Elderly White Voters Are Starting to Turn on the GOP

With all of the bad news that has racked the GOP - losing special elections, record numbers of Republicans opt ing to retire, almost unprecedented Democrat energy, and, of course, the Trump/Pence shitshow - polls suggest that a new menace is forming: defections of elderly whites repelled by the GOP threats to access to health care and the Trump/GOP tax cuts.   True, poor whites more prone to fall for GOP racism and/or pandering to Christian extremism are stay true to the GOP, but educated aging whites seem to belatedly coming to the realization that the GOP is working against their interests - actually for years now - and poses a threat to their future and retirement years.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this new defection from the GOP.  Here are highlights:

One of the many odd features of American politics, circa 2018, is that the primary beneficiaries of our nation’s social safety net are also the core supporters of the party that wants to slash it. No age group derives a bigger benefit from our welfare state than America’s elderly; but no cohort is as susceptible to the cultural paranoia and racial resentment that sustain the modern right, either. Thus, conservatives can’t shrink “big government” without retaining the allegiance of the voters who stand to lose most from the erosion of social insurance.

The tensions inherent to this arrangement grew conspicuous during last year’s fight over Obamacare repeal — when congressional Republicans tried to pass a health-care bill that would have drastically increased the cost of health insurance for older, working-class voters in rural America (a core GOP constituency) while dramatically lowering premiums for 20-something city-dwellers (an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic). Many purple-district Republicans voted for the bill, anyway, effectively betting that it was more politically hazardous to thwart the ideological goals of their big-dollar donors, than to betray the material interests of their gray-haired voters.

This may have been costly mistake.

According to polling from Reuters/Ipsos, the percentage of college-educated white voters who say “health care” is their top issue rose from 8 percent in 2016 to 21 percent today; over that same period, the demographic went from favoring a Republican Congress by ten points, to backing a Democratic one by two.

[T]he Ryan agenda does seem to have played a role in alienating college-educated white Republicans, whose educational backgrounds already rendered them a less-than-ideal audience for Trump’s anti-intellectual shtick.

John Camm has been a Republican since the Nixon Administration, but the 63-year-old Tucson accountant says he will likely support a Democrat for Congress in November. He is splitting with his party over access to health insurance as well as its recent overhaul of the nation’s income tax system. He also supports gun control measures that the party has rejected.

“I’m a moderate Republican, and yet my party has run away from that,” Camm said. “So give me a moderate Democrat.”

… Voters between the ages of 60 and 65 are particularly worried about healthcare, said Brigid Harrison, a political scientist at Montclair State University in New Jersey, because they are paying ever higher private health insurance premiums and are not yet eligible for Medicare.

Republicans have sought consolation in the fact that core Democratic constituencies (like nonwhite and younger voters) have historically failed to turn out for midterms in high numbers. But the Democrats’ turnout advantage in the past year’s special elections put a dent in that hope — and the leftward lurch of elderly whites all but eviscerates it. Older, college-educated whites are among the most reliable voters in the nation.

Republicans were already at risk of losing the House due to shifts in turnout patterns, alone — but if those shifts are accompanied by significant defections among reliable GOP constituencies, the party could suffer historic losses up and down the ballot.

“The real core for the Republicans is white, older white, and if they’re losing ground there, they’re going to have a tsunami,” political scientist Larry Sabato told Reuters. “If that continues to November, they’re toast.”

Remarkably, even as Republicans have lost ground with this key demographic — and Democratic candidates have won improbable special election victories while painting their Republican opponents as enemies of Medicare and Social Security — Paul Ryan has persisted in calling for sweeping cuts to entitlement spending.

Ryan and his reverse Robin Hood agenda may yet prove to be the death of the GOP.  Add in revulsion toward Trump, and it could be a perfect storm for the GOP's annihilation.

Is The GOP Break From Trump Starting?

Driving home this evening I was listening to Steele and Ungar on the Sirius XM POTUS channel. The topic was whether or not Donald Trump was an aberration and whether the GOP would revert back to its historical positions.  At the time, I refrained from calling in, but if I had called in, my remarks would have been that the GOP will never revert back to it's historical self until the Christofascists and white supremacists are exiled from the party.  In my view,  it was the rise of these two groups within the GOP that set the stage for the rise of Trump and the appeal of his calls to racism and religious extremism under the guise of "make America great again" which to these groups translated to "make America white evangelical Christian again." That said, Congressional Republicans are showing signs that they neither fear Trump nor see him as a positive influence on their agenda.  Indeed, between the veto proof legislation on Russian sanctions and now bipartisan talk about health care reform, perhaps Republican members of Congress have realized that they need to proceed on their own without deference to the insane tweets emanating from the White House.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this possibility.  Here are highlights:

Congressional Republicans broke dramatically with the White House on Tuesday over the future of health care reform, with lawmakers entertaining bipartisan talks as the president scrambled for a way to salvage Obamacare repeal and replace efforts.

The talks aren’t expected to yield a quick legislative fix to Obamacare. Instead, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said his committee would simply be hold hearings on possible actions Congress could take to stabilize the health insurance markets.

But the fact that talks were happening at all was a remarkable break from the message that the president and his team were hoping to send. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spoke in the past tense during a press conference on Tuesday to discuss his party’s efforts to pass Obamacare repeal—“our problem on health care was not the Democrats; we didn't have 50 Republicans”—the administration was continuing to press Republicans to keep at it.

