Because I don’t think it really has anything to do with health care. I think it’s just the redistribution of wealth, the power.
.. Well, what do you think liberalism is, in part? About making these people feel good about the messes that they’ve made, all because they care and they have great compassion. And they’re great at using other people’s money, which is what Medicaid and Medicare are, to take care of people and keep ’em away from you. If put everyone on Medicaid and Medicare then you can assume they’re gonna have health care, problem solved. You don’t have to hear them complain anymore, you don’t see ’em, you don’t run into ’em.
.. it seems simple to fix this. Just use a little common sense, trust the free market, get the players that have made the mess out of the way
.. Trump is probably finding out just how deeply intertwined the tentacles of this are throughout our society.
.. And what happens when you remove one tentacle? Yeah. And then you find six more pop up that you didn’t know were there. That nobody knew were there, is how deeply embedded some of this stuff is.
.. Providing health care for people with preexisting conditions is the equivalent of selling somebody a homeowner’s policy for a hundred dollars while the fire is burning their house down. It just doesn’t happen, yet in health care we’re doing it. And it screws up all of the actuarials. It screws up all the calculations, it screws up all the numbers, it screws everything up.
.. I’m just saying that once you include people with preexisting conditions in the pool with everybody else and then you go get premiums based on that, it’s not gonna work. You just can’t do it because you’re not talking insurance on preexisting conditions; you’re talking welfare. And nobody in Washington has the guts to eliminate coverage for preexisting conditions.
.. I have no desire to run anybody else’s life. I don’t care whether somebody can run theirs or not; that’s their responsibility and their problem.
.. I do not live under any illusions that I should tell everybody how to live.
.. My health care reform plan is real simple. For everybody who can, and we would have to have a very, very honest assessment of that, you buy your own. You can either get it from your employer as part of your deal there, or you don’t and you go out and make your own deal. You’ll be able to make your own deal because the government’s not involved and there are insurance companies all over this country selling health insurance, and they’re competing with one another
.. “But Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbaugh, what about the people that can’t afford it?”
.. Well, what’s made it different today than the way it was then? And I would argue it’s a bunch of people dipping their hands in it and being involved in it who are not in the business. Trying to buy votes with it, trying to insure and secure power with it and trying to basically tell people, “You know what? You don’t have to be responsible. We’ll do that for you. Just vote for us.”
.. if it’s this bad, how in the world can the people in charge of it not know it’s this bad? If it is this bad, then why do the Republicans want to hand power back to the Democrats? Why do the Republicans want to hurt Trump’s base?
.. this bill makes it illegal to check an enrollee’s immigration status. You ask why would they do that? Well, well, we’re talking about the open borders crowd. We’re talking about a party that’s been telling us for the last 10 years they don’t think they will ever become a political majority without paying homage to Hispanics.
.. They’ll hire actors to portray these old people and indigents who’ve been left behind. That’s just what they do.
.. to compare subsidies and tax credits is purposefully misleading, and you can’t compare the value. They each have different political values and so forth, but tax credits end up — that’s money you get a credit for on your tax, you don’t pay as much, so that leaves you with more money to spend theoretically shopping for a better deal on health care. Subsidies just help you pay for something. You never see the subsidy, somebody else writes the check or sends the money or what have you.
.. one of the new CEOs, it was either General Motors or Ford took over and after about six weeks this guy said, “I thought I was getting in the business to make and sell cars. I didn’t know I was getting into the health care business.”
Because his job, the number one cost at his automobile manufacturing company was health care for his employees.
.. make it single payer, where nobody worries about cost except they theoretically do as they ration and deny certain people, but in reality they don’
.. If employers are going to be given tax credits for the health insurance they buy for their employees, why shouldn’t individuals get it? Why shouldn’t it become a deductible item?
.. Tax credits end up you having a little bit more money in your back pocket, which, if we’re gonna start applying degrees of conservatism, that’s a pretty conservative thing to do, have a policy where people get to keep more of their money in this.
.. So how can the Democrats complain about tax credits for the self-employed? Poets, painters, and that’s who Pelosi talked about. Free from job lock so you can become a poet, so you could become a painter.
