COVID-19 & Healthcare

GOP fail on ObamaCare replacement

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EddieMunsterThe GOP’s alleged boy genius, Ayn Rand fanboy and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is The Most Overrated Intellect In Washington. As Paul Krugman said years ago, Ryan is The Flimflam Man.

Having nearly seven years in which to come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare,” this is what boy genius comes up with? The Beltway media should revoke his “very serious person” card and stop speaking to him.

Update: It was seven years ago this month that House Republican leaders began promising to unveil a GOP health-care-reform plan, and for seven years, the party has done nothing except offer vague soundbites and vote several dozen times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, replacing it with nothing. (h/t Steve Benen).

Nancy LeTourneau at the Political Animal Blog writes, Speaker Paul Ryan Goes “Post-Truth” on a Health Care Plan:

To the extent that Republicans have become “post policy,” Speaker Paul Ryan seems to be leading the charge to return them to being “post truth.” In other words, he is attempting to revive the old system of pretending to present policy proposals that help Americans, but really just benefit the 1%ers. Nowhere is that more obvious than with his unveiling today of a GOP plan to replace Obamacare.

There is nothing new in this plan. It contains all of the old standbys Republicans have been talking about for a while now: refundable tax credits, health savings accounts, high risk pools, block-granting Medicaid, a voucher program to replace Medicare, etc. Oh, and as Kevin Drum notes, while we’re at it, lets raise the eligibility age for Medicare to 67. But there are two pretty big things that were not included in this “plan”:

1. No budget information on costs

2. No projections on what it would mean for the 20 million people who have gained insurance under Obamacare.

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U.S. Senate to debate gun regulations on Monday

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There are a number of organizations and media outlets that document mass shootings in America, CNN recently posted Mass shootings in America: The big picture in charts and graphs (snippets):

  • There are more mass shootings in the U.S. than in any other country in the world.
  • While the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, it had 31% of all public mass shootings.
  • According to the Gun Violence Archive, which compiles data from shooting incidents, a “mass shooting” is any incident where four or more people are wounded or killed. That number can include any gunmen as well. By that definition, we’ve seen 136 mass shootings in the first 164 days of this year.
  • The Orlando attack was by far the deadliest shooting in U.S. history (49 killed), and it is not even 10 years removed from the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre (32 killed), and the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting (27 killed). In fact, of the 30 deadliest shootings in the U.S. dating back to 1949, 16 have occurred in the last 10 years.

This week, the American Medical Association (AMA) proclaimed that gun violence is a public health crisis. AMA Calls Gun Violence “A Public Health Crisis”.

But for years, we have had a Congress that is unwilling  or incapable of taking action to address this public health crisis because it is in thrall to the merchants of death, the weapons manufacturers and their lobbyist allies in the National Rifle Association and other so-called “gun rights” organizations.

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John McCain’s bogus ad attacking Ann Kirkpatrick for voting for ‘ObamaCare’

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McCain buttonArizona’s angry old man John McCain is sounding like a broken record again, in a television ad (http://bit.ly/1svTrIg) criticizing Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, the presumptive Democratic nominee, for her 2010 vote in favor of Obamacare. McCain hits Kirkpatrick over Obamacare in TV ad.

McCain’s ad comes at the same time the Huffington Post reported  on the latest coverage figures, by way of the CDC, with which the “McMedia” in Arizona should familiarize itself.

More than 7 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage in 2015, the second full year of the Obamacare coverage expansion, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During the fourth quarter of last year, just 9.1 percent of U.S. residents, or 28.6 million people, had no health coverage, the National Health Interview Survey found. That’s a decline of 2.4 percentage points and 7.4 million people from a year before.

The additional 7.4 million insured builds on the 8.8 million previously uninsured people who got covered in 2014, the first year of the Affordable Care Act’s full benefits.

The full report from the CDC is online here (pdf).

When was the last time more than 90% of Americans had health insurance? As Sarah Kliff at Vox.com explains, 2015 was the first year 90 percent of Americans had health insurance. Thanks, Obama. And Thank you, Ann Kirkpatrick.

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SCOTUS remands birth control cases to lower courts

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SupremeCourtIn the birth control cases challenging the Affordable Care Act mandate for contraceptives collectively known as  Zubik v. Burwell, the U.S. Supreme Court today issued a per curiam decision remanding the cases back to the appellate courts for further consideration based upon the positions taken by the parties at the U.S. Supreme Court. You may recall that the Justices asked for extraordinary additional briefing from the parties after oral argument to urge them to find a consensus on which they could settle the case.

Lyle Denniston reports at SCOTUSblog has the opinion Opinion analysis: A compromise, with real impact, on birth control:

Without settling any legal issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, the Supreme Court on Monday nevertheless cleared the way for the government to promptly provide no-cost access to contraceptives for employees and students of non-profit religious hospitals, charities, and colleges, while barring any penalties on those institutions for failing to provide that access themselves.  Thirteen separate cases were sent back to federal appeals courts for them to issue new rulings on the questions the Justices left undecided.  One immediate issue is how soon the government can work out the technical arrangements to provide actual access to the contraceptive benefits.

The Court largely shifted to six federal appeals courts the task of ruling on the mandate’s legality — the task that the Court had agreed last November to take on itself in seven of the cases.  Five appeals courts had ruled in favor of the mandate, and one had ruled against.  All were ordered to re-think those outcomes in the wake of new positions that the two sides in the controversy had made in recent filings in the pending Supreme Court cases.

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Public pressure rolls GOP leadership on KidsCare; imagine what could be accomplished if you threw these Tea-Publicans out of office in November

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Let’s be clear on these points:

  • Pedi_ExamDemocrats in the Arizona legislature stood united in restoring KidsCare to an estimated 30,000 Arizona children. Democrats provided the core of the votes needed to pass restoration of KidsCare. Kudos!
  • Governor Doug Ducey and Tea-Publican legislative leaders did not include KidsCare in the GOP budget passed earlier this week, and the Governor never advocated on behalf of the KidsCare program. The Governor eventually signed the bill that included KidsCare restoration only under public pressure, and only to mitigate the public relations disaster that KidsCare restoration had become for him. Governor Ducey deserves absolutely no credit. Period.
  • Tea-Publican leadership in the House and Senate got rolled by public pressure to pass KidsCare restoration. The handful of GOP defectors does not mitigate the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Tea-Publican Caucus stood ideologically, some virulently opposed to restoration of KidsCare.
  • Tea-Publican leaders are already threatening to file a lawsuit to overturn the KidsCare restoration, just as they are currently in court seeking to overturn the Medicaid (AHCCCS) expansion bill from two years ago, both overwhelmingly supported by the public.

The Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required) reports, Ducey signs KidsCare children’s health insurance bill:

Arizona is going to restore a program it shelved six years ago to provide health care to the children of the working poor.

Without comment, Gov. Doug Ducey signed legislation Friday to allow Arizona to accept federal dollars to restart the KidsCare program. Backers say it could help about 30,000 children.

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