“There are not the votes in the Senate, as I’ve said repeatedly to the president and to all of you, to change the rules of the Senate. There’s not enough even to require 50 or 51 Republicans to agree to do that. The votes are simply not there,” McConnell told reporters.

Trump held talks on Monday with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, ostensibly to convince him to get his home state senator, John McCain, to drop opposition to the last Senate bill. . . . . But the likelihood of that happening is next to nil. Not only is McCain unlikely to return to Washington D.C. as he undergoes treatment for recently-diagnosed brain cancer; but lawmakers are already plotting negotiations for when they get back after Labor Day.

Alexander’s hearings will take place in September, during which the committee plans to hear from state insurance chiefs, governors, health care experts, and representatives from the insurance industry. In the interim, the senator has asked Trump to authorize a short-term stabilization measure known as cost-sharing-reduction (CRS) payments in order to buy Congress time to come up with a bipartisan solution.

[Alexander]  was joined by several other high-ranking Republicans too. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) also encouraged Trump to make the CSR payments, as did Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Bob Corker (R-TN).

“There would be a lot of poor people that would, obviously, be negatively affected. And when you’re president, you’re president of the whole country. And while you might be dissatisfied with what you inherited, typically it’s best to try to figure out a way to move ahead in a manner that doesn’t harm folks,” Corker told The Daily Beast.

The fissure on health care between Senate Republicans and the White House presented Democrats with a rare political opening, but not one without its own set of complications.

Several Democratic aides told The Daily Beast that the party is eager to craft a modest deal with Republicans both as a means of stabilizing the individual insurance marketplace and removing the possibility that the GOP returns to a broader repeal-and-replace push—since the case or one would be weakened by the modest deal they struck.

Trump is expected to decide as soon as this week on whether to extend the CSR payments, which help offset costs for insurers and poorer Americans. If the president axes those payments, experts and lawmakers have warned that premiums could skyrocket and even more insurers could leave or threaten to leave the exchanges.

For Democrats, a prerequisite to crafting bipartisan reform is for the administration to alleviate that uncertainty.

“The idea that we’re doing this to just help insurance companies is hogwash. We would help the treasury, and frankly, we would be helping a lot of the people who are getting coverage in the exchanges,” Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), a former governor who has helmed talks with Republicans for weeks, told The Daily Beast. Carped added that he hopes new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly “will talk some sense” into Trump.

If Trump sabotages the existing law, Carper said, Obamacare’s success or failure will rest on his shoulders.

“We have an old saying in Delaware: if you break it, you own it,” said Carper. “And if he breaks it, he will own it. And ironically and cruelly, some of the people who will suffer the most are the people who live in those red states that voted for him, including West Virginia and Kentucky and places like that.”

Poll: Opposition to GOP Healthcare Bill is Rising

GOP Senate leader, the always despicable Mitch McConnell

As Senate Republicans meet in secret to draft their  "healthcare reform" bill - secrecy is admitted to be needed given how harmful the bill will be to millions of Americans and is aimed at leaving opponents with out time to educate the public on the toxicity of the bill - a new poll shows that public opposition to the GOP is rising.   I don't quite understand the mindset where passing something horrible and harmful to millions with little time for any public review is supposed to lessen the ultimate political fallout.  The details will get out either before or after a Senate vote, and those who voted to harm millions will not go un-wounded  once their constituents understand the extent of the betrayal.  A piece in Politico looks at the already rising opposition to Trumpcare.  Here are highlights:

As the GOP-led Senate prepares to take up the measure, only 35 percent of voters surveyed approve of the bill passed by the House last month. Nearly half of voters, 49 percent, disapprove of the bill. The other 16 percent don’t know or don’t have an opinion, the poll shows.

POLITICO/Morning Consult polling indicates the bill has become less popular since the House advanced it in early May. Immediately after the bill passed, slightly more voters approved of the bill, 38 percent. Opposition to the bill was lower, too, immediately after the House passed it: 44 percent.

The poll underscores the risks Republicans face in pursuing legislation for which opposition is creeping toward a majority of voters. The Senate’s so-far behind-closed-doors drafting process also complicates Republicans’ efforts to sell the proposal to their own voters — and there’s some evidence of slippage among the GOP base on the party’s Obamacare repeal bid.

Among Republican voters, 30 percent disapprove of the GOP health care bill. That is up from 15 percent of Republicans disapproving in early May.

Moreover, independent voters disapprove of the bill by a 2-to-1 margin: 26 percent approve, versus 53 percent who disapprove.

Other measures similarly show few voters are cheering for the legislation’s passage. Only 27 percent think it will make the U.S. health care system better, compared to 41 percent who think it will make the system worse. Just 17 percent think it will decrease costs for them and their families, while 46 percent think costs will increase.

And while voters haven’t heard much about the Senate’s progress, they want the GOP to work with Democrats on the final bill. Nearly two-thirds of voters, 65 percent, say they want Republicans to “compromise with Democrats to reach bipartisan reforms.” Only 18 percent want the GOP to “work only with other Republicans in Congress to achieve reforms.”

Even among GOP voters, a 54-percent majority wants the party to work across the aisle on the final product.

And Republicans are on perilous political ground, according to the poll's generic ballot test. Forty-three percent of voters say they would support the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district, compared to only 37 percent for the Republican candidate. Among voters who say their most important issue is health care, the Democratic candidate leads by 38 points, 61 percent to 23 percent.