.. Job lock, as though everybody was locked in a job they didn’t want because they needed the health care. So Obamacare was gonna come along and free you from all that.
.. people like Obama, Hillary, they love subsidies because it makes you dependent. You never see the money.
Coal Country Is a State of Mind
For coal country isn’t really coal country anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time.
.. But the number of miners began a steep decline after World War II, and especially after 1980, even though coal production continued to rise. This was mainly because modern extraction techniques — like blowing the tops off mountains — require far less labor than old-fashioned pick-and-shovel mining. The decline accelerated about a decade ago as the rise of fracking led to competition from cheap natural gas.
.. it has been a quarter century since they accounted for as much as 5 percent of total employment.
.. Their Trump votes weren’t even about the region’s interests; they were about cultural symbolism.
.. Donald Trump successfully pandered to cultural nostalgia
Why does Trump keep making promises he can’t keep? The secret lies in his past.
the location provided a vivid case study in the dangers Trump will face as time goes on. This early in his presidency, he can still talk about the glittering future he’ll deliver. But at some point, he’ll have to reckon with what his policies have actually done and failed to do.
Trump is applying to governing the same theory that worked quite well for him in his business career. But the rules have already changed for him.
.. the Republican health-care bill will save Americans from the catastrophe of the Affordable Care Act. But it’s an odd thing to say in Kentucky, which may have fared better than any other state under the ACA. The state accepted the law’s expansion of Medicaid and saw an additional 443,000 of its citizens — a full 10 percent of the state’s population — get health coverage at no cost. The state also launched its own ACA exchange, Kynect, which was one of the most successful in the country. According to Gallup, the uninsured rate fell from 20.4 percent in 2013 before the law took effect down to 7.8
.. But hey, who needs Medicaid or subsidized health coverage if you’ve got a great job mining coal, where salaries are high and benefits are comprehensive? Trump repeated that promise, too — that once we get rid of some environmental regulations, all those coal jobs will come back:
.. In his particular corner of the business world, you really can create wealth just by managing public perception — or at least he could. This was the theory of his entire career
.. When he conned someone, like the attendees of Trump University, no matter how unhappy they were he could move on to other marks
.. It was a big world, and there were always other people who might be taken in by the next scam. But in politics, you have to go back to the people you made promises to the first time around, and ask them to put their faith in you again.
.. it’s obvious that Trump looks at his first legislative priority much like one of his buildings: What matters is that people think it’s the tallest one around, even if it isn’t. He doesn’t seem to know or care much about what’s in the GOP’s bill to repeal the ACA or what the effects would be. It’s just about getting a win one way or the other.
.. he met with congressional Republicans not to discuss the content of the bill, but to cajole and threaten them into voting for it. He told Mark Meadows, head of the far-right Freedom Caucus, to stand up while he told him, “I’m gonna come after you, but I know I won’t have to, because I know you’ll vote ‘yes.’ ” (Meadows says he’s still voting no.)
.. So what happens when Trump goes back to Kentucky in three years, and he has taken away voters’ health coverage but didn’t manage to bring back the coal jobs of yesteryear?
Close Trump friend says ditch Paul Ryan’s plan and embrace universal health care
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy calls for Medicaid for all.
A key Trump friend and ally is urging the president to dump Paul Ryan’s Affordable Health Care Act and embrace something that sounds sort of like a lightweight version of a single-payer health care system.
.. Reject the phony private health insurance market as the panacea. Look to an upgraded Medicaid system to become the country’s blanket insurer for the uninsured.
.. Get Democrats to agree to modest tort reform to help lower medical costs.
.. Yet despite the program’s limitations, the evidence is overwhelming that people who receive Medicaid like it.
Indeed, surveys tend to show that people who obtained Obamacare coverage via Medicaid are happier with their coverage than those who get subsidized private insurance on the new marketplaces.
.. But Trump really did campaign on a promise of universal coverage. And as he told CBS’s Scott Pelley back during the primary, “the government’s gonna pay for it.”