Don’t kid yourself - hospitals and multi-specialty health systems are extremely powerful and have lobbyists of their own. They also have the added power of being able to walk away from books of business like Medicare and Medicaid. Sure, it will cost jobs, at least temporarily, but they have their own PR consultants and community relations depts who can jump in front of news cameras and give interviews just as well as any insurer.
Healthcare companies are almost universally hated. Local providers of care? Not so much.
At some point those 66 votes to repeal became performance art as presented by the Republican House. They couldn’t take each petulant vote as something to be alarmed about 66 times and they knew it would be guaranteed to be vetoed. And eventually the House did stop trying. But this proposal is an horse or an orangutan of a different color. But people who benefit by ACA are not going to take this proposed upheaval without a protest. That’s the surest way for an R to lose his job.
What they’re saying, however, is correct. You would see massive numbers of smaller hospitals (usually local or non-profits) closing within a few years after the ACA was dismantled. You would probably also see many of the larger hospital conglomerates basically buying up all of the others (which would make things worse for the public, as they would have very little choice, and the costs would go through the stratosphere).
Healthcare at that point would be for the lucky who may still have coverage through their employers (this also depends on if the Republicans make good on removing the tax break employers get for offering health insurance…if they do, tens of millions of people would more than likely lose their insurance once it became too expensive for an employer to offer), or only for those that can pay in cash.
yeah but burning a little political capital would have been a good investment. pointing out the fallacy of the GOP phony numbers is always a good place to start a discussion.
Trump does not give a flying crap if millions & millions of people become financially weakened & health imperiled when he makes a shit show out of the healthcare system - and no doubt Trump is getting tons of suggestions from the king of all ghouls - Dick Scott of Florida - who takes delight in screwing people out of their life savings by making their health care coverage virtually unaffordable.
Ah -but you are assuming that they actually care about the damage that a totally ill-conceived replacement plan could do -or even the lack of a plan (which they will try to blame on the Democrats) … They don’t care - in fact they will get off on the idea that this will piss people off - they have gotten so freaking adversarial toward anyone that they consider to be their “opposition” that they would actually get pleasure from withholding medical care from the needy… because they consider the “needy” to actually be lazy, scammers - and thus their enemy
Closed hospitals and devastation … thank God. Now there will be less places to bring Trumpanzees when they run out of food, shelter and medicine after the social benefits all dry up. Makes life easier for the rest of us.
The hospitals in Arizona have become used to actually getting paid for a lot of the care they used to have to write off since Jan Brewer became one of the few Republican governors to embrace Obamacare (one of the few good things she did in office). Obamacare was designed by people who actually understand healthcare policy - now we are faced with a team of morons trying to draft something to take its’ place who know absolutely nothing about unintended consequences or downstream disasters. One thing we can rest assured of - it will have a great name like American Choice or Healthcare Freedom. This is going to be a slow motion train wreck and it is going to hurt a lot of patients, physicians and institutions - and many of the people in the first 2 groups will not recognize what the actual problem is even as it rolls over them.
But every genius in the room knows that emergency room care is actually free and allowing insurers to sell across state lines will solve all of our problems - and besides, as long as millionaires can get healthcare, there really are no problems.
I don’t think anyone’s yet thought through the true scale of the disaster this will be. Hospitals closing, an even bigger wave of consolidation sweeping the industry, the end of any kind of individual insurance market. ERs will be swamped again with the working poor, and hospitals will have to write off the cost of treating them or find increasingly creative ways to fob them off on other hospitals or care providers. Coverage has so far been focused on the impact on insurers, who have a much bigger lobby in Washington. The hospital lobby has teeth in the states, but if they couldn’t even get Medicaid expansions in many places, I don’t see how they can keep this meteor from striking Earth.
If they really wanted to be harsh, Republicans could repeal EMTALA, the anti dumping law that requires emergency rooms to examine everyone and to stabilize them if they’re experiencing an emergency. And since EMTALA applies to hospitals that accept Medicare, it’ll be fascinating how Republicans’ privatization of Medicare will impact EMTALA, whether they think they intended to repeal it or not. It could well be up to the hospital administrator to choose between letting an indigent person bleed out in the lobby, or eating the cost of charity care.
In fact, a great many regulations are tied to the acceptance of Medicare. Democrats need to start elevating all these scenarios, STAT.
Why would Rs want to remove the tax breaks for employers? They have to come up with more tax breaks for Jared, Ivanka and Daddums’ faves of the day :duh:
I only wish Tierney Sneed had had time/resources to go beyond the press release from the hospital lobby for her story. At least she didn’t repackage a Politico story for us this time :wtf:
I’m going to go out on limb here and say I think Donald is more concerned with destroying Obama’s legacy than worrying about hospitals losing money and millions of people losing their insurance.
While sucking up every single spare dime in people’s pockets.
Then they start sucking every dime from other industries. Defense spending gets cut. Contractors lose jobs. Business abandons health benefits. Costs continue to skyrocket. The tax base shrinks, as jobs disappear. The starving system sucks harder… And the cycle continues until the entire economy collapses.
The housing collapse was just the Republican’s dry-run.
Debate and discussion are excellent endeavors and in a sane world are a cornerstone of a functioning government. We must, however, remember that there are no longer things called facts. So what is being debated and discussed ? The answer is apparently Mister Trump and the Repubs daily bluelight special or their shiny object of the day.
Remember that on a given day we are not supposed to take Mr Trumps words either literally or seriously because on any day they might be yu-fun-nisns or suggestions or ideas or something else to be determined. We need to check with Kellyanne (?) every morning…I guess. Everybody will be guessing until January.
In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist; And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist; … And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
This continuing belief that math and facts and objective reality will have the slightest impact on the people who invented “dynamic scoring” and magic asterisks and who time and again did things Wall Street begged them not to do and were punished for doing so with even larger contributions the next cycle would be touching if it wasn’t so serious.
And yeah, there’s a lot of that fantasy going on right here, too.