Are giving huge tax breaks to the very wealthy that important to the GOP that depriving millions of coverage - including children and the elderly - outweighs all else?  The GOP is morally bankrupt and so are the evangelical Christians who vote Republican.

Are Liberals Underestimating the Danger of the Alt-Right?

Throughout my years of activism, in educational issues, as a Republican activist, and now as an LGBT activist, I have personally believed in a confrontational approach while armed with facts and data is always preferred to a polite and non-confrontational approach.  Yes, you hurt some feelings, but sometimes feelings need to be hurt and lies and hypocrisy need to be harshly confronted.  In the current political atmosphere where Republicans, Der Trumpenführer, and their Alt-Right allies are destroyng environmental protects, education and degrading healthcare coverage - mental health coverage will no longer have to be covered - "playing nice" is not enough.  Indeed, history and the rise of past fascist regimes shows that liberals need to grow a spine and cease being afraid of confrontation.  If "friends" are offended and are willing to be complicit in immoral actions, then you do not need them as friends.  A column in Salon looks at these issues:

Since the election of Donald Trump as president, liberals and leftists have been discussing how to best respond to American conservatism’s transformation from a shopworn, Cold War, anti-government philosophy into something else.

To the anarchists and socialists who consider themselves part of the global “antifa” movement (an abbreviation for “anti-fascist”), the transition currently taking place on the right is all too familiar. The rise of the alt-right and white nationalism within the U.S. is something the mainstream left doesn’t take seriously enough, they say, even as many Democrats compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
 If it is true that the civic nationalism of Trump and his top strategist Steve Bannon are helping to lay the groundwork for a more radical right — intentionally or otherwise — then their self-described opponents on the left need to do more than wear safety pins and post Facebook denunciations of the president they didn’t vote for say the antifa advocates.

Instead of merely talking among themselves about opposing racism, say the anti-fascists, leftists need to take direct action to make being a white nationalist as difficult as possible. That’s why many antifa proponents have concentrated their efforts on tactics such as targeting the financial means of support for websites they see as enabling or promoting fascist views; they have even engaged in acts of physical assault against members of the far right.

“Only by fighting and destroying fascism can we actually defeat it,” an anonymous member of the website It’s Going Down told Salon via email. . . . they take politics much more soberly than their less extreme counterparts do. For the antifas, understanding that white nationalists are deadly serious about instigating a “racial holy war” is the key to countering them.

“During the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, while anarchists and communists were literally fighting the fascists in the streets, the liberals and social democrats attempted to debate the Nazis point for point in the halls of power,” the anonymous activist continued. “This did nothing, and also normalized the positions of the Nazis and also made them into legitimate positions.”

“Liberalism [has] proven itself unable to prevent the rise of fascism over and over again,” the activists wrote. “By the time liberals are comfortable with cracking down on fascism, it’s almost always too late.

Beyond targeting far-right activists’ financial means and showing up to physically confront them at their events, many antifa activists have made it their mission to expose the true identities of popular alt-right figures so they cannot hide behind pseudonyms. The Nebraska activists provided an example of this tactic in December when they exposed the identity of Cooper Ward, a University of Nebraska student who was outed as the co-host of a popular neo-Nazi podcast. He quit the podcast program after being identified and hasn’t returned.

Antifa activists also take issue with liberals who think that letting people with racist or anti-Semitic views state them publicly somehow serves as a method of relieving societal pressures. Instead, as an anonymous essayist on the anarchist website CrimethInc wrote, such expressions merely increase the reach and influence of the far right:

Fascists are only attempting to express their views “peacefully” in order to lay the groundwork for violent activity. Because fascists require a veneer of social legitimacy to be able to carry out their program, giving them a platform to speak opens the door to their being able to do physical harm to people. Public speech promoting ideologies of hate, whether or not you consider it violent on its own, always complements and correlates with violent actions. By affiliating themselves with movements and ideologies based on oppression and genocide, fascists show their intention to carry on these legacies of violence — but only if they can develop a base of support.

By definition, the antifa arguments are both radical and controversial. The unanswered question is whether liberals, moderates and others who oppose the radical right can learn something from the antifa activists’ confrontational stance. Or will the violent tactics they advocate only worsen tensions in a divided society and beget more violence?

I do not condone violence.  That said, sometimes quiet, peaceful protests may not be enough, especially when confronted with white supremacists and alt-right violence and viciousness.  

Hospitals and Health Groups Denounce GOP Healthcare Bill

Ready to screw over working class families

To the surprise of few, the Republican Party's proposed replacement for the Affordable Health Care Act is a true abortion and despite the bloviating - translate lies - of Republicans, the plan would leave millions without the ability to secure coverage.  Two of the components Congressional Republicans blather about the most are basically worthless to lower income Americans: (i) tax credits, and (ii) health savings accounts ("HSA").  If you aren't making much money and are paying little in taxes, giving you a tax credit goes nowhere near providing the funds to purchase healthcare coverage.  The same more or less goes with having an HSA.  If you don't have the funds to fund the account - and most working class Americans don't - you are left with nothing.  In short, the GOP message to many Americans is that if you get sick, just go ahead and die.  As Congressman Joe Kennedy III noted, the plan is the reverse of the Gospel message Republicans falsely claim to honor.  The New York Times looks at the condemnation coming from hospitals - some of which would likely go into bankruptcy under the GOP plan - and other health care groups.  Here are excerpts:

Influential groups representing hospitals and nurses came out on Wednesday against a Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, joining doctors and the retirees’ lobby to warn that it would lead to a rise in the uninsured.

