compromise bill, worked out over several weeks of negotiations between two Republicans: Mark Meadows, a North Carolinian and the head of the right-wing Freedom Caucus; and Tom MacArthur, a New Jerseyan who is co-chair of the Tuesday Group
.. The compromise negotiations laid bare the simple dynamics of health care among Republicans: every action to add votes on the right loses votes in the center.
.. Dent also opposes how the compromise bill would allow states to deregulate insurance markets to allow insurers to deny coverage to people with preëxisting medical conditions. The preëxisting-conditions provision was a core part of Obamacare, and it was one of the few provisions of the law that Trump and Republican leaders promised to retain.
.. And, if the bill were to change in the Senate, there’s a possibility that the Freedom Caucus will abandon the effort all over again.
.. in the Senate, where, among both Republicans and Democrats, the Freedom Caucus is held in low regard.
.. If Obamacare repeal officially dies, Dent said that Trump has one other option: “Start over, deal with health care from the center out, and work with some Democrats.”
GOP Health-Care Push Falls Short Again
House Republicans fail to round up enough votes to pass legislation before Trump’s 100-day mark
GOP lawmakers’ hopes had risen this week when Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.) introduced an amendment that won over many of the House’s most conservative Republicans.
.. “Protections for those with pre-existing conditions without contingency and affordable access to coverage for every American remain my priorities for advancing health-care reform, and this bill does not satisfy those benchmarks for me,”
.. The bill also would significantly cut spending for Medicaid, a major concern of centrist Republicans in both the House and Senate.
.. With federal waivers, states could let insurers charge higher premiums to some people with pre-existing conditions. That would apply only to people who had let their coverage lapse, a measure that aims to ensure people stay insured. And the higher premiums would generally only last for about 12 months before decreasing.
.. House leaders had argued that GOP lawmakers in tight races next year would benefit from having kept their repeated campaign pledges to repeal the ACA.
“We promised that we would do this,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) said Thursday. “If you violate your promise, if you commit the sin of hypocrisy in politics, that’s the greater risk, I think, to a person’s seat.”
The Balloon, the Box and Health Care
In particular, if you want to make care available to Americans who have pre-existing medical conditions — including the condition of being not rich and being relatively old, but not yet eligible for Medicare — you have to find some way to subsidize them.
Obamacare provides those subsidies in part with direct public funding, in part with regulations that implicitly use premiums paid by the healthy to cover the cost of caring for the less healthy.
.. The important thing to remember is that these problems don’t keep popping up because the people devising the plans are careless, and keep forgetting crucial issues. They’re popping up because the G.O.P. is trying to stuff a big balloon into a small box, and every time you squeeze it somewhere it inflates someplace else.
And because the task Republicans have set for themselves is basically impossible, their ongoing debacle over health care isn’t about political tactics or leadership. Even if Donald Trump were the great deal maker he claims to be, or Paul Ryan the policy wonk he poses as, this thing just can’t work.
.. There are some things we could do that would probably make it even cheaper, but they would all involve moving left — say, introducing a public option, or going all the way to single-payer.
.. If Republicans never had a plausible alternative to Obamacare, if this debacle was so inevitable, what was the constant refrain of “repeal and replace” all about?
The answer, surely, is that it began as a cynical ploy; at first, the Republicans hoped to kill health reform before it really got started. And now they’ve trapped themselves: They can’t admit that they have no ideas without, in effect, admitting that they were lying all along.
The Aspects of Health-Care Reform Republicans Don’t Like Discussing
Republicans should not hitch their wagon to any single, comprehensive bill, nor should they promise the voters a “Republican health-care plan.” Instead, they should seek to roll out a series of improvements to the health-insurance system, each with its own voting coalitions. That conclusion is supported by two observations. One, many parts of the AHCA were more popular than the bill itself, so the odds of passage — and sustainable entrenchment over time — increase as votes are broken into pieces.
.. But they can’t, any time soon, solve the basic problem, which is pervasive in education and health-care debates these days: The costs have spiraled so far out of the reach of ordinary middle-income people that they’ve despaired of paying for them from their own earnings.
.. I don’t like the fact that Obamacare added 10 to 11 million new people to the Medicaid rolls. But I also don’t think it’s wise, fair, or good to yank Medicaid coverage away from these people without a reliable way to move them to alternative affordable private coverage. This doesn’t make for good table-founding talk radio or cable news segments, but it is a fact of life.
.. The Republican answer can’t be, “don’t worry, with enough competition amongst different insurers, you’ll find a plan with premiums, co-pays, and deductibles that you can afford someday, maybe in about ten years, based on the CBO score.”
The French Elites, Comfortable with American Elites’ Playbook from 2016
.. The prospect of a Le Pen presidency upsets a kind of political positivism: the view that democracy can go only from good to better, from being a necessity to being a right. Ms. Le Pen’s election would run counter to the course of history, the reasoning goes, and therefore it cannot be.
Fox News’s Steady Nurturing of a Certain Kind of Right
.. When much of Fox News de facto backed Trump, midway through the primary season, it could hardly come as a shock: It was already obvious that the same type of person Fox had targeted for 20 years was likely to be an ardent Trump supporter.
.. Tomi Lahren, a former host on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, was attempting to re-create the glib, pugnacious Fox News model for a younger audience.
.. I recall a somewhat similar generational split in 2011 when easily forgotten presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexual harassment and affairs. Prominent conservative voices of the Baby Boomer generation were quick to insist the accusers had to be lying and this was all part of a smear campaign by liberals. Generation-X conservative writers weren’t so eager to rush to the ramparts to insist there was no way Cain would behave badly.
.. It seemed to the older voices, Cain was “one of us” and thus deserved to be trusted and defended on faith; the younger voices weren’t quite so certain that “one of us” couldn’t possibly have done something wrong. They remembered John Ensign, Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Bob Packwood…