Hopefully the end of this pathetic saga… And these clowns will get on with fixing the problems they caused in Obamacare trying to insert poison pills when the first Bill was passed.
The reality that the GOP can’t overturn Obamacare is beginning to set in
Inside Congress and the White House, Republicans are beginning to admit that they’re not likely to be able to pass even a pared-down repeal of the Affordable Care Act, despite months of trying. The conclusion is one that many Republicans in Washington have long privately realized but not publicly discussed much.
As the prospects for the Senate GOP’s Better Care Reconciliation Act have continued to worsen, however, Republicans are openly discussing the idea that they may never be able to agree on a repeal of Obamcare. And it’s an idea that even President Donald Trump is considering.
Trump seemed to play good cop in a Monday morning tweet urging the congressional GOP to do something — anything, really — about health care.
Trump’s statement comes after Congressional leaders had all but given up on the idea that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed and replaced — or even just repealed.
“Clearly, the draft plan is dead,”Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Is the serious rewrite plan dead? I don’t know.” He added, “we don’t know what the plan is” in terms of what comes next for the Senate Republicans.
Cassidy’s morbid terminology was echoed by Arizona Sen. John McCain as he pronounced the bill’s prospects terminal during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“I think my view is it’s probably going to be dead,” McCain said.
The Trump White House also appears to be coming to this realization as well. During a Sunday interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin explicitly stated that the administration is getting ready to focus attention on something else.
“If we don’t get this passed then the president as he said will go to the next plan,” he told host George Stephanopoulos.
Mnuchin even appeared to endorse a proposed modification to the bill sponsored by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz that would allow insurance companies to offer plans for sale that are not compliant with Affordable Care Act regulations, provided they also offer at least one plan that is.
“I’m very hopeful that his plan and his changes will get supported. And I think we’d like to get health care done,” Mnuchin said.
Cruz’s idea has come under criticism from more moderate Republicans because they believe it will lead to many companies pricing out older and sicker customers.
Should Republicans decide to punt on health care or work with Democrats (as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been repeatedly threatening his caucus), it may not matter much with their core base of voters.
In a poll released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation, just 8 percent of self-identified Republicans said that repealing Obamacare should be elected officials’ top priority. Support for the GOP health care bill had fallen to just 55 percent among Republicans in the survey.
It is very hard for a government to take away a “right” already granted.
When you look at Revolutions in Third World countries, you find some common themes. The Governments of those dictatorships or quasi-dictatorships are controlled by a group representing the interests of a small minority of the population, typically the wealthy. The Government uses increasingly Draconian measures to force the population’s compliance. Here in America, Republicans are doing just that. Examples of those measures to suppress dissent include laws in several state which allow Chumph supporters to run down and murder protesters, and an attempt by Republicans in some states (including DC, which the Republican majority House now controls) to criminalize dissent though the abuse of felony laws to punish protesters for nonviolent protest.
When you start locking up your detractors in prisons…you have paved the way for violent revolution. When facing a felony conviction or death for waiving a sign on the public streets – there is very little difference in the punishment for blowing up buildings. The white-wing Republican government in America isn’t far from that line.
The Trump(don’t)care legislation is another example of abuse of the majority for the benefit of the rich. A lot of those folks who will be getting abused voted Republican. While the Second Amendment whackos are too consumed by racism to care…There are a lot of poor Republican Soccer Moms and caretakers of the sick and elderly out there who do.
Democrats have one chance to get this right. They need to do smething to stop this steamroller besides pretty speches.
Feelings are running high over the Obamacare repeal and replace vote. Republicans are getting confronted by angry voters at town halls, and some are even seeing that rage spill over to the streets. In Tennessee, one woman was so angry at a lawmaker’s vote in favor of the health care bill that she tried to run him off the road, according to police.
After Rep. David Kustoff visited the University of Tennessee at Martin on Monday, Wendi Wright started tailing his car. Wright was so aggressive while driving that at one point the lawmaker and those in the car with him were “in fear of being forced off” the road, the Weakley County Sheriff’s Department said. So they decided to change course and go to a friend’s house that was nearby. Wright got out of her car and confronted the lawmaker.