In a letter to lawmakers, major hospital groups wrote, “As organizations that take care of every individual who walks through our doors, both due to our mission and our obligations under federal law, we are committed to ensuring health care coverage is available and affordable for all.”

The groups, including the American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Catholic Health Association of the United States and the Children’s Hospital Association, said they could not support the bill “as currently written.”

The hospitals and the American Nurses Association joined the American Medical Association and AARP, which rejected the bill on Tuesday.

Squeezed between wary health care providers and angry conservatives who believe that the bill leaves too much of the Affordable Care Act in place, the Republican leadership and President Trump appear to be facing an uphill climb.

But the White House appears increasingly confident about the prospects for a health care overhaul to pass in the House. In a meeting with conservative leaders in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he anticipated the most trouble in the Senate, where moderate and conservative lawmakers are opposing the plan for different reasons. He said he was prepared to pressure holdout senators by holding the kind of stadium-style rallies he led during his presidential campaign.

The array of groups taking strong positions against the bill is evidence that its potential consequences extend far beyond health insurance coverage, to much of the nation’s economy.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation issued estimates this week showing how much revenue the government could lose starting in 2018 under the Republican bill, which the party has called the American Health Care Act, as a result of repealing taxes on drug makers (nearly $25 billion over 10 years), insurers (nearly $145 billion), makers of medical devices (nearly $20 billion), and high-income households (more than $270 billion from taxes on earned income and investment income).

The A.M.A., which has nearly 235,000 members and calls itself the voice of the medical profession, sent a letter to leaders of the two committees on Tuesday saying it could not support the Republican bill “because of the expected decline in health insurance coverage and the potential harm it would cause to vulnerable patient populations.”

In particular, the group said it opposed a plan to replace the sliding, income-based premium tax credits provided under the Affordable Care Act with fixed credits based on age. The current system, it said, “provides the greatest chance that those of the least means are able to purchase coverage.”

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the health insurance lobby, released its own lengthy statement on Wednesday. In a letter to the leaders of the House committees that drafted the bill, Marilyn B. Tavenner, the group’s chief executive, warned Republican leaders that their plans to change Medicaid financing, among other things, could harm coverage and care.

A day earlier, AARP — the association of middle-aged and older Americans that is another crucial supporter of the Affordable Care Act — declared its opposition to the bill and even started running an ad against it. In a letter to Congress, the group said the bill would increase health costs for people ages 50 to 64, could lead to cuts in Medicaid coverage of long-term care and would allow insurers to charge older people five times as much as younger ones.

There was also a creeping concern about how quickly the bill was moving. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, essentially promised to move the bill to the Senate floor without the hearings and other processes that are normal for such a far-reaching piece of legislation. He had promised when Republicans took the majority that they would honor normal Senate processes and traditions.

“I think if that’s the approach they take,” Mr. Rubio said, “they won’t have the votes in the Senate.”

Note the $270 billion tax cut to high income households and huge cuts to insurance companies.  That is what this bill is really all about.  Working class whites who fell for the GOP's appeals to racism, bigotry and religious extremism are about to learn that the GOP cares nothing about them and is going to f*ck them over thoroughly.  I have no pity for these people if this happens.  They did this to themselves and deserve to suffer greatly.

Life Expectancy is Increasing Except in the U.S.

America has the most expensive and least efficient healthcare system of any advanced nation.  On average Americans - at least those who can pay - pay two to three times more for heathcare notwithstanding Republican lies that the free market will lower costs.  History has shown, the opposite has been the case.  Now, even with Obamacare helping millions, the results are showing: life expectancy is increasing everywhere except in America.  The policies so extolled by the GOP simply aren't working.  The irony, of course, is that in many cases those most harmed by the GOP agenda voted Republican thanks to calls to racism and religious extremism.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this sad picture.  Here are highlights:

 Here's a rare bit of good news: People are living longer than ever.

According to a new Lancet study, life expectancy will jump across much of the industrialized world in the next two decades. By 2030, women in South Korea can, ahem, expect to live to 90, up from 84 in 2010. Women in France, Japan and Spain on average will hit at least 88 or 89 years, up from around 85. Men in South Korea, Australia and Switzerland will also see big gains, living to about 84 by 2030. Fellows from Canada, Spain, New Zealand and the Netherlands will also make gains.

But one country is stuck treading water: the United States. According to experts who studied 35 countries, Americans will see only a small boost. In 2010, average life expectancy for men here was 76. By 2030, they can expect to live just three more years. For women, life expectancy will jump just two years, from 81 in 2010 to 83 in 2030.

Researchers said our low performance is notable because “life expectancy at birth is already lower than most other high-income countries, and is projected to fall further behind such that its 2030 life expectancy at birth might be similar to the Czech Republic for men, and Croatia and Mexico for women.” It's worth noting, too, that the researchers only looked at data until 2013 — so they missed the unprecedented decline in life expectancy that hit two years later.

Experts attribute the lag to economic inequality, particularly when it comes to health care. The United States is one of the only industrialized nations without universal health care. “This means that some groups are getting left behind, and it’s pulling the average down,” James Bennett, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Imperial College London, told Vox. Americans also suffer higher rates of death from alcohol, drug use and mental disorders. We also have high rates of obesity, homicide and infant mortality, which drags down our average.

