When President Obama came into office our nation was losing 750,000 jobs a month, and the President took difficult steps to help save our economy and stave off a second Great Depression.  While some of those steps weren’t popular, they were the right thing to do for our recovery: our country has now added private sector jobs for eight straight months and growth is back in positive territory.

Still, the turnaround hasn’t happened fast enough. Main Street businesses are not yet back to firing on all cylinders, and too many Americans remain out of work.  

That’s why yesterday, the President unveiled a targeted set of proposals to continue our economic recovery and promote growth.  One of these proposals will allow companies to fully deduct qualified capital investments through the end of 2011, and represents the largest temporary investment incentive in American history. 
 
Here’s how it works. Today, if you own a business and buy a $10 million piece of equipment for your factory, your accountants predict how long that piece of equipment will last. In this case, let’s say it’s 10 years. Every year, that piece of equipment depreciates in value, and as the business owner, you get to write off that loss, in small increments, every year for the next 10 years.

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En español.

Join Department of Health & Human Services officials for a live webchat from the White House this Thursday at 2:30 PM ET (11:30 AM PT) to introduce CuidadoDeSalud.Gov, the first website in Spanish of its kind to help consumers take control of their health care, and to take questions from readers of some of the most important Hispanic internet websites in the country about how new changes under the Affordable Care Act affect the Latino community.

HHS officials will be joined on the chat by representatives from Univision.com’s health portal, Hola Doctor, and Dr. Aliza’s VidaYSalud.com. Consistent with the mandate in the Affordable Care Act, CuidadodeSalud.Gov is the partner site of HealthCare.gov and is the first website in Spanish to provide consumers with both public and private health coverage options tailored specifically for their needs in a single, easy-to-use tool.

Join us at 2:30 PM ET (11:30 AM PT) Thursday, at WhiteHouse.gov/live.

Luis Miranda is Director of Hispanic Media

The CMS Office of the Actuary (OACT) released an update today regarding their annual National Health Expenditures report.  The Office of the Actuary does a report on National Health expenditures annually every March.  This year, when they put out their report, they indicated that Congress was poised to enact the health reform law and that they intended to publish an update after they had reviewed the law.  This is that update.  It is consistent with OACT’s earlier analysis of the law that was submitted to Congress by Rick Foster of the Office of the Actuary in April. 

Today’s report by the Office of the Actuary confirms a central point of the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama:  The Act will make health care more affordable for Americans. In fact, the Actuary’s report indicates that total health care spending per insured American will be more than $1000 lower thanks to the provisions of the new law than it would have been if Congress and the President had not acted.

Specifically, by 2019, overall health spending per insured person will average $14,720 instead of the $16,120 projected by the Actuary before the Act was enacted into law.  This is great news for many Americans.  More good news for American consumers:  The Actuary predicts out of pocket spending on health care services per person will decline an average of 6% to $1,310, a savings of $80 per person per year.  This means more money in people’s pockets.

Finally, the Actuary’s report confirms that 33 million Americans who are living without health insurance today will gain coverage.  While this will result in a short-term increase in spending (as uninsured people begin to receive the care they have postponed or gone without), the rate of growth in spending will slow in the second half of this decade. A close look at this report’s data suggest that for average Americans, the Affordable Care Act will live up to its promise.
 

Nancy-Ann DeParle is the Director of the White House Office of Health Reform

We all understand the impact the foreclosure crisis has had on homeowners. But the crisis has hurt communities, too. Foreclosed and vacant homes have a debilitating effect on neighborhoods and often lead to blight, neighborhood decay and reduced property values.

That’s why the Administration is announcing today another $1 billion to help communities struggling with foreclosures.  Already, HUD has provided $6 billion in two rounds of Neighborhood Stabilization Program funding.  These funds help communities buy and redevelop foreclosed and abandoned homes and residential properties – putting Americans back to work, creating more affordable rental housing and helping the neighborhoods that need it most. 