Wright reportedly started screaming, and hit the windows of Kustoff’s vehicle, even reaching inside at one point. She briefly blocked the car from leaving until she got out of there once cops were called. Authorities arrested her later when she wrote about the incident on Facebook. At first authorities tried to get her side of the story but she refused to cooperate. “That left us with no other choice but to issue an arrest warrant for her and take her into custody,” a sheriff’s department official said.
Wright was charged with felony reckless endangerment and freed on a $1,000 bond. She is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday.
If the Senate fails to substantially improve the Healthcare Bill passed by the Republicans…We could see a “revolution” in this country in 2018 when Red state white America realizes just how badly fucked they are by their hero Chumph and the Republican Party.
Added this one under “The New Jim Crow” as obviously poor minorities will bear a larger burden from this.
Repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a pathetically flawed Trumpcare is Dead on Arrival as the sponsors are forced again to cancel the House vote.
Donald Trump announced Friday that the House of Representatives would postpone a planned vote on the American Health Care Act, the Republican bill to repeal Obamacare.
The news was first reported by Robert Costa of the Washington Post, who spoke to the president directly.
The announcement came while a debate over the bill was still playing out in the House chamber, with GOP leaders realizing they lacked the votes to prevail.
It was not immediately clear when Congress plans to resume consideration of repeal ― or whether it will do so at all.
The postponement is a devastating defeat for Trump and Ryan, and a major setback in the crusade against Obamacare that has defined Republican Party politics for seven years.
House Republican leaders abruptly pulled a Republican rewrite of the nation’s health-care system from consideration on Friday, a dramatic acknowledgment that they are so far unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“We just pulled it,” President Trump told the Washington Post in a telephone interview.
The decision came a day after President Trump delivered an ultimatum to lawmakers – and the defeat represented multiple failures for the new president and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).
The decision means the Affordable Care Act remains in place, at least for now, and a major GOP campaign promise goes unfulfilled. The decision also casts doubt on the GOP’s ability to govern and to advance other high-stakes agenda items, including tax reform and infrastructure spending. Ryan is still without a signature achievement as speaker – and the defeat undermines Trump’s image as a skilled dealmaker willing to strike compromises to push his agenda forward.
The Chumph can’t tell the truth and he can’t lead.
The House plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would hit one group of voters especially hard: older, rural voters who were crucial to President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.
The House plan would offer tax credits based on income and age, but the net effect would be a drop in federal subsidies for people who are older, who have a lower income and who live in high-premium areas, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. When you put those elements together, Trump’s voters appear to take the biggest hits.
Older voters were a big part of Trump’s winning 2016 coalition. He won 52 percent of the vote among all voters 45 or older.
A county-level analysis from KFF looked at how the tax credits for various age and income groups in the House plan compared to the subsidies offered by the Affordable Care Act. When you compare those numbers to the 2016 election results, a pattern emerges. Counties that voted for Trump would see a bigger drop in the tax credits designed to make insurance premiums more affordable.
Take, for example, a 60-year-old individual with an income of $40,000 and a mid-level health insurance plan. A person falling into that category would see a decline in their federal tax credit in 93 percent of the counties that voted for Trump. That same person would see a decline in subsidies in 81 percent of the counties that voted for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The size of the decline would be steeper in Trump counties, as well. The median county decline in assistance would be $4,190. Among Clinton counties, the median decline would be $2,280.
Even among younger individuals, counties that voted for Trump are more likely to see a decrease in aid with the tax credits in the new House healthcare plan. The subsidy would decline among 40-year-olds with incomes of $40,000 a year in 16 percent of Trump counties. They would decline in only 9 percent of Clinton counties.
One big force driving these differences is higher premiums in Trump counties, which tend to be more rural. Rural communities tend to have fewer insurers, less competition and higher rates.