Other countries with high projected life expectancy include Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Researchers credit their high-quality health care, along with low smoking and traffic accidents. France and Switzerland did well because they had some of the lowest rates of obesity.

Yes, America is exceptional alright, but not in a good way!

AMA Warns Republicans on Obamacare Repeal

Sadly, Congressional Republicans find themselves near orgasm over their closeness to repealing the Affordable Health Care Act in their effort to diminish the legacy of the nation's first black president and pander to the GOP's white supremacist base.  The problem is that Republicans have ZERO plan as to what will replace Obamacare.  Mere repeal without a replacement plan will throw somewhere between 20 and 30 million Americans off of healthcare coverage.  Even cretins in red states that voted for Der Fuhrer and Republican candidates seem to be waking up to the reality that they have royally f*cked themselves over.  Sadly, they were too stupid or too lazy to look beyond Trump/GOP appeals to racism, bigotry and religious extremism to see that they were being played by a group of con artists.  Others are alarmed to at the pending healthcare catastrophe, including the American Medical Association ("AMA") which has issued a letter to Congress warning Republicans to refrain from a repeal of Obamacare until a viable replacement plan is set to be rolled out.  Think Progress looks at the AMA's cautionary warning.  Here are excerpts:

The largest group of doctors in the country is cautioning Republican leaders to come up with a real plan to replace Obamacare before forging ahead with repeal.

On Tuesday, Republicans took the first step toward rolling back the law, introducing a budget resolution that will allow Congress to sidestep a Democratic filibuster and dismantle key parts of Obamacare. Republican leaders have signaled they plan to use this budget process to produce legislation by January 27 that includes repealing portions of health reform.

But repealing Obamacare is the easy part. What to do next is much harder — and GOP lawmakers don’t have that part figured out.

Although Republicans have been railing against Obamacare for the better part of six years, they haven’t come up with any concrete policy ideas to reshape our nation’s complicated insurance industry and prevent 20 million Americans from losing the health coverage they gained under Obamacare. GOP leaders have never been able to coalesce around a meaningful plan.

Instead, Republicans have suggested they’ll throw the insurance industry into chaos by repealing Obamacare now and figuring out how to replace it later. This strategy, dubbed “repeal and delay,” threatens to create widespread uncertainty in the industry as major insurers will be unclear where the country might be headed with its national health care policy.

That’s pretty concerning to the American Medical Association — one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States — which sent a letter to Republican leaders on Tuesday urging a different approach.

Before rushing to repeal Obamacare, Republican leaders in Congress need to come up with a real plan that has enough details to prove it will be better than the existing realities under the health care law, the AMA wrote.

“Policymakers should lay out for the American people, in reasonable detail, what will replace current policies,” the letter reads. “Patients and other stakeholders should be able to clearly compare current policy to new proposals so they can make informed decisions about whether it represents a step forward in the ongoing process of health reform.”

That’s a tall order for the GOP — particularly considering that every Republican alternative to Obamacare put forward over the past several years has been projected to result in fewer Americans having access to insurance.

The AMA, hardly known for its progressive policy positions, isn’t the only major conservative-leaning group cautioning against the GOP’s “repeal and delay” approach.

Scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent libertarian think tank, published a piece in Health Affairs on Tuesday arguing that “repeal and delay” is the wrong path forward because it “carries too much risk” and “is unlikely to produce a coherent reform of health care in the United States.”

“If Congress fails to vote on a replacement at the same time as repeal, the repealers risk assuming the blame for the continued unraveling of Obamacare,” GOP Sen. Rand Paul wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday.

Nonetheless, GOP leaders appear to be barreling forward. 

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan, both raised as children of wealth and privilege do not give a damn about Americans now at risk of losing healthcare coverage.  Indeed, Ryan is hell bent on transforming American back to a scene out of a Dickens novel.  These men and their fellow repealers are morally bankrupt and disgusting.  

Seduced and Betrayed by Donald Trump

One of the big questions in the wake of the 2016 presidential election is how long it will take for the millions of low information, working class white voters to realize that both Trump and the Republican Party played them for fools with no intention of curing the ills that they believe afflict them and their future.  Succumbing to appeals to their own racism, xenophobia and nativism, these voters ultimately ignored their own best economic interest and put in office a team that will strive to give more and more to the wealthy and large corporations while shredding the social safety net and leaving these voters much worse off.  Yes, in the short term they may feel smug and superior and better about themselves as they look down on blacks, Hispanics, non-whites, non-Christians, and, of course, LGBT American, but down the road they themselves will be the biggest losers.  A column in the New York Times looks at this said tale of trickery and votes cast based on resentment rather than logic.  Do I have sympathy for these voters?  Candidly, no, none whatsoever. Given the base motives that ultimately motivated them, they deserve whatever misfortunes that may befall them.  After all, it will all have been self inflicted.   Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump won the Electoral College (though not the popular vote) on the strength of overwhelming support from working-class whites, who feel left behind by a changing economy and society. And they’re about to get their reward — the same reward that, throughout Mr. Trump’s career, has come to everyone who trusted his good intentions. Think Trump University.

Yes, the white working class is about to be betrayed.