Today, the $4 billion first round of Neighborhood Stabilization funding is in communities, buying up and renovating homes, and creating jobs.  The $2 billion included as part of President Obama’s Recovery Act is making a difference as well.  This second round of funding differed from the first in that it was competitively awarded – to encourage innovative local partnerships, reward the best ideas for tackling the housing crisis and grow local economies in impactful ways.

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Click here to see the video.

This afternoon the President was in Cleveland, Ohio, the city where House Republican Leader Boehner recently put forth his party’s priorities for the economy.  In his remarks,  the President laid out a stark contrast between policies that help the economy work for the middle class, and the policies that allowed special interests to run amok -- and to run our economy into a ditch.  He spoke about the need to strengthen our recovery in both the short and long terms by investing in America’s roads, bridges and runways, by helping small businesses grow and hire, and by giving certainty to businesses through a permanent incentive to innovate and create good jobs in America in the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit.

But before all that he talked about the foundation of the values that guide his decisions:

Yes, our families believed in the American values of self-reliance and individual responsibility, and they instilled those values in their children.  But they also believed in a country that rewards responsibility.  A country that rewards hard work.  A country built upon the promise of opportunity and upward mobility.   

They believed in an America that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college because of the GI Bill.  An America that gave my grandparents the chance to buy a home because of the Federal Housing Authority.  An America that gave their children and grandchildren the chance to fulfill our dreams thanks to college loans and college scholarships.

It was an America where you didn’t buy things you couldn’t afford; where we didn’t just think about today – we thought about tomorrow.  An America that took pride in the goods it made, not just in the things it consumed.  An America where a rising tide really did lift all boats, from the company CEO to the guy on the assembly line.

That’s the America I believe in.  That’s what led me to work in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant on the South Side of Chicago when I was a community organizer.  It’s what led me to fight for factory workers at manufacturing plants that were closing across Illinois when I was a Senator.  It’s what led me to run for President – because I don’t believe we can have a strong and growing economy without a strong and growing middle-class. 

The audience listens as President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy at Cuyahoga Community College in Parma, Ohio

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En español.

Today, an op-ed from President Obama is running in major Spanish-language newspapers across the country. The op-ed discusses the benefits of the Affordable Care Act for Latinos and announces the release of a new Spanish-language version of HealthCare.gov – www.CuidadoDeSalud.gov.

The op-ed is running in ImpreMedia’s print publications (including La Opinión in Los Angeles and El Diario La Prensa in New York) and online properties, all of which have a monthly reach of 9.3 million adults and monthly distribution of nearly 11 million.

As the President notes in his op-ed:

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Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that some health insurance companies are blaming the Affordable Care Act for premium increases that were planned long before the law was passed. We knew this would happen, which is why the President called on insurance companies not to use the Affordable Care Act as an excuse to implement unreasonable premium increases. In fact, when one insurance company in the State of Washington was called out for telling its beneficiaries that rate increases were due to the Affordable Care Act, that company agreed to issue a new letter clarifying the reasons for the increase.

The premium increases discussed today – many of which were planned before the Affordable Care Act was even signed into law– demonstrate that reform came at a critical time.  In fact, consumers have faced unreasonable double digit premium increases for more than a decade, including employer-sponsored plans where premiums have more than doubled since 2000. 

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It is disturbing but unfortunately not surprising that an entire political party would rally together to hold tax relief for middle class families hostage as leverage to push through tax cuts for the very richest Americans -- people who don’t need them and haven’t even asked for them. But that is apparently exactly what Republican Minority Leader John Boehner is trying to do.

Even as the Republican Party has tried to shed its dismal record on fiscal discipline, they have been consistent and unwavering in their attempts to borrow more than $700 billion to support permanent tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. But giving an average $100,000 tax break to those making over $1,000,000 a year when we can’t afford them and they don’t need them is not sound economic policy.

The latest trick from Republican Minority Leader John Boehner says a lot about Republican priorities and strategy – and seems like an obvious recognition of just how irresponsible their position is. 

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