COVID-19 & Healthcare

Action Alert: all hands on deck to stop Senate bill to repeal ‘Obamacare’

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The next two weeks are “red alert” critical for you to focus your attention on the GOP attempts to repeal “Obamacare” and to destroy the health insurance market and Medicaid with it. GOP Senate leaders aim to bring health-care legislation to the floor by end of June: “The push has been laden with secrecy — and rank-and-file Republican senators are increasingly frustrated that Mitch McConnell and a small group of GOP aides are crafting a bill behind closed doors.”

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post explains, Why Mitch McConnell’s secrecy gambit on his health-care bill could backfire:

Right now, the Republican leadership in the Senate is undertaking an unprecedented effort to write and pass a bill to remake the entire American health-care system in secret, with not a single hearing or committee markup and with its details kept hidden even from many Republican senators. This plan was devised by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who is widely respected for his strategic acumen even by Democrats who believe he has a bottomless void where his soul ought to be.

But is it possible that McConnell’s plan will backfire?

I’ll explain why that might happen in a moment, but it’s important to understand that the secrecy with which this bill is being crafted is a tacit admission on Republicans’ part that its likely effects on Americans’ health care and financial security are so gruesome that it must be kept hidden until the last possible moment, lest the public have time to understand what’s in it.

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Trump speedbump to Senate repeal of ‘Obamacare’

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Last month President Trump hosted a kegger party in the White House Rose Garden to cheer the passage of the American Health Care Act with House members.

Trump said “What we have is something that is very, very, incredibly well-crafted.”

The president also promised to get it through the Senate.

“It’s going to be an unbelievable victory when we get it through the Senate, and there’s so much spirit there,” Trump said.

That was then, this is now. Yesterday, Trump calls House health bill that he celebrated in the Rose Garden ‘mean’:

President Trump told Republican senators Tuesday that the House GOP health-care bill was “mean” and he expects the Senate to “improve” the legislation considerably, according to several Republicans familiar with the gathering.

The meeting came as Senate Republicans were struggling to build support for their health-care rewrite among conservatives who are concerned that the legislation is drifting too far to the left.

Trump’s labeling of the House bill as “mean” was a significant shift of tone that followed months of private and public negotiations, during which he called the bill “great” and urged GOP lawmakers to vote for it. Following the House vote, Trump hosted an event in the Rose Garden to celebrate its passage.

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Evil GOP Bastards plot the destruction of health care in secret – call your senators

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The Beltway conventional wisdom was that the awful Zombie Trumpcare bill passed by the House was dead on arrival in the Senate, and senators would draft a more favorable bill to appeal to mythical moderate senators. Or the “Obamacare” repeal effort would die in the Senate.

Beltway conventional wisdom is almost always wrong, however, because the pundits always ignore the iron law of GOP politics: the mythical moderates always cave to the radical conservatives. That’s what makes them”mythical,” moderate Tea-Publicans do not actually exist.

Sarah Kliff reports at Vox.com, Obamacare is in real danger:

The Affordable Care Act is in deep trouble — in Washington and large swaths of the country.

Senate Republicans began to coalesce around the framework of a plan to repeal and replace the law last week. Their plan would, like the bill the House passed in May, almost certainly cause millions of low-income Americans to lose coverage by ending the Medicaid expansion. It would help the young and healthy at the expense of the older and the sick.

Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (Texas) told reporters this past week that the Senate bill will overlap the House bill by as much as 70 or 80 percent.

Meanwhile, across the nation, health insurance plans are beginning to flee the Obamacare marketplace. They’ve cited the uncertainty around the health care law’s future, sown by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration. The number of counties with zero health plans signed up to sell 2018 coverage keeps growing.

The possibility that Republicans will repeal Obamacare or drive it into collapse is an increasingly real one. That’s a reality where millions fewer have health insurance and lower-income Americans struggle to afford coverage.

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Evil GOP bastards are still trying to destroy health care — contact your senators

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While everyone is distracted today with James Comey laying the predicate for an obstruction of justice charge against Donald Trump (and any co-conspirators), keep your eye on Congress because the evil GOP bastards (right) are still busy trying to take health care away from 24 million Americans and to destabilize the health insurance market for everyone else, with less coverage and higher premiums.

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos writes, McConnell starts fast-track process for Trumpcare in the Senate:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) began the procedure Wednesday for fast-tracking Trumpcare to get it to the floor with a minimum of transparency and a maximum of pressure.

McConnell began the process under what is known as Rule 14, according to the Senate minority whip’s office, to allow a repeal bill to be put directly on the Senate calendar so that it is available for a floor vote when Republicans are ready to vote on it. The move comes as GOP senators continue their closed-door meetings to hash out a deal that would secure the 50 votes they’ll need to pass legislation dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which they they are pushing through a process known as reconciliation that avoids a Democratic filibuster.

Rule 14 allows a bill to bypass committees and be sent directly to the floor, without going through normal procedural requirements, like the two-day availability of a committee report prior to floor consideration. The one thing McConnell has to do is get a Congressional Budget Office score before a vote. Former Sen. Harry Reid’s Chief of Staff, Adam Jentleson (who knows McConnell as well as anyone on the Hill) agrees with our speculation that McConnell is following the Ryan model—push this thing through as fast as he can, pressuring his conference to get the 50 votes he needs.

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About that questionable HHS report on ‘Obamacare’ premiums

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Last week Flagstaff’s Arizona Daily Sun published this “feature” article and “editor’s pick” from Cronkite News Service. HHS: Arizona premiums under Obamacare almost tripled since 2013:

Health insurance premiums nearly tripled in Arizona between 2013 and 2017, the fourth-biggest increase among the 39 states that participated in healthcare.gov, according to new data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Arizona’s 190 percent increase meant a monthly premium increase of about $400 to a consumer in the state, to $611, under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The average monthly increase for all marketplace states was 105 percent, or $244, according to the HHS numbers released this week.

But here’s the tell:

The report does not mention the tax credits that many low- and middle-income consumers received under Obamacare, which made the coverage affordable for many.

“Republicans quickly seized on the HHS numbers to support what they say is the urgent need to replace the Affordable Care Act.”

The editors of the Arizona Daily Sun really owe it to their readers to publish this explainer from the LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik, which puts this questionable HHS report into proper perspective. Trump’s team issues a stunningly dishonest study of Obamacare rate increases:

The Department of Health and Human Services seemed mightily pleased with a statistic it issued Tuesday. The agency’s figures showed that premiums on the Affordable Care Act exchanges “doubled” from 2013 through this year.

This might not sound like good news for the people buying their coverage on those exchanges, but to HHS it was vindication. “This report is a sobering reminder of why reforming our healthcare system remains a top priority of the Trump administration,” agency spokesperson Alleigh Marré said.

Actually, it’s a sobering reminder of something completely different: the Trump administration’s stunning dishonesty about the ACA. That’s shown by the HHS statistic in two ways. First, the agency cherry-picked its time frame to make the premium increases under the ACA look much worse than they are. Second, the agency ignored the effect of Obamacare’s subsidies, which for many buyers has reduced the premium increases to zero.

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