Trump Hands Democrats a Gift with Effort to Kill Obamacare

I often make the statement that Trump and the Republican Party want to create a new Gilded Age where the wealth of the richest Americans soared to obscene levels - thinks of the Rockefellers, Goulds, Vanderbilts, etc. - while the majority of Americans struggled to survive.  One study found as follows as to what happened to life expectancy during the rise of the Gilded Age:

"an average white ten-year-old American boy in 1880, born at the beginning of the Gilded Age and living through it, could expect to die at age forty-eight. His height would be 5 feet, 5 inches. He would be shorter and have a briefer life than his Revolutionary forebears.” “Infant mortality worsened in many cities after 1880.”

Part of the problem of the Gilded Age was a lack of safety and environmental regulations - things that were eventually remedied.  Yet now, Trump and the GOP are steadily rolling back such regulations so that big business can reap larger profits. Now, Trump has declared war on the Affordable Health Care Act and seeks to deprive millions of access to healthcare.  Even before this latest action, as a Washington Post story reported, the USA was going backwards in terms of diminished life expectancy and infant mortality.  Here are excerpts:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, reported in November [2018] that life expectancy for the average American ticked downward for the third year in a row. The news attracted a storm of attention . . . . Other trends, however, passed by more quietly. In health care, for example, maternal deaths inched up slightly this year to 20.7 per 100,000 live births, according to data from the United Health Foundation. In fact, giving birth in the United States has become increasingly deadly over the past few decades, placing our country in the same category as developing nations such as Afghanistan and Swaziland. And the rates are even worse for mothers of color.

The latest CDC data released this year shows that U.S. infant mortality rates, after steadily falling over the past few decades, haven’t decreased significantly for five years. Today it stands at 5.9 deaths per 1,000 births, far higher than the average rate of 3.9 deaths for developed countries. Again, it’s even worse for infants of color.

Given these statistics, increasing access to health care would be the moral thing to do.  Sadly, to Trump and Republicans (and evangelical Christians), most of us simply do not matter.  Indeed, it appears that they'd prefer that Americans - especially minorities and the poor - simply die while the rich rake in an ever larger share of the nation's wealth. How else to explain the Trump administration's latest effort to destroy health care access for millions.  A piece in Politico looks at this disgusting development and the Democrat response to such immorality.  Here are highlights:

House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday seized on the Justice Department’s endorsement of a federal court ruling to eliminate Obamacare in its entirety, immediately renewing attacks on the GOP for trying to gut the law’s popular protections and rip health coverage from more than 20 million Americans.

The administration’s surprise decision — a shift from its prior stance that only parts of the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out — offered a unifying moment for Democrats still grappling with the news that Mueller would not charge President Donald Trump with any crimes and comes as the party readies a fresh legislative offensive on health care.

“It’s disgusting. It’s horrible,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the No. 4 House Democrat. “It’s what they were trying to do during the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, it’s what Republicans were doing when they filed the lawsuit. The president’s been clear about his position the whole time.”

And even as Democrats decried the move, they also saw it as a political gold mine.

[L]awmakers were privately ecstatic about the Trump administration’s decision to essentially to trample all over its own good news cycle and turn the attention back to an issue that Democrats used to win back the House.

“It’s really outrageous. I don’t understand if Republicans weren’t present for the last election, but if there was an issue that was deeply critical, it was health care,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said after the meeting. . . . It’s “not only immoral, it’s a really bad political decision for them,” she added.

“We’re going to introduce a bill to protect and strengthen the ACA. That’s the responsible thing to do,” said Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.). “They’re being irresponsible, and they’re putting 20 million people in this country at risk.”

Indeed, House Democrats had planned a pivot to health care even before the Trump administration late Monday announced its support for a federal judge’s December ruling that the entire ACA should be invalidated because Congress eliminated its individual mandate penalty in the GOP tax law.

Democrats are rolling out a wide-ranging Obamacare package aimed at shoring up the law’s benefits while reversing several of the Trump administration main health priorities — a bid to follow through on the campaign-trail vows that helped propel them into the House majority.

The package is largely a rehash of policies that Democrats pitched last year, like expanding the Obamacare subsidies meant to help Americans afford health coverage and restoring outreach funding that Trump slashed over the past two years. It would also rescind regulations expanding cheaper, skimpier health plans that the administration has touted for providing greater choice, but Democrats have derided as “junk” insurance.

Their plan gained new significance in the wake of the Trump administration’s legal action, providing vulnerable Democrats with concrete legislation to hype for their swing-district voters and a powerful tool to use against Republicans who refuse to endorse any Obamacare-related measures even as they insist they want to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

For Republicans, meanwhile, the Justice Department’s move threatens to put them back on the defensive just days after what was arguably their biggest victory of the Trump era.

