COVID-19 & Healthcare

Happy birthday Medicare

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Social
Security Amendments establishing Medicare and Medicaid. The guest of
honor at the signing ceremony was former President Harry S. Truman, who
fought for most of his political career to achieve this goal. (h/t Daily Kos for photo).

Johnson

LBJ signs Medicare into law, with Harry S. Truman watching.

Congressman John Conyers, Jr. penned an op-ed for The Hill today, Happy 48th birthday, Medicare:

As I reflect on my 48 years in Congress, at the positive policies
created and those that have had not so positive effects, the enactment
of Medicare is a bold highlight.

I voted for its original passage out of the House during my first
summer as a congressman, during a time that was very different from the
America of today. Prior to Medicare’s creation, only half of older
adults had health insurance, with coverage often unavailable or
unaffordable to the other half because of limited incomes and policies
that cost nearly three times as much for the elderly than the young.

Medicare’s positive impact was more than just extending medical
coverage to more than 19 million elderly citizens in its first year. A
significant requirement of its implementation was provider compliance
with Title VI of the then recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Almost overnight, this requirement effectively brought an end to segregation in hospitals.

The new ‘compromise caucus’ push-back against Tea-Publican hostage taking

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Posted  by AzBlueMeanie:

The latest Tea-Publican economic terrorist threat is the “kill Obamacare or else”
demand: the GOP will refuse to continue to fund the government and
force a governnment shutdown in a last-ditch attempt to coerce Democrats
into surrender to their 39 votes (and counting) to kill "ObamaCare." The House will take its 40th repeal vote next week.

Arizona's Senator John McCain is trying to halt the Tea-Publican insurrection's descent into madness. McCain to Republicans: Forget about any more crazy debt ceiling hostage taking. Sen. McCain is among a bloc of Republican senators comprising a new Compromise Caucus at odds with the Tea-Publican economic terrorists who want to destroy the government.

Today, Sen. McCain and the Compromise Caucus was joined by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): "I think it's the dumbest idea I've ever heard of," he told reporters.
"Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act
is going to be law." Gov’t Shutdown Threats Over Obamacare ‘The Dumbest Idea I’ve Ever Heard’.

Krugman: GOP brinksmanship against Americans

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Paul Krugman blogs at the New York Times, To The Brink, Again:

Krugman.pngIf John Boehner
is to be believed — which, admittedly, is a real question — Republicans
are once again willing to push America into default and/or shut down
the government if they don’t get their way. As Greg Sargent
points out, this is amazing — and what’s equally amazing is how this is
being treated as normal. Politics ain’t beanbag; but “I’ve got a bomb
strapped to my chest, and the whole room gets it if you don’t hand over
the money” is not normal tactics, especially if pursued repeatedly.

* * *

To the extent that there ever was an economic justification for this
brinksmanship — the claim that we were on the verge of a debt crisis,
the claim that slashing spending would boost the economy — that
justification has collapsed in the face of declining debt projections
and overwhelming evidence that austerity has large negative impacts in a
slump.

Norman Ornstein: The GOP attempt to sabotage ‘ObamaCare’ is ‘simply unacceptable, even contemptible’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Political scientist and high priest of Beltway centrism, Norman Ornstein, has a must-read opinion today in the National Journal on the Tea-Publican insurrectionists' attempts to sabotage "ObamaCare." The Unprecedented—and Contemptible—Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare:

When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless
President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not
news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist
senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans' No. 2 and No. 3 leaders,
John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is
news—of the most depressing variety.

I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate
Republicans' monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of
Obamacare—Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra
Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now
spinning out of control.

It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply
unprecedented. The clear comparison is the Medicare prescription drug
plan. When it passed Congress in 2003, Democrats had many reasons to be
furious. The initial partnership between President Bush and Sen. Edward
Kennedy had resulted in an admirably bipartisan bill—it passed the
Senate with 74 votes. Republicans then pulled a bait and switch, taking
out all of the provisions that Kennedy had put in to bring along Senate
Democrats, jamming the resulting bill through the House in a three-hour
late-night vote marathon that blatantly violated House rules and
included something close to outright bribery on the House floor, and
then passing the bill through the Senate with just 54 votes—while along
the way excluding the duly elected conferees, Tom Daschle (the
Democratic leader!) and Jay Rockefeller, from the conference committee
deliberations.

The GOP Health Care Policy – ‘We don’t do policy’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In the “post policy nihilism”
of the GOP, Republicans are no longer guided by any real policy
“asks,” but rather are chronically positioning themselves only in
opposition to the
president's policies. "Just say no."

The latest example: Three years after campaigning on a vow to "repeal and replace" President
Obama's health care law, House Republicans have yet to advance any
alternative for the system they have voted more than three dozen times
to abolish in whole or in part. GOP yet to detail any alternative to health overhaul:

Officially, the effort is "in progress" – and has been since Jan. 19, 2011, according to GOP.gov, a leadership-run website. [Actually, since 2009.]

But
internal divisions, disagreement about political tactics and Obama's
2012 re-election add up to uncertainty over whether Republicans will
vote on a plan of their own before the 2014 elections, or if not by
then, perhaps before the president leaves office, more than six years
after the original promise.

* * *

The current state of intentions contrasts sharply with the Pledge to
America, the manifesto that Republicans campaigned on in 2010 when they
took power away from the Democrats. That included a plan to "repeal and
replace" what it termed a government takeover of health care.