Every Lie Told About the ACA is Now the Reality of the AHCA

The people this tiny group of Republicans are speaking to are the lobbyists. No input from Democrats, no input from the rest of the Republicans, no input by the voters, no input from groups like the AMA, no input PERIOD. This is the type of overreach they always end up going for every time they lie their way into power. At least that never changes. The other consistency is that their idiot base never holds them accountable.

The Not-So-Secret Truth About the Senate GOP’s Secret Health Care Bill
The details matter. But at its core, it’s still a massive tax cut paid for by depriving millions of health care.
By Jeffrey Young

Senate Republicans are hurling themselves toward passing an incredibly unpopular set of health care reforms that even they don’t understand, haven’t seen and likely won’t see until just before it hits the floor.

This rightly has raised the hackles not only of Senate Democrats and the media, but anyone who values transparency in government or is anxious about the consequences of reordering the American health care system and taking away health coverage from millions of people.

But as important as the legislation’s details will turn out out to be, there’s a simple, fundamental, incontrovertible fact about whatever the Senate health care reform bill winds up looking like: The purpose of this bill is to dramatically scale back the safety netso wealthy people and health care companies can get a massive tax cut.

It’s the biggest open secret about the secret Senate health care bill.

That’s true of the House-passed version of the American Health Care Act, which the Congressional Budget Office projects would lead to 23 million fewer people being uninsured over the next decade, severely weaken protections for people with pre-existing conditions and put health coverage out of reach for older, sicker and poorer people who won’t be able to afford insurance or, in some cases, to even access it at any price.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his handpicked cohort of backroom negotiators are advancing a measure that will look pretty much like the House legislationand do pretty much the same thing. McConnell wants a vote before July 4, and he’ll probably get it if something doesn’t alter the trajectory. There’s little Democrats can do beyond try to slow Senate business to a crawl to draw out the process and keep health care in the public eye for as long as possible.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Senate “moderates” balking at the most regressive parts of the House bill and halfheartedly complaining about McConnell’s opaque processas though they’re powerless to influence it. But if the past behavior of so-called moderates can inform predictions about what they’ll do this time, the smart money’s on them giving in when push comes to shove.

Yes, the details are important, especially to anyone anxious about how this bill would affect their lives. But it’s not as though the Senate is proposing to increase assistance for people who don’t have the money to buy health insurance, or to provide targeted help for those whose premiums have risen beyond their means under the Affordable Care Act.

There’s no way McConnell unveils a bill that fixes what’s wrong with the health care system, a scenario that might prompt Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to join him in a duet of “I Got You Babe” on the Senate floor. There’s no way this ends with a new law that ensures people have access to decent, affordable health insurance and a safety net to catch them during hard times.

Whatever else the bill might be, it’s still an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act because Republicans don’t believe rich people and corporations should have to pay so that poor, middle-income or sick people can go to the doctor.

The Affordable Care Act is an assertion of the opposite, that society has a collective responsibility for, and derives a mutual benefit from, promoting access to health care and providing the mechanism and the money to do so. The law hasn’t done everything it set out to do, and didn’t even attempt to achieve truly universal health care, but it still extended health coverage to about 20 million previously uninsured people and drove down to a historic low the share of the population without health coverage.

Whenever senators finish their secret dealmaking and the public has a bill to review ― if not stop it before Congress and President Donald Trump rush to make it law and have another party in the Rose Garden ― there’s not going to be much difference from the unloved House-passed bill no one seems to like. That includes Trump, who reportedly told senators he believes it to be “mean.”

The question isn’t whether GOP senators choose to preserve gains in coverage, but just how much of it they’re willing to take away.

We aren’t be talking about senators from states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act fighting to save it, but about how many years they want to wait before the Medicaid expansion disappears.

The senators aren’t going to retain the guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, because they’ll relax other insurance regulations in a way making that moot. A promise that insurers have to offer coverage to, for example, a cancer patient is worthless if the insurance doesn’t have to cover cancer treatments or if there are annual and lifetime limits to an insurance policy’s benefits.

There may be Republican senators who aren’t ready to commit in public to supporting the health care bill, citing the opacity of McConnell’s process. But the rest of us already have enough information to make up our minds about it.

 

The cat that was never really in the bag is now amongst the pigeons. (Pity the suffering of a mangled metaphor that'll never get proper attention, resulting in permanent disability.)

From the mouths of shitheels:

'Tom Price admits that the new Trumpcare is only repeal, no replace'

'During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised, over and over again, that he would replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” that would “take care of everybody” and be “a lot less expensive” for consumers and the government.

'But despite claims by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that his latest version of Trumpcare would provide “stability” while “improving affordability,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price made a major admission about the bill Sunday: that the legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare would simply permit insurers return to the ways they used to operate.

'On ABC’s This Week, the longtime Obamacare critic was pressed by Jon Karl about a provision in the bill pushed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), which would allow insurance companies to offer sub-standard plans. Karl noted that not only do more than 10 medical groups and 32 cancer organizations oppose the Trumpcare bill, “a rare joint statement by the biggest insurance companies in the country called the Cruz amendment ‘unworkable in any form’ [as] ‘it would lead to, ‘widespread terminations of coverage.”

'Price responded that he found that wall of opposition “really perplexing, especially from the insurance companies, cause all they have to do is dust off how they did business before Obamacare.”

'The administration had not previously admitted so clearly that this bill would mean a return to the pre-Obamacare days where insurers could deny customers coverage for pre-existing conditions, impose lifetime coverage caps, and force patients to pay out-of-pocket for essential care.

'But while much of this bill would return things to the bad old days, it would also hurt consumers in a novel way. Under the Trumpcare bill, customers who purchase a cheapo Cruz substandard plans would not be considered to have had “continuous coverage.” And a provision of the bill states that anyone without continuous coverage would be subject to a six-month waiting period before they could buy any real plan. In other words, it could be even worse than the pre-Obamacare system for people who suddenly become sick.'
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The Republicans are stuck in a corner between all the bad things they said about the ACA and no viable option to replace it with anything better. Anything seen as less than repeal by their idiot base will doom them to explain their own lies which they can't do. Providing quality affordable healthcare was never part of their plan. Their idiot supporters would rather have a perceived "win" than a working healthcare system.

 

And the latest GOP disaster dies a well-deserved death.

 

During the entire course of the past administration the Republicans did nothing but throw political tantrums and stomp their feet as they yelled NO! NO! NO! We WON'T work with the president!! Most of the dipshit Tea Party Congresscritters have spent their entire time in Washington doing nothing but obstruct and oppose--it looks like they don't have a clue how to do anything else with their positions, let alone something constructive and positive. The old guard Republicans seem to have mostly forgotten how to get things done. I guess we'll just have to thank Loki for the disarray that has resulted from all this incompetence and malignant cluelessness.

 

We don't have government right now, we have a bunch of A-holes trying to take down the government from within the government.