So does Trumpcare pass the house?

[boutons_deux]

The AHCA may be dead, but big insurance adored it — and they like Obamacare, too

But know this: They love it

Their fingerprints are all over what the Republicans are calling the American Health Care Act.

In fact, more than half of the big insurers’ revenues is now coming from the government, not the private sector. And they’re fine with that.

It gets rid of those pesky new rules on consumer protection

they smell an opportunity to get rid of most of those pesky new rules. Don’t think for a minute that the ACA’s regulations have been a big drag on profits. Even with those consumer protections, most insurance companies have reported record profits during the Obamacare years, and their investors are considerably richer.

The share price of the biggest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group, has increased more than 1,000 percent since the early days of the Obama administration.

It is a myth that the big for-profit insurers like the ones I worked for have an interest in providing all of us with access to affordable care. That would conflict with their top priority, which, as I quickly learned in my corporate job, is to “enhance shareholder value.”

It is also a myth that the for-profits are even still in the insurance business in a significant way.

Goodbye individual mandate, o insurance gap

Under the GOP plan, if there is a gap in your coverage of 63 days or longer, insurers can charge you 30 percent more when you reapply. This is the GOP/insurance industry stick to discourage people from going without insurance. The problem is that many people will go 63 days or longer without coverage because of a job loss.

Now you know why insurers haven’t joined doctors and hospitals and many others in condemning the American Health Care Act.

Overall, it would be a big win for health insurance companies, the big for-profits in particular.

And, of course, their top executives and shareholders. Too bad the House vote was canceled — again.

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/26/the-...e-too_partner/

[boutons_deux]

Republican Congressman fesses up that Trumpcare just a tax cut scheme

Charlie Dent's words on Trumpcare / tax cuts should be played in a loop

"Well, I am not going to deny that," Dent said. I listened very respectfully to what the President had to say. But my bottom line is this.

This discussion has been far too much about artificial timelines, arbitrary deadlines all to affect the baseline on tax reform.

This conversation should be more about the people whose lives are going to be impacted by our decisions on their health care.

We did not have enough of a substantive discussion.

I am holding up a plan from Republican governors, from expansion states like mine, Kasich, Snyder, Sandoval, Hutchinson.

They wanted to be part of this process.

They were not brought in.

I mean those kinds of issues are very important to me and to the people I represent and frankly to a lot of the members of Congress who are part of our Center Right group, The Tuesday Group.

We are very concerned about the Medicaid changes. I can hold my ground."

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/3/27/1647577/-Republican-Congressman-fesses-up-that-Trumpcare-just-a-tax-cut-scheme?detail=email&link_id=3&can_id=4217e8eb109c6 8bd0c2e4143dd2d8c15&source=email-cartoon-poor-trump-voter&email_referrer=cartoon-poor-trump-voter&email_subject=cartoon-poor-trump-voter

The RUSH to pass AHCA was a hope that people wouldn't find out had bad it was for them. And, above all, it was a $100Bs tax cut for the wealthy.

[boutons_deux]

The Real Reason Why Obamacare Now Has a 54%? Approval Rating

CNN had an eye opening story yesterday that’s been flying under the radar and really deserves to be given a lot more attention. In his article The cruel double standard that may have saved Obamacare, John Blake explores a very simple rationale for why Obamacare is suddenly gaining in popularity.

The face of Obamacare is now white.

More Americans now realize Obamacare helps millions of working class whites and that

it's not -- as once portrayed by conservatives -- a form of welfare pushed by the first black president to help people of color

, historians and scholars say.

The media landscape is filled with images of the furrowed brows of anxious white residents at congressional town halls who fear they will suffer if they lose Obamacare, says Judy Lubin, a sociologist and adjunct professor at Howard University in Washington.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/3...or-trump-voter

[RandomGuy]

I'm going to say yes, I think this piece of will get passed tomorrow.

I thought it would go through in the beginning as well, don't feel bad.

Until I head that the whackadoodle caucus was again'

[RandomGuy]

So how re ed is Trump, blaming the Democrats for not voting for his ty Trumpcare bill that had 17% approval? The Democrats must be loving how Dear Leader keeps highlighting how this horrific bill didn't get a single vote from their party. The DNC should use that in their commercials for the 2018 midterms.