[M]ost Republicans have so far remained fairly quiet in the aftermath of the DOJ filing in a case that few view as politically advantageous — even as Trump appeared to celebrate the decision. . . . GOP lawmakers who did have an initial reaction expressed exasperation at the disconnect between the Trump administration and the Hill on health care.

[T]he issue is a new headache given the new Senate map: Democrats have gone from defending 10 states that Trump won in 2018 to launching campaigns against incumbents in places like Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Maine. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has been particularly outspoken in opposition to the administration’s support of the lawsuit.

[N]either the Trump administration nor Republicans in Congress have any ready replacement for Obamacare if it is ultimately wiped out. . . . with a serious battle for Senate control developing in purple and blue states, Democrats say they have the political upper hand on an issue their House counterparts used to devastating effect in 2018.

This move by the Trump administration to take away health care will prove far more detrimental to the administration and the Republican Party than any gains they might have made by the [findings] of Mr. Barr’s letter,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Even Doug Jones of Alabama, by far the most endangered Senate Democrat next year, was singing the same tune as party leaders. “I’m outraged. It’s going to hurt my state really bad if that were to go forward,” Jones said in an interview. “They couldn’t do in this chamber what they wanted to do, which is completely dismantle and disintegrate it. So they’re trying to blow it up in any way possible.”

Being a Republican and being a decent and moral person are becoming increasingly mutually exclusive.

Republican Appointees Are Corroding the Foundations of Democracy.

The main agenda of today's Republican Party is to retain power while thwarting the will of the majority of voters in the USA.  This agenda is being pushed in multiple ways, including voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and, increasingly, by politicizing the federal judiciary with unfit appointees who place political partisanship ahead above the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.  Frighteningly, with the U.S. Senate controlled by Republicans - who seemingly hold as much regard for American democracy as the Vichy French did for maintaining the democracy of the French Third Republic - it is near impossible for Democrats to block these ideologues who are set on thwarting the will of the people. A column in the New York Times looks at this insidious assault of democracy itself and the ruling of GOP appointee U. S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor who issued a ruling striking down the Affordable Health Care Act.  O'Connor has previously issued rulings (i) upholding anti-transgender "bathroom bills," (ii) barring same sex couples from family medical leave benefits and (iii) and allowing physicians to refuse to treat LGBT individuals.  Here are column highlights:

The midterm elections were, to an important extent, a referendum on the Affordable Care Act; health care, not Donald Trump, dominated Democratic campaigning. And voters delivered a clear verdict: They want Obamacare’s achievements, the way it expanded coverage to roughly 20 million people who would otherwise have been uninsured, to be sustained.

But on Friday, Reed O’Connor, a partisan Republican judge known for “weaponizing” his judicial power, declared the A.C.A. as a whole — protection for pre-existing conditions, subsidies to help families afford coverage, and the Medicaid expansion — unconstitutional. Legal experts from both right and left ridiculed his reasoning and described his ruling as “raw political activism.” And that ruling probably won’t be sustained by higher courts.

But don’t be too sure that his sabotage will be overturned. O’Connor’s abuse of power may be unusually crude, but that sort of behavior is becoming increasingly common. And it’s not just health care, nor is it just the courts. What Nancy Pelosi called the “monstrous endgame” of the Republican assault on health care is just the leading edge of an attack on multiple fronts, as the G.O.P. tries to overturn the will of the voters and undermine democracy in general.

Rule of law depends not just on what is written down, but also on the behavior of those who interpret and enforce that rule. If these people don’t regard themselves as servants of the law first, partisans second, if they won’t subordinate their political goals to their duty to preserve the system, laws become meaningless and only power matters.

And what we’re seeing in America — what we’ve actually been seeing for years, although much of the news media and political establishment has refused to acknowledge it — is an invasion of our institutions by right-wing partisans whose loyalty is to party, not principle. This invasion is corroding the Republic, and the corrosion is already very far advanced.

I say “right-wing” advisedly. There are bad people in both parties, as there are in all walks of life. But the parties are structurally different. The Democratic Party is a loose coalition of interest groups, but the modern Republican Party is dominated by “movement conservatism,” a monolithic structure held together by big money — often deployed stealthily — and the closed intellectual ecosystem of Fox News and other partisan media. And the people who rise within this movement are, to a far greater degree than those on the other side, apparatchiks, political loyalists who can be counted on not to stray from the party line.

Republicans have been stuffing the courts with such people for decades; O’Connor was appointed by George W. Bush. That’s why his ruling, no matter how bad the legal reasoning, wasn’t a big surprise.

