A new report argues that the Republican health law would slash jobs and perhaps trigger a recession.
So how would Trump and his job-creating party feel about a law that costs a million jobs over the next decade and decreases total business activity by hundreds of billions over the same time period?
.. the AHCA would slash total jobs by about a million, total state gross domestic products by $93 billion, and total business output by $148 billion by 2026. Most of those jobs would be shed from the health-care industry, which would contract severely over that frame. Most of the losses in economic activity would come in states that have expanded Medicaid to low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act.
.. This report suggests a net loss of about 700,000 jobs in the health-care sector alone.
.. This report suggests a net loss of about 700,000 jobs in the health-care sector alone.
.. Those contradictions might not matter for the prospects of the law’s passage, though, since it is front-loaded with economic sweeteners that should benefit Republicans in the all-important next two elections.
.. might include provisions like a delay of Medicaid cuts and a restructuring of tax credits that will soften the long-term economic blow of the law.
How the Republican Coward Caucus is about to sell out its own constituents — in secret
a repeal bill so monumental in its cruelty that they feel they have no choice but to draft it in secret, not let the public know what it does, hold not a single hearing or committee markup, slip it in a brown paper package to the Congressional Budget Office, then push it through to a vote before the July 4th recess before the inevitable backlash gets too loud.
“We aren’t stupid,” one GOP Senate aide told Caitlin Owens — they know what would happen if they made their bill public.
.. Today, we learned that in a break with longstanding precedent, “Senate officials are cracking down on media access, informing reporters on Tuesday that they will no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission.” Everyone assumes that it’s so those senators can avoid having to appear on camera being asked uncomfortable questions about a bill that is as likely to be as popular as Ebola.
.. This is how a party acts when it is ashamed of what it is about to do to the American people. Yet all it would take to stop this abomination is for three Republicans to stand up to their party’s leaders and say, “No — I won’t do this to my constituents.” With only a 52-48 majority in the Senate, that would kill the bill. But right now, it’s looking as though this Coward Caucus is going to be unable to muster the necessary courage.
.. Take Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a state where over 175,000 people have gotten insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion... Last week The Hill reported that Capito now supports eliminating the expansion after all — just doing it over seven years instead of the three years that the House bill required...Or how about Ohio’s Rob Portman? In his state, 700,000 people gained insurance as a result of the Medicaid expansion... They’d pay for the slower elimination of the expansion by cutting money out of the existing program, so they could get rid of all of the ACA’s tax increases.. — over half of Medicaid dollars go to the elderly and disabled... That means that they aren’t just undoing the ACA; they’re making things substantially worse for tens of millions of America’s most vulnerable citizens than they were even before the ACA passed... And they’re hoping they can do all this before anyone realizes what they’re up to, making this an act of both unconscionable heartlessness and epic cowardice. Their efforts to hide what they’re doing show that they are still capable of feeling some measure of shame. But it might not be enough to stop them.
The Innovation Nation versus the Warfare-Welfare State
We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century we need to increase the rate of innovation and to do that we need to put innovation at the center of our national vision. Innovation, however, is not a priority of our massive federal government.
Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. federal budget, $2.2 trillion annually, is spent on just the four biggest warfare and welfare programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Defense and Social Security. In contrast the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research, spends $31 billion annually, and the National Science Foundation spends just $7 billion.
That’s me writing at The Atlantic drawing on Launching the Innovation Renaissance. Here is one more bit
Our ancestors were bold and industrious–they built a significant portion of our energy and road infrastructure more than half a century ago. It would be almost impossible to build that system today. Could we build the Hoover Dam today? We have the technology but do we have the will?
The Republicans’ War on Medicaid
as incomes have stagnated and health-care costs have accelerated, Medicaid has turned into an essential support mechanism for millions of Americans who can’t be classed as poverty-stricken, strictly speaking, but who also can’t afford to bear the costs of private health coverage.
.. 74.6 million people were enrolled in plans supported by Medicaid or its sibling, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. That’s more than one in five of the U.S. population.
.. sixty per cent of all nursing-home residents now receive some sort of assistance from Medicaid.
Kids are also big beneficiaries: Medicaid and chip now help to provide medical coverage for about a third of all the children in America.
.. the Party doesn’t merely want to roll back the Obamacare reforms; it wants to shrink the entire program, transferring it to the states and imposing tight caps on the payments they receive from the federal government.
.. the bill would reduce over-all federal spending on health care by about $1.1 trillion over ten years. Of that,
- eight hundred and thirty-four billion dollars—fully three-quarters of the savings—would come from cuts to Medicaid.
.. spending on Medicaid would be reduced by a quarter compared to current spending. In the same time period, the number of people covered by Medicaid and chip would fall by about fourteen million
.. Donald Trump appeared to understand this when, from the beginning of his campaign, he promised not to cut Medicaid.
.. If you view the modern G.O.P. as basically a mechanism to protect the wealthy, Medicaid is an obvious target for the Party.
.. recent expansion was financed partly by an increase in taxes on the richest households in the country.
.. They also dislike that it’s working. As medical costs have risen and the private sector has failed to cover an increasing number of Americans, the Medicaid and chip programs have filled some of the coverage gap, and have done so relatively cheaply.
.. For any politician who loathes government interventions in the economy, and whose real goal is to head off socialized medicine, the expansion of Medicaid represents a serious threat.
.. Here is an embryonic single-payer system that is growing fast and could be further expanded pretty easily. That means it has to be crippled now, before it gets more firmly established.