That is going to be a badge of honor.

Dems swept into power campaigning against Shrub, and will get to run effectively against Trump in 2018. I only wonder how many more votes Trump is going to lose for his party before then.

[boutons_deux]

how many more votes Trump is going to lose for his party before then.

Trash's policies are ESTABLISHMENT Repug policies. Identical.

[AaronY]

Ryan's trying to piece together a new plan:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/power...=.fde036b0ce83

Some tweet highlights if you don't wanna read the whole thing:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mikedebon...69867695943684

[mavsfan1000]

Paul Ryan is a snake. I'm hoping Trump catches on. But Paul Ryan is a globalist. I trust Rand Paul and Ted Cruz way more.

[spurraider21]

onion with the goods

GOP Makes Good On 2009 Promise To Block President’s Healthcare Bill

[baseline bum]

onion with the goods

GOP Makes Good On 2009 Promise To Block President’s Healthcare Bill

[pgardn]

onion with the goods

GOP Makes Good On 2009 Promise To Block President’s Healthcare Bill

Its funny but actually difficult to tell if it's satire. I can vividly see some Trumpet giving a strange, "we win" press conference, after an anvil has fallen on their head.

America First dammit.

[Adam Lambert]

[boutons_deux]

GOP Strategist: Trump’s Health Care Dealmaking Went Over Like a ‘Fart in a Hurricane’

http://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-s...n-a-hurricane/

[boutons_deux]

The AHCA: Mass Murder in Broad Daylight

The latest version that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had a chance to analyze would have,

over the course of 10 years,

cut taxes by $1 trillion, disproportionately benefiting the rich;

cut Medicaid spending by $839 billion, exclusively harming the poor and sick; and

cut the Affordable Care Act's health insurance subsidies by about $300 billion, mostly hurting older people of modest means.

Add it all up, and the CBO estimated that 24 million people would have lost their health insurance as a result. It would have allowed them to pass two permanent tax cuts for the rich.

even basic items like emergency room and maternity care were chopped down because the Freedom Caucus found them to be too generous. Ponder that a moment:

This bill failed not because it was too vicious, but because it was not vicious enough.

Make no mistake about it:

This was a mass murder bill, plain and simple,

one that would have lost by only a handful of votes had it come to the floor of the House.

an underlying eugenicist view within Trump and Bannon's camp that the lives of the rich and powerful matter more and are the only ones worth protecting because they believe the rich are genetically superior to the poor.

In a recent New Republic article, journalist Sarah Jones do ented the prevalence of this view within Trump's inner circles:

The most powerful people in America appear to enthusiastically embrace the idea that humans can be divided into inherently superior and inferior specimens and treated accordingly.

"You have to be born lucky," President Donald Trump told Oprah Winfrey in 1988, "in the sense that you have to have the right genes."

His biographer Michael D'Antonio explained to Frontline that Trump and his family subscribe "to a racehorse theory of human development.

They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring."

So does Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, if the reports are to be believed.

Sources told The New York Times this November that despite his devout Catholicism, Bannon "occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners."

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic reported in January that

Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the Immigration Act of 1924 in a 2015 interview with Bannon, which could be an insight into the views of both these immigration hardliners:

The act required would-be immigrants to specify whether they’d ever spent time in prison or the "almshouse," and if their parents had ever been confined to a psychiatric hospital.

The AHCA was a mass murder bill aimed at bettering the rich while setting up the poor, elderly and infirm for ultimate disposal by dint of poor health.

God only knows what Trump and the GOP have in mind next. If they are capable of proposing legislation like this without blinking, only to kill it because it wasn't bloodthirsty enough, they are capable of anything.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4...broad-daylight

[boutons_deux]

Even Kansas caving to Obamacare

Kansas moves to expand Medicaid as GOP legislatures face pressure after ‘Trumpcare’ failure

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...=.1acfb71e43d4

[boutons_deux]

By Blocking Medicaid, Brownback Shows There is No Limit to His Trickle-Down Folly

The Kansas governor—our Trickle Downer of the Week—is expected to veto Medicaid expansion legislation, (potentially) capping his tenure with one more outburst of cruelty

http://prospect.org/article/blocking...kle-down-folly

[boutons_deux]

In the battle over Obamacare’s future, Trump just blinked.