[I]t’s not just the courts. Even as Trump and his allies spin fantasies about sabotage by the “deep state,” the reality is that a growing number of positions in government agencies are being occupied by right-wing partisans who care nothing, or actively oppose, their agencies’ missions. The Environmental Protection Agency is now run by people who don’t want to protect the environment, Health and Human Services by people who want to deny Americans health care.

The same takeover by apparatchiks is taking place in politics. Remember when the role of the Senate was supposed to be to “advise and consent”? Under Republican control it’s just plain consent — there is almost literally nothing Trump can do, up to and including clear evidence of corruption and criminality, that will induce [GOP] senators from his party to exercise any kind of oversight.

So how do people who think and behave this way respond when the public rejects their agenda? They attempt to use their power to overrule the democratic process.

When Democrats win despite election rigging, they strip the offices Democrats win of power, as they did in Wisconsin. When Democratic policies prevail despite all of that, they use apparatchik-stuffed courts to strike down legislation on the flimsiest of grounds.

As David Frum, the author of “Trumpocracy,” warned a year ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That’s happening as we speak.

So Pelosi was right about Reed O’Connor’s ruling being a symptom of a “monstrous endgame,” but the game in question isn’t just about perpetuating the assault on health care, it’s about assaulting democracy in general. And the current state of the endgame is probably just the beginning; the worst, I fear, is yet to come.

Scott Taylor and House Republicans Lie About Their Votes on Health Care

Scott Taylor - lying about his health care votes

McMorris-Rodgers - lying about her health care votes

If one watches television in the Hampton Roads viewing area, it is hard to miss the Elaine Luria campaign ads taking Scott Taylor to task for his votes to make health care insurance less obtainable and less affordable for many residents of the Virginia 2nd Congressional District.  Taylor whines that the ads are lies and that he has voted to protect access to health care for average Americans.  Obviously, Taylor is hoping that voters will not take the time to research his voting record for themselves.  If they do so, they will find that Luria's ads are accurate.  Scott Taylor DID vote to gut the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, just like he voted for the massive Trump/GOP tax cuts that gave massive tax breaks to the extremely wealthy and large corporations, threw a few crumbs to average taxpayers, and reduced a number of tax deductions for small businesses (meaning their taxes will go up). But Taylor is not alone on his lies about his votes on health care issues. As a piece in Politico notes as but one example of GOP dishonesty, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the No. 4 Republican in the House, is busy lying through her teeth about her votes that have made healthcare less attainable for many.  Here are article excerpts:

Cathy McMorris Rodgers got an earful about health care on a recent Friday afternoon knocking on doors in the suburban Balboa neighborhood of Spokane. McMorris Rodgers, the top-ranking Republican woman in the House facing the toughest reelection contest of her career, heard one resident complain his wife’s monthly insurance premiums have swelled to over $700 per month. Another agonized about affording long-term care for her elderly mother. Yet another worried whether Medicare would go bankrupt.

In past election cycles, the seven-term lawmaker might have had an easy talking point: Repeal and replace Obamacare. But like other Republicans who suddenly find themselves on the defensive on health care, she avoids mentioning her party’s long-standing pledge to eliminate the 2010 law.

The fact that she’s now steering clear of one of the GOP’s core tenets about repealing Obamacare shows just how treacherous the health care issue has become on the campaign trail. . . . she’s also the sole Washington state lawmaker to have voted to repeal Obamacare last year.

Now, she faces attack ads spotlighting that vote, not to mention lawn signs imploring voters to “repeal McMorris Rodgers, not our health care.” And while McMorris Rodgers talks about the importance of insurance protections for people like her son who have pre-existing conditions, she voted for a bill that health experts largely agree would have eroded those [pre-existing conditions] protections.

“She’s still defending that vote,” said her Democratic rival Lisa Brown, a former state Senate majority leader with health care bona fides, including helping to start a medical school in eastern Washington. “She’s still saying, ‘Well, people just didn’t understand our vision.’ It’s so much not in the best interests of this region and the whole state of Washington that I had to conclude she’s either really out of touch with the district … or has just decided to choose the party over the district.”

When pressed on health care on the campaign trail, she promises to ensure that vulnerable people, including those with pre-existing conditions, get the care they need, even though the Trump administration is asking the courts to throw out Obamacare’s insurance safeguards.

McMorris Rodgers’ district, which sprawls across the eastern part of the state and borders Canada and Oregon, carries historic symbolism that makes it an irresistible target for Democrats. When the Gingrich revolution led a Republican takeover of the House in 1994, the most prized scalp was that of former House Speaker Tom Foley, who held the seat for three decades and became the first sitting speaker to lose reelection since the Civil War.