The evidence of that coming betrayal is obvious in the choice of an array of pro-corporate, anti-labor figures for key positions. In particular, the most important story of the week — seriously, people, stop focusing on Trump Twitter — was the selection of Tom Price, an ardent opponent of Obamacare and advocate of Medicare privatization, as secretary of health and human services. This choice probably means that the Affordable Care Act is doomed — and Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will be among the biggest losers.

The first thing you need to understand here is that Republican talk of “repeal and replace” has always been a fraud. The G.O.P. has spent six years claiming that it will come up with a replacement for Obamacare any day now; the reason it hasn’t delivered is that it can’t.

Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to: You can’t cover Americans with pre-existing conditions without requiring healthy people to sign up, and you can’t do that without subsidies to make insurance affordable.

Any replacement will either look a lot like Obamacare, or take insurance away from millions who desperately need it.

What the choice of Mr. Price suggests is that the Trump administration is, in fact, ready to see millions lose insurance. And many of those losers will be Trump supporters. . . . . we’re probably looking at more than five million Trump supporters, many of whom have chronic health problems and recently got health insurance for the first time, who just voted to make their lives nastier, more brutish, and shorter.

Why did they do it? They may not have realized that their coverage was at stake — over the course of the campaign, the news media barely covered policy at all. Or they may have believed Mr. Trump’s assurances that he would replace Obamacare with something great.

Either way, they’re about to receive a rude awakening, which will get even worse once Republicans push ahead with their plans to end Medicare as we know it, which seem to be on even though the president-elect had promised specifically that he would do no such thing.

And just in case you’re wondering, no, Mr. Trump can’t bring back the manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the past few decades. Those jobs were lost mainly to technological change, not imports, and they aren’t coming back.

There will be nothing to offset the harm workers suffer when Republicans rip up the safety net.

Will there be a political backlash, a surge of buyer’s remorse? Maybe. Certainly Democrats will be well advised to hammer Mr. Trump’s betrayal of the working class nonstop. But we do need to consider the tactics that he will use to obscure the scope of his betrayal.

One tactic, . . . will be to distract the nation with bright, shiny, trivial objects. True, this tactic will work only if news coverage is both gullible and innumerate. . . . . But judging from the coverage of the deal so far, assuming that the news media will be gullible and innumerate seems like a good bet.

And if and when the reality that workers are losing ground starts to sink in, I worry that the Trumpists will do what authoritarian governments often do to change the subject away from poor performance: go find an enemy.

Remember what I said about Trump Twitter. Even as he took a big step toward taking health insurance away from millions, Mr. Trump started ranting about taking citizenship away from flag-burners. This was not a coincidence.

The point is to keep your eye on what’s important. Millions of Americans have just been sucker-punched. They just don’t know it yet.

I always advise clients that they must put logic over emotion when making both business decisions or decisions to institute lawsuits.  Following emotion may feel good, but often the result is disastrous. Trump voters chose to go with emotion as opposed to logic and reason. Now they deserve to pay a very high price. 

Court Ruling and Trump's Election Puts Overtime Pay Rules in Limbo

Obama effort for workers at risk

If one listens to the right's propaganda that white working class voters supported Donald Trump due to economic concerns rather than their allegiance to Trump's calls to racism, white supremacy, anti-immigrant bigotry, and general misogyny, then one would think that these voters would have applauded and supported the Obama administration's plan to change the Department of Labor's overtime rules.  These changes would have forced employers with "salaried" workers to pay overtime to staff making less than a designated annual salary.   Prior to the rule changes, many employers - it is a practice widely seen in the legal services realm for paralegals and real estate processors  - designated employees as salaried staff exempt from hourly wage overtime rules and then demanded that they work 60+ hours a week.  Between a conservative court ruling and Trump's election, the new rules are on hold and likely face repeal if Trump holds true to his pledge to undo Obama's legacy. Meanwhile, many working class and low level professional workers will find themselves making less money for longer hours once again. It's yet another example of Trump voters cutting their own economic throats. Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post looks at this potentially additional self-inflicted harm:

As an education specialist for a museum in Kansas City, Mo., Cherie Kelly says it can be tough to keep her work schedule to 40 hours a week.

On weeks with evening events or special programming, she might have to put in closer to 60 hours — something she says happens about once a month. She was looking forward to earning some extra money through overtime pay soon, thanks to a federal rule that was slated to kick in this week.

But she and many other workers are now in limbo after a federal judge in Texas ruled last week to halt an overtime rulethat was supposed to take effect Dec. 1.

The Labor Department rule, which would have made overtime pay available to more than 4 million additional workers, was challenged in court by a number of business groups and a collection of states. The judge ruled that the department exceeded its authority when it more than doubled the salary limit that determines which workers should be made eligible for overtime pay.

The rule would have made overtime pay an option for full-time salaried employees earning up to $47,476 a year — substantially more than the current threshold of $23,660 a year. The rule hadn’t been updated in 12 years.

But business groups, states and other employers expressed concerns that the higher income threshold would hurt their bottom lines, disrupt their business models, or limit opportunities for employees.

The Labor Department said it strongly disagreed with the court’s decision and is currently reviewing its legal options.

The timeline for when the court will reach a final decision depends on what the department does next, legal experts say. If the Labor Department challenges the injunction as expected, some consumer groups said they are worried that the rule advocated by President Obama may not survive under the next administration. One scenario is that the Labor Department under President-elect Donald Trump could decide to drop the case, putting an end to the rule, says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president for the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

As a result, Eisenbrey said, the institute is researching options for becoming a party in the lawsuit so that it could continue the case even if the Labor Department drops out.