The tax credits proposed in the House bill are flat, meaning that a 60-year-old earning $40,000 would get the same tax credit regardless of where he or she lives — $4,000.
Under the Affordable Care Act, subsidies are determined by a formula that considers income and the local cost of coverage. That can make a real difference, particularly for those living in swing states.
In Las Vegas, that same 60-year-old would qualify for an annual federal subsidy of $4,380, according to the KFF report. But in rural Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, the available federal subsidy is $11,150.
The net impact: In Northumberland, where Trump won 69 percent of the vote, that 60-year-old could be paying $7,150 more for health insurance under the new House Bill. In Clark County, Nevada (home of Las Vegas), which Hillary Clinton won with 52 percent of the vote, the same person would pay $380 more.
The numbers hold a special significance because many of Trump’s voters pointedly opposed the ACA and pushed for its repeal. Throughout the campaign and after his win, Trump promised that the Republican replacement for President Obama’s signature legislation would be better, less expensive, and provide “insurance for everybody.”
The numbers in the KFF analysis show the political promise and peril in the House plan for the places that were most strongly behind Trump. Under the House plan, many of those voters may get the repeal they sought, but higher costs would come as part of the deal.
The natives are definitely getting restless with the cover-up of Chumph Treason and numerous illegal acts by Republicans in Congress. Perhaps enough white folks are getting pissed off that it may prove difficult to get reelected in even those scientifically tailored Gerrymandered white-wing districts?
On Friday morning, congressional aides for three key Georgia Republicans — U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Johnny Isakson, and Rep. Jody Hice — fled what was billed as a constituents services meeting after getting booed by protesters.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the aides to the lawmakers were overwhelmed when they saw dozens of protesters who were eager to make their voices heard on repealing Obamacare and other key issues.
“About a half-dozen congressional aides briefly addressed the crowd, telling them the event was not a town hall and they would take no questions from the floor,” the AJCreports. “They left after crowd members chanted ‘shame, shame, shame.’”
Hundreds of angry Utah residents packed a town hall hosted by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) — who hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for performing his oversight duties over the White House — and chanted “do your job.”
About 1,500 more people waited outside Brighton High School, holding signs that echoed the chants inside, along with others that read, “America is better than this,” reported The Salt Lake Tribune.
The hostile crowd of about 1,000 people, which the newspaper described as mostly political opponents of the Republican lawmaker, roared “explain yourself” at Chaffetz — and frequently interrupted to express their disapproval at his answers.
“If you want me to answer the question, give me more than five seconds to do it,” Chaffetz said at one point.
Attendees arrived early to get into the event, which they complained the GOP lawmaker had deliberately scheduled at a small venue to limit the pushback he expected to face.
Chaffetz addressed 13 questions, the newspaper reported.
Three of those focused on public lands and four on investigating President Donald Trump in the lawmaker’s role as chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
The other questions covered Planned Parenthood, air quality and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
According to news reports, Chaffetz met Tuesday with Trump and Reince Priebus, his White House chief of staff, and the president strongly cautioned the lawmaker against probing his actions as chief executive.
“Before my bum even hit the chair,” the president said no oversight; you can’t talk about anything that has to do with oversight and I said, ‘fair enough,” Chaffetz said, according to the Washington Examiner.
Chaffetz claimed the president encouraged him to investigate anything he wanted when they met a month earlier at the annual Republican retreat in Philadelphia.
The lawmaker said he was looking into comments made by Kellyanne Conway, the president’s senior advisor, who promoted clothing sold by Ivanka Trump during a Fox News interview.
“There’s no case to be made that we went soft on the White House,” Chaffetz told his constituents. “In terms of doing my job, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”
One constituent, a woman from Salt Lake City, read Chaffetz’s own words back at him, when he called on all the presidential candidates to release their tax returns — which Trump still refuses to do.
“I’m asking you to explain what your timeline is to uphold your word or why there is a reluctance to do so,” said the woman, Melissa Batka Thomas.
