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White House pressures GOP leaders on Obamacare showdown next week

There are three reasons his supporters stand by Trump:

1)He isn't Clinton
2)He is supposed to "break" Washington
3)He is supposed to "stick it to libs."

Destroying healthcare fits into 3).

Which reinforces the thought that the "politics of who" has come to rule. Actual workable solutions be damned, screw the average citizen, just make sure the other side is crushed.
 
Ryan and the GOP have a more realistic grasp of what actually works and what doesn't than Trump... and apparently his Suckers, too... does.

Ryan actually seems to be in way over his head, on both the policy and the politics of all this.
 
Which reinforces the thought that the "politics of who" has come to rule. Actual workable solutions be damned, screw the average citizen, just make sure the other side is crushed.

It basically means that if you want government to function, you are required by definition to not have a Republican-dominated government for the simple reason that one of the most common platforms Republicans run on is that government doesn't function. You can't act shocked when your guy says that government doesn't work and...surprise!...he turns out to be incompetent. Who would be dumb enough to bring their car to an autoshop whose business theme is that cars can't be repaired? Yet people regularly vote for candidates who openly announce that they're ****ing idiots.

On the plus side, the next time Democrats get into power they won't need a filibuster-proof majority to operate.
 
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Ryan actually seems to be in way over his head, on both the policy and the politics of all this.
Ryan has his flaws, and he certainly was caught off-guard in not having something ready (I don't think he ever worked on it prior to the election), but he also understood the realities of the situation when Trump was pushing for a vote of what was clearly a bad plan.
 
Ryan has his flaws, and he certainly was caught off-guard in not having something ready (I don't think he ever worked on it prior to the election), but he also understood the realities of the situation when Trump was pushing for a vote of what was clearly a bad plan.

Correct, but it's his fault that he's a liar.
These things don't go together. Ryan lied about having a plan ready. Trump said he would sign the repeal when it reached his desk. Ryan lied about everything. Trump lied about nothing. It's not Trump's fault Ryan was forced to throw together a bunch of terrible unworkable garbage. If Ryan had practiced what he preached then Trump would have fulfilled what he said and signed the bill into law. Trump can't sign a law that doesn't reach his desk.
 
These things don't go together. Ryan lied about having a plan ready. Trump said he would sign the repeal when it reached his desk. Ryan lied about everything. Trump lied about nothing. It's not Trump's fault Ryan was forced to throw together a bunch of terrible unworkable garbage. If Ryan had practiced what he preached then Trump would have fulfilled what he said and signed the bill into law. Trump can't sign a law that doesn't reach his desk.

Trump absolutely lied. He's pushing hard for the House to pass the AHCA, which will not do what he said he would do.

 
There is no plan except the desire of many republicants to do away with (repeal) PPACA. The problem is that states, insurance companies and people now enjoy getting "free" federal money - the only politically acceptable solution must not take away anyone's current "free" federal aid which makes the Trump plan (to reduce federal cost) a very tough nut to crack. What specific past bill are you calling "the plan"?

Except the ACA pays for itself by a tax on the wealthy. That is where the money for the subsidies comes from. Of course the GOP wants to get rid of that tax and give yet another $300 billion gift to rich people. That is where the rub lies.

In total, the committee estimated that repealing the Medicare payroll tax surcharge would cost the federal government $117 billion over 10 years, while the investment income levy would cost $158 billion. The GOP bill, titled the American Health Care Act, also calls for repealing a host of other taxes, including those on insurers, medical device makers and prescription drug makers.
A new report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that repealing all these taxes would mean that nearly everyone in the Top 1%, who earn more than $772,000 a year, would enjoy a hefty tax cut, averaging a little more than $37,000 in 2022. Tax filers in the Top 0.1% would get an average tax cut of more than $207,000.

GOP Obamacare repeal bill is a windfall for the wealthy - Mar. 11, 2017
 
Except the ACA pays for itself by a tax on the wealthy. That is where the money for the subsidies comes from. Of course the GOP wants to get rid of that tax and give yet another $300 billion gift to rich people. That is where the rub lies.



GOP Obamacare repeal bill is a windfall for the wealthy - Mar. 11, 2017

What pays for a system sold to the public under the guise that it would reduce costs by about $2,500/year is not the point. Everyone knows that you can tax and spend to buy votes - but that was not how PPACA was advertised. To assert that only "the rich" are experincing cost increases rather than promised cost decreases avoids the real issue - PPACA did not lower the average cost of insurance and only made it "affordable" by adding subsidies.
 
What pays for a system sold to the public under the guise that it would reduce costs by about $2,500/year is not the point. Everyone knows that you can tax and spend to buy votes - but that was not how PPACA was advertised. To assert that only "the rich" are experincing cost increases rather than promised cost decreases avoids the real issue - PPACA did not lower the average cost of insurance and only made it "affordable" by adding subsidies.

There's plenty of evidence that the ACA helped keep costs from rising as fast as they already were.

Three years before the ACA took effect, health insurance premiums were increasing by 10 percent to 12 percent each year, and the rate of the uninsured was growing.

Today, even as news about big premium increases for 2017 raises concerns about the Affordable Care Act’s long-term health, an analysis released last week in the journal Health Affairs seeks to put things in perspective. The upshot: Things could be worse.

