“Did we promise the American people we were going to repeal Obama care but keep and expand Medicaid? And did we promise the American people we were going to repeal Obamacare but create a new entitlement with the fancy name of refundable tax credits? I don’t think we did.”
And they still voted for you.
SMH
With the notable exception of financial looting, these people are genetically incapable of doing anything — anything! — competently. It’s a marvel, albeit a sad and unfortunate one, that they can even successfully reproduce.
“The American Health Care Act: Bend over, please. And sorry we can’t afford the glove or vaseline.”
You can only fill out a crossword or sudoku puzzle one way. Similarly, given current political constraints, you can really only thread the healthcare needle in the US one way too.
And thanks to GOP scare tactics and lies, that one way pisses off the GOP base. And threading the needle half-assedly, trying to please the unpleasable base, pisses off everyone else.
And none of them are talking about the CBO’s estimate that the ACA left untouched will cost 1/3 less than estimated in 2010.
Page 3: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/reports/52468-outlookqfrs.pdf
This needs to be emphasized again and again and again. And then another time for good measure.
I wonder how long it will be before this bill is pulled altogether? If the so-called Freedom Caucus holds firm, it’s DOA. I can’t assume that any Democrat would put their name to this, surely.
Perhaps it will be such a political calamity that Paul Ryan will feel the heat as well. Lord knows it’s about time for the boy scout to get knocked about a bit. What a joke he is, a man whose sole purpose in public life is to cut taxes on the wealthiest and eliminate Medicare and Social Security. For the life of me, I cannot understand how he has coasted this far.
This couldn’t happen to a better group of goons. This bill, which is deeply flawed, isn’t going to pass. A better bill has no chance unless Democrats participate. They won’t because this is a partisan issue. Glad there isn’t any leadership in the Republican party.
Funny but the ACA does need some real reforms to correct problems that have come up. Too bad that won’t happen.
Just say NO! to the GOP Unaffordable Care Act! Listen to AARP on the massive increased costs for health insurance for low to moderate income persons in the 55 to 64 year old age bracket if the GOP Unaffordable Care Act in enacted to law… Lyin Ryan and his band of GOP undertakers are out to bury Medicaid and Medicare, and their opening moves are baked into the GOP Unaffordable Care Act, which will force low to moderate income citizens to in effect pay for huge tax cuts for the wealthy.
Grovel, hypocrites!
Conservatives in the news are either slamming this thing because it doesn’t kill poor people quickly enough, and defenders are dancing around the idea that “this is all just a start, just wait until we’ve refined it a bit!”. It can’t be repeated enough that after 7 years, this is what they’ve come up with. Exactly the situation that liberals had predicted they’d be in. Nobody is going to win here, except the wealthy. America has yet again fucked itself by voting in Republicans. Way to go United States!
Conservatism is, at its core, the philosophy of selfishness. So it’s no surprise that self styled “real conservatives” in the Rumpublican coalition are pitching a peculiar brand of freedom. The freedom of skaters and deadbeats: people who can perfectly well afford health insurance but either negligently fail (skaters) or deliberately refuse (deadbeats) to buy any. Not so much the freedom of people who truly can’t afford health insurance to pray they don’t get sick, although this will be the outcome as well.
Because they’ve been openly pitching “freedom” for 7 years, it’s not only fair, but imperative to ask. What fraction of the newly uninsured will have their health insurance taken away because they truly can’t afford it? What fraction will be newly empowered skaters and deadbeats?
Health care needs to be treated as a public good. Period. If people want more, fine they can pay for that. But nobody wants cancer or a brain tumor. Nobody even wants complications from the flu. And babies, well, they show up from time to time. So design the health care system to be efficient and tax accordingly. End all free-ridership. At the moment, the GOP plan seems to be to end healthcare for about 38 million people and increase free-ridership, especially among insurers.
That’s all the American people are asking.
But Republicans are trying to turn this into a way to swindle more money out of the pockets of their own base so their campaign donors can make a bigger donation… uh, profit.
I read an article yesterday where someone surmised that Paul Ryan and the leadership don’t really want this bill to pass. I didn’t think too much of it until this morning when I read that Robert Reich said the ability to buy insurance across state lines was the biggest thing they bragged about for years and there is nothing in this bill that addresses that. Why would they leave that out when that has been Trump’s and the Republican party’s biggest talking point to save money? I’m on the fence now on believing it could be a Potemkin bill so they can kick the repeal and replace can down the road and concentrate on more popular things.
On his good looks, jacked body, and being the smartest Republican in the room. The latter is like being the smartest rock in the box. This, if you can’t tell is snark – in no way do I consider him intelligent or knowledgeable and calling him a policy wonk is an insult to all people with any minimal understanding of policy.
Also he is the high priest of the church of Ayn Rand so the true believers follow him. (I never thought I would pine for Boehner).
It’s DOA.
As I wrote out here yesterday, the Republicans are coming up against a law of physics: Nature abhors a vacuum. You can’t replace something with nothing.
Despite all of the things wrong with the American Health Care — Walk It Off!™ — Act there are at least two issues it addresses that are of keep-us-awake-at-night importance to most Americans.
First of all, Rethugliklans very lovingly inserted this language, as pointed out by the Los Angeles Times’ indispensable *Michael Hiltzik:
This provision “[R]emoves the ACA’s limit on corporate tax deductions for [health care] executive pay. The cost to the American taxpayer of eliminating this provision: well in excess of $70 million a year. In the reckoning of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank that analyzed the limitation in 2014, that would have been enough that year to buy dental insurance under the ACA for 262,000 Americans, or pay the silver plan deductibles for 28,000.”
“The Institute for Policy Studies calculated in 2014 that the 10 biggest insurance companies had paid their top 57 executives a total of $300 million the previous year. Because of the ACA rule, they were able to deduct only 27% of the sum. Without the ACA, they would have been able to deduct 96%,” Hiltzik wrote.
Secondly, the GOP: Special Victims Unit dedicated over 10% of the 66-page bill — a full seven pages! — addressing another area of deep concern to every American: Lottery winners who are eligible for and receiving Medicare. Given the amount of attention it garnered, this monumental detail alone will, one would presume, easily pay for the $53 billion increase in the defense budget the interminably paranoid trough feeders deem necessary to assure our protection.
But now that I think about it, the slimness of the bill — as so ably demonstrated by Sadr City Sean as he danced between the stacks of prop-papers during his last press conference — will have another noticeable benefit: It will help Micturition Man’s teeny, tiny little fingers appear almost normal-sized as he waves it around during an inevitable primetime photo-op/victory lap.
*Source: Column: Here's the secret payoff to health insurance CEOs buried in the GOP Obamacare repeal bill
I noticed that “across state lines” line in several comments on my Reps FB page and in other comments about this new bill. I wonder if these people are an outside force from the insurance industry or if they are such low thinkers that health insurance=car insurance?