Trump just blinked. And in so doing, he inadvertently revealed that despite the bluster coming from him and Republicans, the politics of the battle over the ACA’s future tilt against them.

The Trump administration has now quietly announced that it will refrain from taking an important step that could have pushed the ACA’s individual markets toward collapse.

Specifically, The Post and the New York Times report that

the administration will keep on paying so-called “cost-sharing reductions” to insurance companies to cover their reimbursement of out-of-pocket costs for about 7 million lower-income customers.

House Republicans had sued the Obama administration to block the payments, and last year a federal judge ruled that they are invalid but kept them going, pending the former administration’s appeal. Trump could drop that appeal, which would cause the payments to stop. But the Trump administration has decided not to do this — at least for now — and to keep the payments going.

“The withdrawal of the cost-sharing reductions would essentially torch the exchanges in most states,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor and health policy expert at the University of Michigan, told me.

“The Trump administration must think that it would be blamed for that. They’re admitting the politics are against them, at least with respect to something that has the potential to devastate the exchanges in a hot minute.”

Instead, by keeping up the payments, the administration has sent a signal to insurers that they should not exit the exchanges,

a recent Standard & Poor’s report finding that there’s no “death spiral” and that the markets could soon become profitable for insurers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-draw7&wpmm=1

[boutons_deux]

Trump may halt insurer payments to force Democrats to negotiate on healthcare

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...litics+News%29

... what about the Freedom Kockus?

BigInsurer is gonna LOVE this tactic

[boutons_deux]

Trump has a strange new plan to threaten Democrats. It’s a sick joke.

Trump could do a great deal of damage to the ACA if he wanted to — but it’s unclear why this would help him realize his own stated goals.

Trump’s new threat is that he will cut off so-called cost-sharing reductions, which subsidize insurance that offers lower out-of-pocket costs to 7 million lower-income Americans.

For all the details, see this piece by Jonathan Cohn; the short version is that, if Trump does this,

premiums could skyrocket and insurers could flee the individual markets, causing them to melt down and ultimately pushing millions off coverage.

As Cohn notes, Trump is basically “threatening to torpedo insurance for millions of Americans unless Democrats agree to negotiate with him.”

this will “force people to do something.”

Missing from this explanation is why this would force Democrats to the table, and to what end he hopes this will occur.

The basic problem is that Trump is asking Democrats to cooperate with him to bring about an outcome that would be worse than the one he is threatening them with.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...t-draw7&wpmm=1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-threatens-coverage_us_58eebb13e4b0bb9638e13674

Trash is a of chess player, thinking through every available move and ahead to future moves.

[boutons_deux]

16 Big Lessons from Trump and the GOP's First Attempt to Destroy Our Health Care System—Here They Go Again
??
Lessons from a key Democratic health care operative.

Here is Slavitt's list of 16 lessons not to be forgotten:

1. That Ryan and House leaders have no moral qualm taking away access to health care for 24 million people. None.

2. By the time the bill got done, it raised premiums 15-20 percent. Cut care from vets, stripped benefits, raised deductibles, hurt hospitals, cut 25 percent from Medicaid, which effectively ended our 1965 Medicaid safety net commitment, and robbed from the Medicare Trust Fund.

3. Even that was not enough for many in the House GOP, who wanted Americans to get even less, including no pre-existing protections. They still do.

4. Why did it almost pass? For some supporters of the bill, this was about expediency, some was about going along with leadership, some was ideology.

5. But the biggest reason is no fancy policy theory. It’s money: $1.2 trillion pulled from health care to pay for massive tax cuts for pharma companies, insurers, insurance company CEOs, tanning salons and medical device companies. And a $55,000 gift per millionaire.

6. Turns out, Americans don’t agree. Only 17 percent thought this was a good idea.

7. An encouraging number of Americans stood up and said they want this country to be a place where people band together to make things better for everyone.

8. Others, when they heard “repeal and replace” for seven years, simply thought that meant politicians were looking to improve affordability and coverage. They now know differently.