Many employers said after the ruling that they would move ahead with changes even though the future of the rule is murky. TJX, the parent company for T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, said this week that it would “move forward as planned” in implementing the changes required by the rule, without elaborating on what those changes would be. Walmart in September raised the salaries of its entry-level managers to $48,500 from $45,000 to bring them above the threshold for overtime pay and said this week it has no plans to change course.

 If the Trump/GOP plan plays out, these working class Trump voters could see a loss of their health care coverage, a gutting of Medicare, and reduced pay.  They say they wanted change, and they will certainly get it if all of this comes to pass.  As noted before, I have ZERO sympathy for these morons who rallied to a message of hate and bigotry and were too lazy and/or stupid to educate themselves about what Trump and the GOP actually had planned. They deserve every misfortune imaginable.  I feel sorrow only for their children who will likely suffer significantly.

American Workers Have Unprecedented Anxiety About Jobs

The Republican Party gives a lot of lip service to caring about jobs and the economy, yet rather than pass meaningful legislation to spur the economy upward, the GOP's sole focus - when not maligning gays to please the Christofascists - is obstruction of anything and everything Barack Obama proposes, the Affordable Health Care Act in particular.  Meanwhile, other than the wealthy who are getting richer, the rest of us are experiencing downward mobility and increased fears of job loss and/or whether or not we can pay our bills and support our families.  The GOP truly has its head up its ass.  A new survey reveals just how anxious many Americans are about jobs and the economy.  The Washington Post has details.  Here are excerpts:

American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers such as Stewart.

More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey, which explores Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future.
Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but they typically rose and fell across all levels of the income ladder. Today, workers at the bottom have drifted away, occupying their own island of in­security.

Fifty-four percent of workers making $35,000 or less now worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, compared with 37 percent of ­lower-income workers in 1992 and an identical number in 1975, according to surveys by Time magazine, CNN and Yankelovich, a market research firm.
Lower-paid workers also worry far more about making ends meet. Fully 85 percent of them fear that their families’ income will not be enough to meet expenses, up 25 points from a 1971 survey asking an identical question. Thirty-two percent say they worry all the time about meeting expenses, a number that has almost tripled since the 1970s.

Americans’ economic perceptions often divide along political lines; supporters of the incumbent president are usually more optimistic about the job market and the health of the economy. But that’s not the case with this new anxiety. Once you control for economic and demographic factors, there is no partisan divide. There’s no racial divide, either, and no gender gap. It also doesn’t matter where you live.

There is a reason workers like Stewart are so nervous in today’s economy. That reason is the economy itself. There are still 11 million Americans looking for work who can’t find a job. The unemployment rate is 7.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1980, except during recessions and their immediate aftermaths. Adjusting for inflation, average household incomes for the poorest 40 percent of workers have fallen steadily — by more than 10 percent, total — since 2000.

There's more and it is depressing.  And most of these workers likely have no healthcare coverage.  Not that today's Republicans give a damn. 

Why Romney's Lying About the Availability of Health Care

I often disagree with much of what Nicholas Kristof writes, but in today's New York Times he hits a home run as he looks at the continuing tragedy of those who find themselves without health care insurance either through no fault of their own or through carelessness and/or a false sense of immortality.  Mitt Romney has pledged to undo the Affordale Health Care Act ("AHA") - derisively called "Obamacare" by the far right and Republicans - which among other things seeks to increase the number of Americans.  In Romney's mind, just as 47% of Americans are moochers and parasites, so too are millions of Americans disposable.  Simply unworthy or unimportant trash to be discarded.  Kristof begins his column by looking at the unfortunate situation of a friend and then looks at what Romney and the GOP would do to millions of citizens.  Here are column excerpts:

Yet for all his innate prudence, Scott now, at age 52, is suffering from Stage 4 prostate cancer, in part because he didn’t have health insurance. President Obama’s health care reform came just a bit too late to help Scott, but it will protect others like him — unless Mitt Romney repeals it. 

If you favor gutting “Obamacare,” please listen to Scott’s story. He is willing to recount his embarrassing tale in part so that readers can learn from it.   I’ll let Scott take over the narrative:

•

It all started in December 2003 when I quit my job as a pension consultant in a fit of midlife crisis. For the next year I did little besides read books I’d always wanted to read and play poker in the local card rooms.

I didn’t buy health insurance because I knew it would be really expensive in the individual policy market, because many of the people in this market are high risk. I would have bought insurance if there had been any kind of fair-risk pooling. In 2005 I started working seasonally for H&R Block doing tax returns.

As seasonal work it of course doesn’t provide health benefits, but then lots of full-time jobs don’t either. I knew I was taking a big risk without insurance, but I was foolish.

In 2011 I began having greater difficulty peeing. I didn’t go see the doctor because that would have been several hundred dollars out of pocket — just enough disincentive to get me to make a bad decision.

A normal P.S.A. test for prostate cancer is below 4, and mine was 1,100. They also did a CT scan, which turned up possible signs of cancerous bone lesions. Prostate cancer likes to spread to bones.

Let’s just stipulate up front that Scott blew it. Other people are sometimes too poor to buy health insurance or unschooled about the risks. Scott had no excuse. He could have afforded insurance 

He’s the first to admit that he screwed up catastrophically and may die as a result. .  .  .  .  Yet remember also that while Scott was foolish, mostly he was unlucky. He is a bachelor, so he didn’t have a spouse whose insurance he could fall back on in his midlife crisis. In any case, we all take risks, and usually we get away with them. Scott is a usually prudent guy who took a chance, and then everything went wrong. 

