It’s like when somebody barf’s in your car. You have to sell the car.
Trump has barfed. In all of our cars.
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Nice thoughtful article by Tierney. If the Dems go into the weeds and wonk around about specific sabotage against the ACA we will be in the exact same place in 2018 and 2020 that we are now - defending a law and policy that seems less than effective in truly rendering affordable healthcare, and the 2 minute sound bite public will be as confused as they are now. If they start calling for a one payer solution now, in unity, their alternatives will be much clearer. The main problem is the Democrats have elected to continue taking mega contributions from corporations including pharmaceutical companies, among others.
If we do not quit letting corporations call the shots with their money we are doomed to fight for the crumbs falling off of the corporate table for the foreseeable future and the Dems will continue to be Republican light.
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Expect tRump and Price to do everything they can do to cripple ACA. What are the Democrats planning to do about it?
Tom Price is a devious fucker who has every intention of blowing up Obamacare, and is in a perfect position to pull it off.
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Instead of stealthily going after your grandparent’s Medicaid nursing home room or your parent’s Medicare Advantage plan within the Trumpcare model, Price will blatantly go after them now? Nah, he’s just going to maintain that only rich people need medical attention…and more tax breaks, of course.
Trump will even rename the cabinet office to Tax Reform and be done with it. Jared will head this, too. Price couldn’t get the job done. Only Jared can get anything done. He sure worked out a great deal with Putin and that campaign hacking assignment, right?
I will make this bet - Trump will implode before the ACA. Unfortunately, Pence is waiting in the wings and he will be dragging us down the exact same road.
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“what will he do now” ?
whatever Ryans’ doing now.
Donny so desperately wants to “you’re fired” somebody. That’s his drug.
“It will be interesting to see if he can shift roles and become an administrator, a competent, careful thoughtful administrator that he may not like but has to live with. Or whether, instead he remains steadfast in his ideological commitment to undoing the Affordable Care Act by any means possible.”
…
“They’re really going to face a tension between the desire to allow the ACA to crater and to blame it on the Democrats, [or to] follow the recognition that politically it makes a whole lot of sense to try to make the Affordable Care Act work as well as possible.”
Okay, seriously now. Why is it that so many so-called “experts” seem like they have been living under a rock for the past twenty-plus years when it comes to Republican’s irresponsible partisanship and just general malevolent mendacity? “Well if Republicans behave in a responsible manner acting in the best interest of the country…” you might as well be talking about how great life would be if we had herds of unicorns that shat diamonds and farted magic climate change fighting pixie dust.
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It might help if Democratic leaders pointed out at least ONCE that it’s the red states refusing to take the federal subsidies in the ACA which have increased premiums and decreased insurance company participation.
Having that large chunk of unused funds just sitting around is hurting the rest of our healthcare delivery system not just the ACA exchanges. States rights cannot be allowed to affect the cost of my cancer treatments under my employee based healthcare plan.
Why is it so hard to speak to the obvious when it’s such a glaring fact? Our Democratic reps should be getting in the face of the media and demanding immediate action.
Republicans always get away with undermining set law because Dems don’t challenge them in the court of public opinion the way they could. It’s always the frustrated, sick and beaten down consumer who has to go to town halls to do all the heavy lifting.
Find your voice and start using it again, Schumer, McCaskill and the rest of you slackers we elected. People vote elsewhere when you act afraid and become unnecessary. I thought things would get better when Reid retired. The status quo seems to be locked in at the DNC.
Get moving. The press is on a warpath since Trump threatened them. Give them a story that they will run with instead of just reacting to Trump’s midnight tweets and Nunes night time runs over to the White House grounds to get his instructions from Bannon.
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Republicans don’t do the right thing. They have gotten by with doing nothing or grave harm to this nation for so long because they are not challenged hard with cold, hard facts.
They must feel very vulnerable or they wouldn’t be attacking “fake news” and coining new phrases like “alternative facts.” When I heard them reacting to situations found in science fiction and teenage dystopian novels, I knew that they thought they were in trouble.
Republicans know the underemployed youth in this country are as pissed off as all those around the world.
Radical Islamic terrorism isn’t causing those terrorist attacks in Europe. It’s income inequality. Nobody could blame Obama for that and they won’t blame any progressive Democratic candidate in the future either. The pointing fingers will go right back to St.Reagan and Republicans Voodoo Economics once the revolution begins.
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Awwwwwwwww…don’t worry about Priceless… there are a lot more blow jobs to be had in DC…
Too late. He’s already targeted, and that’s the word, the VA.
Price of meat, huh? Yeah, that’s it all right. I should have realized it when Sargento foods, a Koch company, filed for trade-name protection for Soylent Green.
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I think, unfortunately, that the democrats have to wait until Price does something. Otherwise Very Serious People will be all about the partisanship and the paranoia. But once he does (and luckily, most of his decisions will have delayed effect) the drumbeat can be relentless.
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The GOP’s position and certainly the “president’s” position on health care is driven almost exclusively by their hatred of Obama. They don’t believe in their own proposals on the merits, they are only interested in ending the ACA as a means to tarnish Obama.
Their hypocrisy can be seen in the Republican senate bill, S.1770(103rd) sponsored by current Trump supporters Grassley, Dole, and Hatch among many other conservatives; Of interest in this bill is Section 1501 that establishes an individual mandate for all US residents to purchase health insurance and Section 2401 that establishes a tax penalty for failure to comply with the individual mandate. In simplest of terms, they were for the ACA before they were against it, and they were against it because Obama was for it.
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Um, let’s see, oh yeah, the answer is, and has been for a long time “the Republicans are Evil” yup that’s it, got it. (Is there a Godwin’s Law for “Evil” ?)
But less seriously, the Evil Ones’ playbook will be, for every Russia bombshell, or other devastating revelation, they will counter with an ACA crippling bombshell, or other obliterating act, to compete for the news cycle. Whichever bombshell dominates the national discourse the other slips under the radar and they always get a win on a big item one way or the other.
Tit for tat.
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I seem to recall that you are the poster who worked in healthcare and expressed the unsuitability of a rich orthopedic surgeon to make decisions on patient care. Someone said it, and my own 3-year experience working closely with doctors in a hospital pharmacy yielded the same results. With respect to the so-called implosion, I posted earlier on another thread that Trump is dreaming of the insurance companies all pulling out, ACA is supposed to crash and the Administration can blame Obama. With all the stakeholders and the Democrats having a million ways to stop the pullout or slow it to a crawl, there’s no way in the world this will work, as you point out.
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I have no doubt that #45 and TPrice will continue doing everything in their power to undermine the ACA - what they could not accomplish by repeal and “replace” they will accomplish by administrative and executive order (and the continued silence from all the people who howled about Pres. Obama’s use of executive orders will be positively deafening). Repubes will continue to blame Fmr. Pres. Obama and the Dems for the failings of the ACA, and they will probably continue getting away with it.
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The other major figure to watch is Seema Verma, head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
Yes that is me - worked in healthcare (I am a registered nurse and case manager) for over 30 years and, like most people who actually have some knowledge of healthcare and insurance, the discussions we have on most talk shows and the people who are making the decisions that affect all of our lives are distressing in the extreme. Never have so many who know so little exercised so much power over something that affects so many people - it is a huge black hole of ignorance and we have been reduced to fighting tooth and nail for something that is woefully inadequate when compared to almost any other advanced nation. And yet we have been put in a position where that is the best we can do.
FUCK INSURANCE - I WANT HEALTHCARE
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