9. I spent a lot of time traveling the country talking to people during this time. Many people told me they felt like there was no chance Washington would listen to their concerns.

10. For good reason. An irresponsible timetable, no public hearings, no CBO score/discrediting non-partisan work, a dishonest representation of the facts, a disengaged White House giving thumbs up. The absolute worst of Washington.

11. For those reasons, the bill almost passed the House.

12. But it turns out that town halls, calls and visits to district offices and the capitol make a difference. And it turns out that even in a short window, facts do matter.

13. There are some who want a bipartisan path—in touch with most of the public.

14. Word is now the administration, with assistance from Congress, will sabotage the ACA instead. Lots of ways to do it. Not unlike enforcing an environmental regulation.

15. And many in Congress still harbor the hope of ending pre-existing protections and affordable coverage.

16. That is why, despite their initial failure, I cannot let them off the hook. It’s not over.

http://www.alternet.org/election-201...th-care-system

[boutons_deux]

Latest ACA Repeal Plan Would Explode Premiums for People with Pre-Existing Conditions

a plan for an “invisible risk pool.” And today, word has leaked that the pool is part of a broader plan to allow insurers in the individual market to charge a premium markup for enrollees with pre-existing conditions, with the pool put forth as a way to offset the premium increases resulting from the rest of the plan.

The so-called Federal Invisible Risk Sharing Program would establish a $15 billion fund to help offset insurers’ expenses for patients with high-cost health conditions, similar to the reinsurance program created by the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.

But the invisible risk pool is inferior to traditional reinsurance in two key respects.

First, because the fund only covers the costs of certain conditions, consumers and insurers would have to submit paperwork to demonstrate enrollees qualify for the program—putting costly administrative burdens on insurers, enrollees, and doctors alike. By contrast, reinsurance reimburses insurers for any high-cost enrollee, regardless of condition, eliminating the need for time-consuming paperwork.

Second, the invisible risk pool would not cover high costs that are unrelated to any previous health condition, such as a sudden heart attack. While the proposal does provide a means for insurers to “voluntarily qualify” individuals for the pool, this would exponentially increase the administrative burden by requiring insurers to undertake the qualification process for every enrollee. For these reasons, the invisible risk pool is not as efficient or effective as traditional reinsurance.

In addition to its poor design,

the funding for the invisible risk pool is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive increase in enrollee health care costs as a result of the ACHA.

Spread over nine years and across millions of enrollees, we estimate that

the $15 billion fund could lower annual premiums by about 1 to 2 percent each year,

https://www.americanprogress.org/iss...ng-conditions/

[boutons_deux]

The GOP’s Latest Health-care Plan Is Comically Bad

Republicans don’t talk much about the practical reason for moving urgently on health care, which is to set the stage for tax reform: They want to take money now used to subsidize health care for low-income Americans and give it to the wealthy in the form of big tax cuts.

Again, we can see you.

The new proposal — brokered by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), of the moderate Tuesday Group, and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), of the far-right Freedom Caucus — is like a parody, as if life-or-death access to health care were fodder for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

Nominally, the MacArthur amendment would retain the Essential Health Benefits standard imposed by the ACA, which requires insurance policies to cover eventualities such as hospitalization, maternity and emergency care — basically, all the things you’d ever need health insurance for.

The amendment would also appear to maintain the ACA’s guarantees that anyone could buy health insurance, including those with preexisting conditions, and that parents could keep adult children on their policies until age 26. That all looks fine — but it’s an illusion.

After specifying that these popular provisions will stay, the amendment then gives states the right to snatch them away.

States would be able to obtain waivers exempting them from the Essential Health Benefits standards.

They would also be able to obtain waivers from the preexisting conditions requirement by creating a “high-risk pool” to provide coverage for those who are unwell.

There would no longer be a prohibition, however, against charging “high-risk” individuals more — so much more, in fact, that they would potentially be priced out of the market.

We would go back to the pre-ACA situation in which serious illness could mean losing a home or filing for bankruptcy.

provisions that would strip massive amounts of money out of Medicaid, by far the nation’s biggest source of payment for nursing-home care. So Republicans might not want to show their faces anywhere near retirement communities.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2...-comically-bad

[boutons_deux]

George Will predicts Obamacare to become single-payer because of this inconvenient fact



the essence of Obamacare is the expansion of Medicaid.

what we've learned in this debate about repealing Obamacare is that

the essence of Obamacare is the expansion of Medicaid.

Who has benefited from that? Probably

disproportionately white working-class males, Trump voters."

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/21/1654931/-George-Will-predicts-Obamacare-to-become-single-payer-because-of-this-inconvenient-fact?detail=email&link_id=8&can_id=4217e8eb109c68b d0c2e4143dd2d8c15&source=email-trumps-white-house-dinner-guest-called-hillary-a-worthless- -obama-a-subhuman-mongrel&email_referrer=trumps-white-house-dinner-guest-called-hillary-a-worthless- -obama-a-subhuman-mongrel___202136&email_subject=george-will-predicts-obamacare-to-become-single-payer-because-of-this-inconvenient-fact

[boutons_deux]

The Balloon, the Box and Health Care

Republicans have spent many years denouncing Obamacare as a terrible, horrible, no good law and insisting that they can do much better. They successfully convinced many voters that they could preserve the good stuff — the dramatic expansion of coverage that has brought the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low — while reducing premiums, shrinking deductibles and, of course, doing away with the taxes on high incomes that pay for the program.

health care costs money. In particular, if you want to make care available to Americans who have pre-existing medical conditions — including the condition of being not rich and being relatively old, but not yet eligible for Medicare — you have to find some way to subsidize them.

Again and again, we read news reports to the effect that Republicans are closing in on a plan that will break the political deadlock. They’ll repeal the Obamacare taxes and block-grant Medicaid! No, they’ll make insurance cheaper by eliminating the coverage requirements! Or, the latest idea being floated, they’ll let insurance companies raise premiums on people with pre-existing conditions and compensate by creating special high-risk pools!

And each time the plan turns out to have a fatal flaw. Millions will lose coverage; or they’ll keep coverage, but it will become so threadbare it’s almost worthless; or premiums will skyrocket for the most needy unless vast sums — hundreds of billions of dollars — are devoted to those high-risk pools.

their ongoing debacle over health care isn’t about political tactics or leadership. Even if Donald Trump were the great deal maker he claims to be, or Paul Ryan the policy wonk he poses as, this thing just can’t work.

The truth is that while Republicans have portrayed Obamacare as a crazy, inefficient scheme, it has in fact been much more successful at containing costs than even its proponents expected.

All of this raises the obvious question: If Republicans never had a plausible alternative to Obamacare, if this debacle was so inevitable, what was the constant refrain of “repeal and replace” all about?

The answer, surely, is that it began as a cynical ploy;

at first, the Republicans hoped to kill health reform before it really got started.

And now they’ve trapped themselves:

They can’t admit that they have no ideas without, in effect, admitting that they were lying all along.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/2...alth-care.html

[boutons_deux]

From a slave state, of course. Must have all those genetically inferior knitters who aren't Real Americans

GOP Congressman supports covering pre-existing conditions, but only for people who “lead good lives”

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)

Despite assurances from Trump himself that Americans with pre-existing conditions would be protected from insurance providers cutting their coverage,

the current House bill would allow states to give providers license to effectively deny insurance to anyone with a pre-existing condition

by siphoning those individuals into so-called high risk pools, which are prohibitively expensive.

The change was made at the behest of Brooks and his fellow members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, which blocked the first version of Trumpcare because it wasn’t punitive enough.

But as Rep. Brooks sees it,

being afflicted with a serious or life-threatening pre-existing condition is the price you pay if you don’t live a healthy lifestyle.

“My understanding is that it will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurnace pool,” said Brooks. “That helps offset all these costs,

thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.

And right now those are the people—who’ve done things the right way—that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”

https://thinkprogress.org/gop-congre...d-51944a953f0e

I really doubt Mo is thinking about all the POOR WHITE TRASH in his and other slave states doing drugs, are alcoholics, "Walmart people", are morbidly obese, smokers, etc

The Freedom Kockus ain't happy until 10Ms of Americans are screwed out of health care.