Will The GOP HealthCare Bill Pass the Senate?

Chris P

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Tonight, about 3000 (wild guess) of us marched around the capitol to protest the Senate bill at an event organized by Planned Parenthood. The short march ended with several speakers, including members of the Senate.

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Meanwhile, a couple hundred more people took part in a faith-based event opposing the bill on moral/ethical/religious grounds on the Capitol lawn. Many people participated in both.

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For those who are writing letters on this or other issues, I got a good tip at a town hall earlier this week: focus on specific events in your life related to the issue. For me, I was on Medicaid when I was unemployed two years ago, and Medicaid paid for my pre-employment physical when I finally got offered a job. Cuts would have forced me to pay for this physical out of pocket, which will make many people's journey to employment that much harder.

The speaker at the town hall said it is those types of stories that get read and make a difference.
 
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MaeZe

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White House press conference today, note the ACA framing change from Mnuchin:

The ACA was a tax on the economy, led to slow growth. So now the rich people are the economy.

"Giant tax hike to the economy"

The POV that taxes are always a drain on the economy is pure unsupportable bullshit.

Out of the other side of his mouth, Mnuchin assures us something to the effect, "we will never put economic concerns over the health of people". That he says that with a smile on his face is all the more disgusting.
 
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MaeZe

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REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS BUY HEALTH INSURANCE STOCKS AS REPEAL EFFORT MOVES FORWARD

JUST AS THE HOUSE Republican bill to slash much of the Affordable Care Act moved forward, Rep. Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican and member of Speaker Paul Ryan’s leadership team, added a health insurance company to his portfolio....

He wasn’t the only one. As the health care system overhaul advanced last month on the other side of Capitol Hill, Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma purchased between $50,000 to $100,000 in UnitedHealth stock. ...

[Backstory] ... Congress eventually acted with the STOCK Act, legislation designed to curb insider trading abuses. But the law was quickly watered down with amendments, and some provisions of it were later repealed. As we’ve reported, the House of Representatives has actively fought efforts to enforce the law after the Securities and Exchange Commission attempted to investigate one congressional staffer accused of passing health care information to a set of hedge funds.

I hope not, but I fear this is a sign Congressional insiders expect the ACA to be repealed.
 

Brightdreamer

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MaeZe

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It's not just "now". Throughout my lifetime this has been true, in the mindset of the GOP.

caw

I don't agree at all. I was being sarcastic. We are the economy, we work, we buy, we pay taxes. The rich mostly skim off the benefits (with many individual exceptions).
 

MaeZe

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Kasich spokesman: Pence’s healthcare claims ‘false’
The false assertion:
“I know Gov. Kasich isn’t with us, but I suspect that he’s very troubled to know that in Ohio alone, nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck on waiting lists, leaving them without the care they need for months or even years,” Pence said in a speech Friday at the National Governors Association summer meeting in Providence, R.I.

VP Pence made a fake news claim today and has been called on it by multiple sources including GOP governor Kasich.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich's (R) office has flatly rejected Vice President Pence's claim that nearly 60,000 disabled Ohioans are on waiting lists for Medicaid’s home and community-based services.

Not to mention all the GOP bill would so is make said waiting lists longer.
According to the Post, waiting lists for such Medicaid services are common and are typically longer in states that did not take ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion than in those that did.

Ohio was among a number of Republican-controlled states that took the ACA's Medicaid expansion, which dramatically expanded the number of people who qualify for the program.

Senate GOP leaders' healthcare bill – the Better Care Reconciliation Act – calls for deep cuts to Medicaid, prompting some more moderate Republican members to voice misgivings about the measure.


VP Pence spreading ‘fake news’ about Ohio
About a week after the White House spread misinformation about Ohio’s Medicaid program, Vice President Mike Pence falsely said Friday that 60,000 Ohioans are going without care because of the state’s Medicaid expansion.

That prompted Kasich’s press secretary, Jon Keeling, to tweet: “That’s what we call #fakenews.” Keeling included a link to The Dispatch’s Capital Insider column from last Sunday citing state Medicaid data to refute an article cited by the White House. In what “the West Wing is reading,” the inaccurate piece said that after expanding Medicaid, Ohio “rolled back eligibility for some 34,000 seniors and individuals with disabilities as a cost-cutting measure.”

Medicaid officials also said there was no truth to a separate claim about recipients of Ohio’s Medicaid expansion “being put ahead of 60,000 disabled Ohioans who rely on Medicaid but are currently on a waiting list.”...

Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said the vice president’s source was a Wall Street Journal editorial July 7 slamming Kasich, even questioning whether he was still a Republican because of his stance on Medicaid. The editorial said, “Nearly 60,000 disabled Ohioans are on waiting lists that last for months or years to receive supplemental state services.”

Those Ohioans, however, are on a list seeking Medicaid waivers, mostly for home- and community-based services for the developmentally disabled. The number of people who can be served via the waivers is restricted, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act Participatory Action Research Consortium. ...

But Kaiser itself analyzed the data and concluded “there does not appear to be a relationship between a state’s Medicaid expansion status and changes in its ... waiver waiting list.” Kaiser noted that about 40 percent did not qualify for a waiver when they signed up for one, while as many as 90 percent of those with certain types of disabilities already are getting some form of non-waiver Medicaid help.

The foundation also learned that waiting lists in non-expansion states are often longer than those in expansion states.
 

regdog

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I wasn't surprised by Pence's stunt. Kaisch has been very public in his condemnation of the bill and this was that Administrations way of attacking him for it. Lie about what's happening to make Ohio and by default Kaisch look bad and I bet they hoped they'd panic people in Ohio.
 

MaeZe

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Two more GOP no votes announced, bill can't get to the floor. :hooray:

GOP Sens. Jerry Moran (Kansas) and Mike Lee (Utah) announced on Monday night they will not support taking up a bill repealing and replacing ObamaCare, effectively blocking the legislation.

"This closed-door process has yielded the [bill], which fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address healthcare’s rising costs. For the same reasons I could not support the previous version of this bill, I cannot support this one," Moran said in a statement.

Lee added on Twitter that he and Moran will not support proceeding to "this version" of the Senate GOP legislation, known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act.
Never thought I'd be welcoming the extreme-right view but that appears to be how the vote is going, three far-right-wing no votes, one GOP moderate no vote.
 
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William Haskins

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it's dead for now.

interestingly, the votes they couldn't get came from three fringes of the party: collins the moderate, paul the libertarian, lee to the far right.
 

rugcat

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it's dead for now.

interestingly, the votes they couldn't get came from three fringes of the party: collins the moderate, paul the libertarian, lee to the far right.
This is not original with me, but I think now that no single republican senator will be seen as the villain who would be responsible for killing the bill, a bunch more of those "undecideds" are going to recognize which way the wind is blowing and come out against it as well.

I don't think for a moment the Republicans are going to abandon the attempt to repeal the ACA, however. If they have to start over from scratch, that's what they'll do. Will they give up the cuts to Medicaid and work with Democrats to improve the ACA without repealing it? That would be the sensible thing, but somehow I don't see it.
 

blacbird

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it's dead for now.

interestingly, the votes they couldn't get came from three fringes of the party: collins the moderate, paul the libertarian, lee to the far right.

This also makes it easier for the wishywashies like Murkowski to just say No, as well.

caw

addendum: She did exactly what I just predicted she'd do.
 
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shakeysix

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Laughing because a dear friend of mine called Jerry Moran at home over the recess. He hung up on her. Nothing startling. They go back years. -He hears from her often. We had a long ranting phone call about him just days ago. Now he is not voting for Trumpcare. They say he got an earful in western Kansas. I'd like to think my 77 year old horse- riding, liberal, blue eyed Kiowa friend was the straw that broke his back. --s6
 

MaeZe

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The hard-core right wing of the GOP have changed their talking point to "we were elected to repeal Obamacare".

Just drop 'replace' and pretend repeal is what you campaigned on all along. Pretend you never claimed to have a magical replacement plan. Pretend the public hates the ACA despite the fact 50% support it and that number is even higher if you ask about the ACA rather than Obamacare despite the fact they are one in the same.

In the meantime sabotage is the name of the game.

Pro-ACA website: GOP Blocks ObamaCare Cost Sharing for 7 Million in Courts
The GOP is using a tactic called “starving the beast”, what that means is that, instead of trying to repeal a law directly, they try to defund it and break it. Then, over time, as the pain gets to great for America, America demands the law’s repeal. It is a hardline, but viable tactic.

Trying to dismantle programs in this way is a messy process. The way the branches of government work, lawsuits must be brought to the Judicial branch via the court system. Even then, they can only rule, they can’t correct or create laws themselves.

There are a bunch of right-wing law firms and think tanks that organize these lawsuits. And that is what we mean when we say GOP-backed lawsuit.

