COVID-19 & Healthcare

Paul Krugman of the New York Times gets it exactly right in his column today. Voodoo Time Machine:

Congress would respond to the sharp increase in American economic growth that, we now know, began last spring. After years of insisting that President Obama is responsible for a weak economy, they couldn’t say the truth — that short-run economic performance has very little to do with who holds the White House. So what would they say?

Well, I didn’t see that one coming: They’re claiming credit. Never mind the fact that all of the good data refer to a period before the midterm elections. Mitch McConnell, the new Senate majority leader, says that he did it, that growth reflected “the expectation of a new Republican Congress.”

The response of the Democratic National Committee — “Hahahahahahaha” — seems appropriate. I mean, talk about voodoo economics: Mr. McConnell is claiming not just that he can create prosperity without, you know, actually passing any legislation, but that he can reach back in time and create prosperity before even taking power. But while Mr. McConnell’s self-aggrandizement is funny, it’s also scary, because it’s a symptom of his party’s epistemic closure. Republicans know many things that aren’t so, and no amount of contrary evidence will get them to change their minds.

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Tea-Publicans in Congress renewed their war on the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare” this week, this time focusing their ire on workers with employer sponsored health insurance plans.

The evil GOP bastards’ plan is to kick American workers off their employer sponsored health insurance plans by amending the “full-time hours” requirement, which will force many workers onto their state’s Medicaid program, and others will be left uninsured, shit out of luck. This will increase the cost of “ObamaCare” while adding to the federal deficit.

Why do Tea-Publicans hate America?

Joan McCarter reports at Daily Kos, CBO: Republican Obamacare bill would increase deficit and uninsured rate:

The “Save American Workers Act,” Republicans attempt to make it easier for employers to exploit their workers, gets a vote in the House this week. The bill is another attack on Obamacare, a “fix” that would change the definition of full-time work in the bill from 30 hours per week to 40. The employer mandate in the law says that employers with 50 or more workers has to either provide insurance to 95 percent of their full-time employees or pay a fine. Republicans like to pretend that this means bosses will cut their workers’ hours, and they’ll fix that when in reality their bill will allow employers to get 39.5 hour work weeks out of their employees without having to shell out for benefits. It wouldn’t just hurt workers, though. The Congressional Budget Office says it would create a $53 billion hit to the deficit and increase the uninsured rate.

The agency thinks that 1 million fewer people would get health insurance at work: an employer might decide not to offer coverage to someone who works 35 hours per week, for example, because they no longer face a penalty.Some of these people would just be out of luck — a bit fewer than 500,000 people, CBO says, would end up uninsured. More would end up on government programs: between 500,000 and 1 million people would join Medicaid or enroll through the exchanges (maybe with a federal subsidy, if they earn less than 400 percent of the poverty line) after losing their employer coverage.

As a result, CBO estimates that the federal government would end up spending $53.2 billion more on the Affordable Care Act.

Remember when the deficit was the only thing that (supposedly) mattered to Republicans?

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