don’t get insurance through their jobs to help them purchase coverage? (No.)
In a poll following the ruling by the Supreme Court, which upheld most of the law, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 56 percent of voters said they would like to see opponents of the law stop trying to block its implementation. Eighty-two percent of Democrats said detractors should move on to other issues, compared to 51 percent of independent voters. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans said they want efforts to block the law to continue. The poll surveyed 1,239 voters June 29 and 30.
The New York Post reported this week that Senate Health Committee Chairman Kemp Hannon, R-Nassau County, said the issue of creating a health exchange, in particular Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive order creating one in New York, may have to be “revisited” to see if it is legal. All states are required to create and run health exchanges, which are marketplaces for individuals and businesses to purchase insurance. Senate Republicans opposed legislation to do that, which led to Cuomo’s executive order. Senate Minority Leader John Sampson, D-Brooklyn, critized Hannon’s remarks. The federal government will set up exchanges in states that don’t do it on their own.
The Kaiser Family Foundation also has an animated video that boils down the roughly 1,000-page law into a nine-minute presentation. The goal of the video, narrated by journalist Cokie Roberts, is to break through all the political rhetoric on the Affordable Care Act.
Here it is in Spanish, narrated by Isabel Gomez-Bassols, a national talk-show host on Spanish-language radio stations:
