The Senate bill is really bad, even when compared to the House legislation, for a tactical reason. Yertle the Turtle plans to allow cosmetic changes to coverages (but, of course, not to the main purpose of the bill: tax cuts for the wealthy funded by screwing low income Americans out of health insurance). He’ll make a few trivial “improvements” and all but 2 of the phony GOP Senate “moderates” will, in unison, drop their opposition. This is a cynical game to McConnell. Don’t play along, TPM.
yup it’s policy
Republicans= Hurt poor people
Democrats = Help poor people
It’s a systemic hate of poor people that has been in place since Roosevelt and the Democrats began the policy of helping those less fortunate than ourselves.
Evangelicals indeed
The Republican party is a nest of vipers, plain and simple. Everything they do is a cover for making the wealthy wealthier, including removing protections from consumers and stripping the poor of services. I really have no idea how they sleep at night.
When Bitch McConnell was a little boy, he suffered from polio. Welfare paid for his treatment and therapy afterward. All of it. Now, ol’ Bitch wants little kids to suffer. He is a “conservative,” after all.
When all one cares about is money, like a baby.
Under the Senate GOP proposal, waiver proposals are only required to reduce the federal deficit. …Furthermore, the GOP bill changes the ACA text from saying the Health and Human Services secretary “may” grant waivers—giving the HHS some discretion—to “shall” grant waivers
…It’s even an open question whether the lax requirements would let the state divert federal Obamacare funding to non-health care spending.
That’s sabotage, not legislation.
Even if you don’t give a shit about health insurance coverage for people who don’t have affordable plans from an employer, this is sloppy as hell. Since when did Congress love giving money away without retaining some say in how it is spent? Even Senators who care only about tax cuts should want to claw back any money they can from the health insurance funding, to create room for further tax cuts.
Long-range planning at hospitals must be a joy right now.
The part about it that the Death Caucus cares about is that the waivers only get granted if they reduce the federal deficit. So if a state says “Cut our federal education funding by a billion dollars, and we’ll take the money out of medicaid” that’s win-win for a conservative republican.
The NYTimes can only breathlessly report how clever he is.
Not buying that subscription today…
My take on the Senate draft bill:
The procedure and the contents were designed from the start to allow vulnerable GOP senators to pretend to make a bold stand in opposition, get some impressive sounding change to the bill, and then vote yes for something that is damn close to the House bill.
By producing the draft in secret, McConnell could release something that hasn’t yet been subject to any compromises. He has plenty of room to grant modifications without changing the bill into something he can’t work on with the House.
Easy compromises on the bill include: increasing the required actuarial value of policies above the 58% specified; requiring states to spend federal funding only on “health-related” programs; disallowing annual caps (but retaining lifetime caps that do the job well enough for insurance companies); and specifying that Medicaid spending cannot decline year over year (in nominal dollar terms) except where it drops due to state-requested changes.
The GoPers serving in Congress are simply hateful people and thus, they hate people who they do not care about! PERIOD!
The ACHA is truly a CONServative plan to CONvert states into DEATH PANELS!
“Not buying that subscription today.”
I’m always on the verge of pulling the plug myself. I haven’'t quite been able to bring myself to do it yet, but one more falsely equivalent story could do it.
I think political reporting suffers from attempts to be exciting. I was thinking about this recently. A good political report should be more like reading a grocery list than a novel. There should be a lot less character development, and a lot more meat, potatoes and cooking oil.
Let’s get real. The US health care system provides the BEST health care in the world.
But the US health care PAYMENT system is among the worst in the world. Imagine a world in which you’re betting against corporations on your health. Most other civilized nations in the world wouldn’t make you make that bet. What’s wrong with ours?
what is wrong: Corporations profit from sick people. polluters want short-term profits that make people ill. Drug companies profit from sick people with expensive medication that only maintain, not cure buyers. Insurance companies profit from sick people. and Republican profit from people being sick, tired, and scared - too tired to think about consequences. Making a profit from misery - as long as it’s profit. Greed, not Government - that’s the drive to disaster for the middle class.