The Mitt Romney philosophy, as I understand it, is that this is a tragic but necessary byproduct of requiring Americans to take personal responsibility for their lives. They need to understand that mistakes have consequences. That’s why Romney would repeal Obamacare and leave people like Scott to pay the price for their irresponsibility. 

To me, that seems ineffably harsh. We all make mistakes, and a humane government tries to compensate for our misjudgments. That’s why highways have guardrails, why drivers must wear seat belts, why police officers pull over speeders, why we have fire codes. In other modern countries, Scott would have been insured, and his cancer would have been much more likely to be detected in time for effective treatment. Is that a nanny state? No, it’s a civilized one. 

President Obama’s care plan addresses this problem inelegantly, by forcing people like Scott to buy insurance beginning in 2014. Some will grumble about the “mandate” and the insurance cost, but it will save lives. 

Already, Obamacare is slowly reducing the number of people without health insurance, as young adults can now stay on their parents’ plans. But the Census Bureau reported last month that 48.6 million Americans are still uninsured — a travesty in a wealthy country. The Urban Institute calculated in 2008 that some 27,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 65 die prematurely each year because they don’t have health insurance. Another estimate is even higher. 

You want to put a face on those numbers? Look at Scott’s picture. One American like him dies every 20 minutes for lack of health insurance.

Romney's statement that no one goes without health care is a lie.  And it costs lives literally daily.  It is a scandal that the USA does not provide health care coverage like every other modern industrialized nation.  It's an even bigger scandal that those seeking to repeal AHA  are the same ones who claim to be godly Christians even as they utterly ignore the Gospel message of Christ.  The hypocrisy of it all in mind numbing.

Mitt Romney's Lie About Pre-existing Conditions

The commentary on Mitt Romney's incredible dishonesty during the first presidential debate continues to unroll.  Reflecting on all of Romney's lies I am left with the conclusion that Romney views most Americans as cretins who are in his view too stupid to figure out that they are being shamelessly lied to and played for suckers.  It is part an parcel with his arrogance, sense of entitlement and utter disconnect from the reality with which most Americans live their lives.  Paul Krugman has a great take down of Romney in the New York Times that looks particularly at Romney's lies about health care coverage pre-existing conditions.  As a small business owner myself who must shop health care coverage options every year, I will say that Romney is on hallucinogenic drugs if thinks small businesses have a snow ball's chance in Hell of negotiating with big health insurance companies on aspects of coverage or premiums.  Perhaps if the man lived in the real world he'd understand just how disingenuous his statements are in fact.  Here are some key excerpts from Krugman's column:

“No. 1,” declared Mitt Romney in Wednesday’s debate, “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” No, they aren’t — as Mr. Romney’s own advisers have conceded in the past, and did again after the debate. 

Was Mr. Romney lying? Well, either that or he was making what amounts to a sick joke. Either way, his attempt to deceive voters on this issue was the biggest of many misleading and/or dishonest claims he made over the course of that hour and a half. Yes, President Obama did a notably bad job of responding. But I’ll leave the theater criticism to others and talk instead about the issue that should be at the heart of this election.

So, about that sick joke: What Mr. Romney actually proposes is that Americans with pre-existing conditions who already have health coverage be allowed to keep that coverage even if they lose their job — as long as they keep paying the premiums. As it happens, this is already the law of the land. But it’s not what anyone in real life means by having a health plan that covers pre-existing conditions, because it applies only to those who manage to land a job with health insurance in the first place (and are able to maintain their payments despite losing that job). Did I mention that the number of jobs that come with health insurance has been steadily declining over the past decade? 

What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

How many Americans would be left out in the cold under Mr. Romney’s plan? One answer is 89 million. According to the nonpartisan Commonwealth Foundation, that’s the number of Americans who lack the “continuous coverage” that would make them eligible for health insurance under Mr. Romney’s empty promises. By the way, that’s more than a third of the U.S. population under 65 years old. 

First, Mr. Romney proposes repealing the Affordable Care Act, which means doing away with all the ways in which that law would help tens of millions of Americans who either have pre-existing conditions or can’t afford health insurance for other reasons. Second, Mr. Romney is proposing drastic cuts in Medicaid — basically to save money that he could use to cut taxes on the wealthy — which would deny essential health care to millions more Americans. (And, no, despite what he has said, you can’t get the care you need just by going to the emergency room.) 

[M]any Americans have health insurance but live under the continual threat of losing it. Obamacare would eliminate this threat, but Mr. Romney would bring it back and make it worse. 

Not only was Mr. Romney’s claim fundamentally dishonest, it has already been extensively debunked, and the Romney campaign itself has admitted that it’s false. 

Let me be blunt.  Mitt Romney is a lying sack of shit.  Would that he knew what it is like to have a desperately ill child and be faced with medical costs that vastly exceed the limits of one's health insurance coverage.  But, I guess with large trust funds and family wealth he'' never know that reality.  I've been there and know that reality.  My savings were totally wiped out and it took me years to pay off the bills - even back when I had a six figure income.  As I have noted before, I suspect Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were in as in touch with the reality of the lives of their subjects as Mitt and Ann Romney are with most Americans - i.e., not in touch whatsoever.