Governors, gubernatorial candidates and state legislators, meanwhile, will be asked whether they intend to “opt out” of provisions in the Affordable Care Act that are overwhelmingly popular with voters, as is permitted under the Republican plan. Their plans for state Medicaid programs also will be scrutinized if massive GOP cuts to Medicaid funding are realized.
.. I can’t recall a vote this significant in terms of its political potential in 20 years.”
.. Trump’s political advisers calculated that it was less damaging electorally for congressional Republicans to pass a bill that some of their constituents see as deeply flawed than to have passed nothing at all.
.. Polling shows that the public disagrees with Republican health-care plans. Thirty-seven percent of Americans support repealing and replacing the law known as Obamacare, while 61 percent want to keep it and try to improve it
.. slash Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion and cut nearly $600 billion in taxes under the health-care law, most of which will benefit the wealthiest Americans.
.. the Republican bill would lift that prohibition and give states the option to let insurers charge more for them.
.. Wilson added, “Republicans in the House right now should be on their knees praying for the Senate to kill this,” arguing that the line of attack would be less powerful if the bill does not become law.
.. whether it’s the AARP saying it charges people over 50 five times more, or the American Cancer Society saying it guts protections for preexisting conditions. There’s no real way to defend that to voters.”
Trumpcare 2.0: It’s Even Worse Than the Original
The new version would further tighten the screws on vulnerable Americans by letting insurance companies charge older people and people with pre-existing conditions much higher premiums than they charge younger and healthier people. It would also give insurers the freedom not to cover essential health services like maternity care and cancer treatment.
.. The premium for a 40-year-old earning $30,000 living in Chattanooga, Tenn., would increase by $3,000 under the bill, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
.. The AARP says that 40 percent of those between the ages of 50 and 64, or about 25 million people, have the kinds of pre-existing medical conditions that would put them at risk of losing affordable health insurance under the House bill.
.. Republican lawmakers claim that states could help anybody hurt by their bill by creating high-risk pools with the help of federal grants. But this is a disingenuous argument. Many states operated high-risk pools before the A.C.A., but they ran up large losses and benefited few people.
.. A recent Pew poll found that 60 percent of people say that the government has a responsibility to make sure everybody has health care.
Republicans exempt their own insurance from their latest health care proposal
Obamacare requires all members of Congress and their staff to purchase coverage through the health law’s marketplace, just like Obamacare enrollees. The politics of that plank were simple enough, meant to demonstrate that if the coverage in this law were good enough for Americans, it should be good enough for their representatives in Washington.
That’s been happening for the past four years now. Fast-forward to this new amendment, which would allow states to waive out of key Obamacare protections like the ban on preexisting conditions or the requirement to cover things like maternity care and mental health services... If congressional aides lived in a state that decided to waive these protections, the aides who were sick could presumably be vulnerable to higher premiums than the aides who are healthy. Their benefits package could get skimpier as Obamacare’s essential health benefits requirement may no longer apply either.
The Limbaugh Health Care Reform Plan
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.