Chaffetz told the woman the president was “exempt” from conflict of interest laws, which he has said before.
“Until there is evidence that he has somehow overused that to ingratiate his family …” Chaffetz said, but he was drowned out in a shower of boos.
Back during the late Bush and early Clinton Administrations I owned a Government consulting company which develop specialized software for a variety of systems and computer platforms. we developed systems either directly for Government Agencies or for Prime Contractors who had contracts with the Government.
Every President comes to Washington with a list of things to do. Many of those things can be implemented within the vast Federal Systems he directly controls without Congress’ approval through the passage of laws. Things like improving the system which take care of veterans, or the procedures to assist home buyers. In some cases improving how these programs work involves upgrading the computer systems which make them go.
when President Clinton came to town, Republicans had controlled the Federal apparatus for 12 years. The vast majority of the positions which are politically appointed were held by Republicans. There is a level under the appointed officeholders called the Senior Executive Service, which is not supposed to be political. It is made up of Senior professional managers who are the folks who really make things function in the Federal Government. They work under whoever is President and typically make careers out of Federal Service. Some of these people are promoted from careers within the Government. With the pay for these position tied to the commercial market, many come from the commercial industry side to work for the Government.
Historically, while the selection process for these jobs is blind, when Republicans hold power they try and recruit fellow Republicans to make the jump. Ditto for the Democrats. which during the GW Bush Administration opened the door to outright politicization of these jobs through manipulating, and outright breaking the system. This assured that many of those jobs were taken by Bush sycophants…
During the Clinton Administration I witnessed many of the Bush/Raygun holdovers working to throw a monkey wrench in many of Clinton’s signature programs.
Obama, trying to appear magnanimous refused to flugh he Bushit filled toilet when he gained office.
Anyone who has worked with computers knows that the technology is exacting. It really doesn’t take much to make a million lines of code useless. A program can fail because of one single line of code being in error. Google spent many years and millions of dollars to make their search engine be able to handle common misspellings. The engines before Google were literal. If you searched for cheeese, you got only those results with the same typo.
Suggesting the reason the Obamacare programs failed so badly…
Was an inside job.
It would be nice if our computer whizzes at the NSA took a look at that instead of spending all their time snooping on everyone’s telephone.
To the undisputed reasons for Obamacare’s rocky rollout — a balky website, muddied White House messaging and sudden sticker shock for individuals forced to buy more expensive health insurance — add a less acknowledged cause: calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step.
That may sound like a left-wing conspiracy theory — and the Obama administration itself is so busy defending the indefensible early failings of its signature program that it has barely tried to make this case. But there is a strong factual basis for such a charge.
From the moment the bill was introduced, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress announced their intention to kill it. Republican troops pressed this cause all the way to the Supreme Court — which upheld the law, but weakened a key part of it by giving states the option to reject an expansion of Medicaid. The GOP faithful then kept up their crusade past the president’s reelection, in a pattern of “massive resistance” not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
The opposition was strategic from the start: Derail President Barack Obama’s biggest ambition, and derail Obama himself. Party leaders enforced discipline, withholding any support for the new law — which passed with only Democratic votes, thus undermining its acceptance. Partisan divisions also meant that Democrats could not pass legislation smoothing out some rough language in the draft bill that passed the Senate. That left the administration forced to fill far more gaps through regulation than it otherwise would have had to do, because attempts — usually routine — to re-open the bill for small changes could have led to wholesale debate in the Senate all over again.
But the bitter fight over passage was only the beginning of the war to stop Obamacare. Most Republican governors declined to create their own state insurance exchanges — an option inserted in the bill in the Senate to appeal to the classic conservative preference for local control — forcing the federal government to take at least partial responsibility for creating marketplaces serving 36 states — far more than ever intended.
Then congressional Republicans refused repeatedly to appropriate dedicated funds to do all that extra work, leaving the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to cobble together HealthCare.gov by redirecting funds from existing programs. On top of that, nearly half of the states declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal funds, as the law envisioned.
Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law. And congressional Republicans sent so many burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits gearing up to help consumers navigate the new system face-to-face that at least two such groups returned their federal grants and gave up the effort. When the White House let it be known last summer that it was in talks with the National Football League to enlist star athletes to help promote the law, the Senate’s top two Republicans sent the league an ominous letter wondering why it would “risk damaging its inclusive and apolitical brand.” The NFL backed off.
The drama culminated on the eve of the open enrollment date of Oct. 1. Congressional Republicans shut down the government, disrupting last-minute planning and limiting the administration’s political ability to prepare the public for the likelihood of potential problems, because it was in a last-ditch fight to defend the president’s biggest legislative accomplishment.
“I think my Republican colleagues forget that a lot of people are enrolling through state exchanges, rather than the federal exchange,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) noted last week. “And if it wasn’t for the fact that many Republican governors, including my own,” failed to set up state exchanges, “then we wouldn’t be putting so much burden on the federal system.”
In fact, putting an excessive burden on the federal government was the explicit aim of the law’s opponents. “Congress authorized no funds for federal ‘fallback’ exchanges,” the Tea Party Patriots website noted as long ago as last December. “So Washington may not be able to impose exchanges on states at all.” The group went on to suggest that since Washington was not equipped to handle so many state exchanges, “both financially and otherwise — this means the entire law could implode on itself.” …more
Emboldened by first Sen Paul Ryan, and then sen Ted Cruz committing political Hari Kari – Ben Carson is warming up that buckdance and Jockey Suit for a potential political run in 2016 a la Herman Cain.
Obamacare is “worse than slavery”?
An American black man really said that shit?
Was it worse than being a Jewish person in Auschwitz, Uncle Ben?
Methinks Uncle Ben has a “racial displacement” issue…
Now where did I put that damn “Lawn Jockey of the Year Award”?
It is really very simple. The essence of which is captured by the following three images…
The post-Raygun destruction of the American Middle Class not only means a loss in ages. Faced with ballooning medical costs driven by private insurers, companies have shifted payment of health coverage off the “benefits” list and onto the shoulders of the employee. Now, even your average college grad is only one illness away from poverty.
And then – there is Mom…
The biggest non-criminal racket in the world is care for the elderly in the US. Conservatives would have you believe it is “Death Taxes”, which is a crock designed to fool the stupid into believing that the $10,000 a month it will cost you to put Mom or Dad in a senior center is irrelevant. For most of the middle class anymore, there quite simply isn’t any intergenerational wealth being passed on because of this.
Let’s be very clear. There is going to be a war in America on this come next election cycle. It is going to get ugly, when folks wake up and see these images with their mother, their kids, or brother or sister…
Even Tea Bagger hog calls to racism against the black President doesn’t trump mom dying.
In a huge win for the American People the Supreme Court today decided that the ACA, called Obamacare by Republicans is Constitutional. This decision puts a major torpedo in the Conservative right wing scow, and has major implications in the Presidential race.
Sunrise over the Supreme Court. I doubt it is the dawn of a new era – but it is a small ray of hope.
The Supreme Court upheld President Obama’s health care law today in a splintered, complex opinion that gives Obama a major election-year victory.
Basically, the justices said that the individual mandate — the requirement that most Americans buy health insurance or pay a fine — is constitutional as a tax.
Chief Justice John Roberts — a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush — provided the key vote to preserve the landmark health care law, which figures to be a major issue in Obama’s re-election bid against Republican opponent Mitt Romney.
Obama is expected to comment on the decision within the next two hours.
The government had argued that Congress had the authority to pass the individual mandate as part of its power to regulate interstate commerce; the court disagreed with that analysis, but preserved the mandate because the fine amounts to a tax that is within Congress’ constitutional taxing powers.
The announcement will have a major impact on the nation’s health care system, the actions of both federal and state governments, and the course of the November presidential and congressional elections.
As lawyers examined the details of the various opinions, political analysts quickly predicted at least a short-term political boost for Obama.
Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said “you can hear the sigh of relief at the White House” over a big plus for Obama.
“It allows the president’s signature achievement to stand,” Brown said. “Since politics is the ultimate zero-sum game, what’s good for Obama is bad for Gov. Mitt Romney.”
Brown also noted that the ruling allows the Republican “to continue campaigning against the law and promising to repeal it.”
This is an absolutely brutal puncturing of the Republican/conservative balloon about Obamacare being un-Constitutional …
What this points out is that the conservative objection to Obamacare isn’t really about the Constitution. The 5 thugs in robes could give a damn about the “Original Intent” of the founders – and are on a path to force the country into a quasi-fascism.
A number of the FOunders, and signatories to the Constitution supported mandates... Including George Washington
The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court—Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy—cloak themselves in the myth that they are somehow channeling the wisdom and understanding of the Founding Fathers, the original intent that guided the drafting of the Constitution. I believe the premise of their argument is itself suspect: It is not clear to me how much weight should be given to non-textually based intent that is practically impossible to discern more than 200 years later. Most of the issues over which there is constitutional dispute today could not even have been envisioned when the document was drafted.
Even so, it would be an even better response to the conservative wing’s claim of perceived understanding of original intent to be able to refute their claims by showing them to be historically and indisputably wrong. So once again let’s venture into the world of the health care debate. The consensus view is that existing Commerce Clause doctrine clearly authorizes the type of mandate passed in the act—see in particular the affirmance of the statute by ultraconservative Judge Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court.
Nonetheless, those opposing the bill insist that an individual mandate has never been done and the framers would simply not permit such an encroachment on liberty and freedom.
Some spectacular historical reporting by Professor Einer Elhauge of Harvard Law School in the New Republic thoroughly rebut the argument. He has found three mandate equivalents passed into law by the early Congresses—in which a significant number of founders served—and reports that these bills were signed into law by none other than Presidents George Washington and John Adams. As Founders go, one might consider them pretty senior in the hierarchy. Their acts can probably be relied upon to give us a reasonable idea what the Founders intended to be the scope of congressional and governmental power.
Amazingly, the examples of individual mandates passed by the founders are so directly applicable that the claim that original intent precludes affirming the heath care act should become almost laughable:
In 1790, a Congress including 20 Founders passed a law requiring that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. Washington signed it into law.
In 1792, another law signed by Washington required that all able-bodied men buy a firearm. (So much for the argument that Congress can’t force us to participate in commerce.)
And in 1798, a Congress with five framers passed a law requiring that all seamen buy hospital insurance for themselves. Adams signed this legislation.
In aggregate, these laws show that the Founders and the Congress of the time were willing to force all of us to participate in a particular act of commence and were comfortable requiring both the owner of a business and the individual employee to buy insurance in order to assure that health costs would be covered at a societal level. That is a pretty complete rebuttal to all the claims being made by the originalists as they relate to the health care act.
But what is so powerful about these historical finds is not just that they rebut the specific argument about original intent as applied to the health care act. This history lays bare the ahistorical nature of the justices’ claims at another and deeper level. For the types of bill passed in 1790, 1792, and 1798 show the Founders to have been doing exactly what congress did especially well in the era of FDR—–experimenting with solutions and approaches to resolving social issues in ways that made government part of creative problem solving.
These examples show the fallacy and the false rigidity that the originalists seek to impose on our government. In their effort to cabin and restrain the government—their ideology of the moment—they seek to have the benefit of the claim that the founders shared such a limited approach to governing. In fact, the approach to governing that these acts demonstrate is more nuanced and thoughtful. As with so many of the claims of the originalists, a slight understanding of the true history shows that the originalists’ view is mere ideology being imposed on a false understanding of history.
I’m categorizing this post under “The New Jim Crow”, because the lack of health care results in the deaths of tens of thousands of black babies due to lack of pre-natal or post-natal care in the first year of life…
Every year in the United States.
Put in any other terms – the lack of Health Care i the US is genocide.
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