It turns out that the average premiums in the individual market actually dropped when the ACA was implemented.

“Average premiums for the second-lowest cost silver-level (SLS) marketplace plan in 2014, which serves as a benchmark for ACA subsidies, were between 10 and 21 percent lower than average individual market premiums in 2013, before the ACA…,” write researchers from the Brookings Institute.

individual-market-premiums-dropped.jpg

Source: https://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2016/07/29/health-premiums-after-obamacare-theyre-lower/
Follow us: @EyeOnInsurance on Twitter | healthinsurance.org on Facebook
 
Dropped is now defined as did not increase as fast as expected? If my rent went up (more) slowly then that is not the same as my rent dropped.

The savings are the same. You are splitting hairs. If you want to talk lies and false promises just look at Trump. He promised his plan "would take care of everyone" and instead it kicked 24 million off their health insurance.
 
The savings are the same. You are splitting hairs. If you want to talk lies and false promises just look at Trump. He promised his plan "would take care of everyone" and instead it kicked 24 million off their health insurance.

It did absolutely nothing and never even came to the House floor for a vote leaving PPACA intact. I gueess that means it saved money too. ;)
 
Pretty much.

Doesn't the latest version eliminate pre-existing conditions? At that point, why have a health bill anymore?
Oh, I wrote that off long before that.

In the beginning, if an individual had a gap in insurance coverage--especially common among folks with pre-existing conditions, you no longer had pre-existing coverage protections. That was along with gutting Medicaid and Medicaid Expansion, making it all the more likely that people with pre-existing conditions wouldnt have their conditions covered at all. This would set us back at least a few decades in terms of a service providing infrastructure in and across state lines.

Then they tried to dash off the EHBs most beneficial for people with pre-existing conditions. Then there were the high risk pools, which even further made it likely people with pre-existing conditions couldn't get or afford insurance coverage.

The net impact: more institutionalization, more jail sentencing in order for people with pre-existing conditions to get basic medical care. In my state, 70% of judges have admitted to sentencing someone to jail in order to receove basic care because of the lack of services in my state. No one could say with a straight face that it won't get a hell of a lot worse.

Then they said, eh, why bother with the pretense at all?

The entire point of the AHCA was to kick pre-existing conditioned people off then insurance rolls and into the gutter so that healthier, more financed people could feel good about themselves again.

It's basically a social darwinist bill masquerading as proper healthcare.





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It did absolutely nothing and never even came to the House floor for a vote leaving PPACA intact. I gueess that means it saved money too. ;)

An even worse replacement is in the works. Republicans won't pass anything that provides coverage like the ACA does. They've got theirs and the rest be damned.
 
Ryan has his flaws, and he certainly was caught off-guard in not having something ready (I don't think he ever worked on it prior to the election), but he also understood the realities of the situation when Trump was pushing for a vote of what was clearly a bad plan.

What shocked me about Ryan and the GOP in general is they really got NOBODY behind that piece of garbage plan before rolling it out. They did the nearly impossible and produced something industry hated, conservative think tanks hated, conservative pundits hated, the republicans in the Senate said was DOA if/when it got there, and all but a handful of republicans in Congress were at best indifferent about. There was really no one to push that bill other than Ryan and Trump who just wanted something, anything, to pass.

So, yeah, Ryan IMO screwed up big time. I would bet somewhere Boehner was having a drink and LOLing about Ryan stuck with the same dysfunctional house that ousted him as Speaker.
 
An even worse replacement is in the works. Republicans won't pass anything that provides coverage like the ACA does. They've got theirs and the rest be damned.

Yep, that (bolded above) is the whole point of repeal and replace. I'm very glad that you realize that.
 
Yep, that (bolded above) is the whole point of repeal and replace. I'm very glad that you realize that.
Except it goes way further than undoing the ACA ever could.

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Except it goes way further than undoing the ACA ever could.

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So far it has gone nowhere. I hope folks will come to realize that having one federal plan is not as good as having 50 state plans.
 
So far it has gone nowhere. I hope folks will come to realize that having one federal plan is not as good as having 50 state plans.
One can hope it continues to go nowhere. I can't believe we are talking about the death of Medicaid waivers and capped services as some sort of replace option.

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Yep, that (bolded above) is the whole point of repeal and replace. I'm very glad that you realize that.

Oh thank you for the chuckle Ttwtt!

It seems like there has been a lot of coming together between the Tuesday Group and the Freedom Caucus in the House over the Mac Arther Amendment. What it does is list Federal guidelines but at the same time offers states an option to waiver certain guidelines pertaining to things that have an impact on lowering cost of premiums for everyone. It looks like it will have a good chance of passing in the next week or so. The House returns to session on this coming Tuesday. They have been working on this bill throughout the Spring break. I doubt it will come up for a vote next week as the final bill has to be written and it is important that all the i's get dotted and the t's get crossed because when it goes to the Senate, the wording has to be precise. Once it gets into the Senate, the parliamentarian will be able to gut Obamacare even further something the House does not have the power to do. They will produce their version and it will go to conference. Today was day 90 of the Trump administration. I would not be surprised by day 110 there will be a bill on Trump's desk to sign.
 
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