So far GOP-backed lawsuits:

Made it so states could opt-out of Medicaid expansion (leaving millions of sick and working poor without coverage). NFIB V. Burwell.
Tried to gut subsidies and make it so no one had premium cost assistance. King V. Burwell.
Tried to make it so employers could override their employee’s right to contraception. This happened in a number of different cases, including the Hobby Lobby case.
Tried to repeal the law about 60 times and replace it with tax cuts for big businesses (instead of spending cuts or a better healthcare plan).
Paul Ryan might be a “real conservative”, and there might be some great ideology on the right, but in practice they act like they just let the far-right (who overtook their party going into the Eisenhower years, and the rest that routed from the Democrats in 1964) overrun their party. They have become the party of obstruction, and obstruction is a nice word for crony capitalists who seek to destroy legislation that helps the working poor and middle class without replacing it in a meaningful way.

Going after assistance wasn’t the only way to starve the beast of the ACA, but they picked the low hanging fruit and may spill some blood in the process.

The Atlantic, last May: A Legal Victory Against Obamacare—for Now
At issue in the case, House of Representatives v. Burwell, is Section 1402 of the ACA, which requires insurance companies in the ACA’s exchanges to reduce co-payments and deductibles in their plans. The reductions effectively shift those costs from the customer to the insurer.

Section 1402 then allows the federal government to provide “periodic and timely” reimbursements to insurers “equal to the value of the reductions,” thereby shifting the costs from the insurer to the federal government itself.

When Congress passed the act, however, it did not explicitly appropriate funds for those reimbursements. The Obama administration implemented it by drawing upon funds appropriated for Section 1401, which subsidizes health insurance for low-income taxpayers through a tax credit.

In its lawsuit, the House argued Section 1402 could not be funded through Section 1401’s tax credit. Obama administration officials countered that context and legislative history justifies their implementation of it, and that it made no logical sense for Congress to draft the provision without implicitly authorizing funds for it. Judge Rosemary Collyer in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with the legislators.

“The Affordable Care Act unambiguously appropriates money for Section 1401 premium tax credits but not for Section 1402 reimbursements to insurers,” Collyer wrote in her opinion. “Such an appropriation cannot be inferred. None of Secretaries’ extra-textual arguments—whether based on economics, ‘unintended’ results, or legislative history—is persuasive.”

Without Obama, how long with this last?
Collyer stayed her ruling while the Obama administration challenges it in D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing the reimbursements to continue for now.

This is the reason some insurers have pulled out of some markets. Their financing is uncertain.


I had to turn off Trump TV a few minutes ago. His speech about the evils of the ACA and the evils of Obama, one need not listen to Trump's bullshit to know what it was he was going to say. It only depresses me.
 

regdog

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DJT is obsessed with destroying everything Obama did. Maybe we should have had Obama build the wall and DJT would have it torn down.
 

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The GOP has skewered itself on its own pitchfork with this episode. They began to get into trouble on the issue because they were only listening to the ubervocal right-wing base, and deluding themselves into thinking that group represented the public as a whole. Once the bill, designed in deep secret, got released, the overall public reaction was predictably negative. So Republicans are left with Now what? And, of course, the Blamer-in-Chief is doing is all to piss off even his own party's Senators. Watching this is going to be fun.

caw
 

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Fun, except that now the GOP is likely to work (even more) systematically to sabotage the ACA, and revive the repeal attempt later when more people have decided that the (GOP-sabotaged) ACA sucks.

There's really very little upside, if any, to these jokers being in charge.
 

rugcat

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Today Donald Trump gave a speech in which he explained how Obamacare was destroying the country, and as a photo op had a group of people behind him as an example of some of those whose lives have been destroyed by Obamacare.

Interesting optics – no people of color, (except for a little Asian girl with white parents) and judging by the well-dressed, well coiffed, squeaky clean adults and children, they didn't appear to be particularly poor people either. This was not a coincidence – they're exactly the backdrop for people he was speaking to. I found it oddly creepy.

 

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To be fair, I don't know if I'd judge how well-off people are who know they're going to be standing behind the president during a televised speech/photo-op by their clothes and cleanliness. You take a shower, you spend more time on your hair, you borrow a suit or dress. Or perhaps the White House provides hair, clothing, and make-up to create the image they want behind the president in a photo.
 

Brightdreamer

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Is anyone honestly surprised by McCain's party-line-toeing vote contradicting his critical words? This is his established MO. The trivial detail of his recent diagnosis doesn't change his adherence to a party bound and determined to see the average American die in the name of corporate profit.

As for the second bit, I'm getting whiplash trying to follow the news, here... so I will probably curl up in a corner for a while, hoping against hope the absolute worst doesn't happen. (Didn't work in November, but there's a first time for everything...)
 

regdog

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The Republicans have been trying to kill the ACA since it was passed. Time to try something new. Why don't they put forth a bill to amend and repair the ACA and see how that goes.