Democrats believe Brown is the candidate who could turn the district blue again. She spent two decades in the state Legislature, rising to Senate majority leader before becoming chancellor of Washington State University’s Spokane campus. In both roles, she helped create a new medical school at the college, which enrolled its first class last year, cementing Spokane’s status as a regional health care hub.

On a recent afternoon, Brown touted her work establishing the medical school during a candidate forum on the Colville Indian Reservation, about two hours north of Spokane. “The health care issue is probably the most important issue I hear about as I travel through the district,” she told the audience.

Brown, like other Democratic candidates this cycle, frequently criticizes Republicans for threatening insurance protections for pre-existing conditions, which a recent POLITICO-Harvard poll found is an overwhelming concern for Democrats. The Trump administration’s decision to support a lawsuit from 20 conservative states that would gut Obamacare’s protections has been a political gift for Democrats and a messaging challenge for Republicans.

“By trying to dismantle it and not having anything to put in its place, clearly that’s in jeopardy,” Brown said. “It’s the distance between the rhetoric and the reality.”

Like McMorris Rodgers, Scott Taylor is at best talking out of both sides of his mouth, but to put it bluntly, is just plain lying.  Just as he's lying about protecting Social Security and Medicare, programs that the always despicable Mitch McConnell targeted for cuts just this week.  Don't trust Taylor. Vote him out on November 6, 2018. 

Republican Blatant Lies on Health Care

I view quality health care for all citizens as something very important.  First, if one is a moral person - I can't say Christians because evangelicals continue to prove themselves to be both morally bankrupt and hypocrites nearly daily - the welfare of others, especially children and the elderly ought to concern you.  Secondly, Americans pay the highest costs for health care of any developed nation because we fail to cover preventive care and as a result have people flooding ER's with catastrophic illnesses that could have been either avoided or greatly lessened in magnitude.  These un-reimbursed costs get passed on to everyone else and drive up insurance premiums.  The simple math is that to save money, one needs to spend money on basic and preventive care.  A third reason is that from personal experience when one of my children came down with a rare and very deadly disease, I understand how unexpected medical bills can ruin one financially.  Even with "excellent insurance" all of our savings were wiped out and it took me four years to pay off the balance of the bills.  But for a well paying job, I'd have been forced into bankruptcy.  

Polls indicate that a majority of Americans similarly deem health care and access to health care insurance as important, especially when it comes to pre-existing conditions.  Yet what do Republicans want to do?  Gut the Affordable Health Care Act, allow insurance companies to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions (or charge them exorbitant rates).  Worse yet, to finance the Trump/GOP tax cuts they want to make cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.  But heven forbid that they be honest with voters about their agenda.  Instead, as a column in the New York Times notes, the blatantly lie.  Here are column excerpts:

Republicans no longer bother with deceptive presentations of facts. Instead, they just flat-out lie.

What do they lie about? Lots of things, from crowd sizes to immigrant crime, from steel plants to the Supreme Court. But right now the most intense, coordinated effort at deception involves health care — an issue where Republicans are lying nonstop about both their own position and that of Democrats.

The true Republican position on health care has been clear and consistent for decades: The party hates, just hates, the idea of government action to make essential health care available to all citizens, regardless of income or medical history.

This hatred very much includes hatred of Medicare. Way back in 1961, Ronald Reagan warned that enacting Medicare would destroy American freedom. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that happened. Newt Gingrich shut down the government in an attempt to force Bill Clinton to slash Medicare funding. Paul Ryan proposed ending Medicare as we know it and replacing it with inadequate vouchers to be applied to the purchase of private insurance.

And the hatred obviously extends to the Affordable Care Act. Republicans don’t just hate the subsidies that help people buy insurance; they also hate the regulations that prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. Indeed, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit trying to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions, and the Trump administration has declined to oppose the suit, in effect endorsing it.

So if you’re a voter who cares about health care, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out where the parties stand. If you believe that Medicare is a bad thing and the government shouldn’t protect people with pre-existing conditions, vote Republican. If you want to defend Medicare and ensure coverage even for those who have health problems, vote Democrat.

But Republicans have a problem here: The policies they hate, and Democrats love, are extremely popular. Medicare has overwhelming support. So does protection for pre-existing conditions, which is even supported by a large majority of Republicans.

Now, you might imagine that Republicans would respond to the manifest unpopularity of their health care position by, you know, actually changing their position. But that would be hopelessly old-fashioned. As I said, what they’ve chosen to do instead is lie, insisting that black is white and up is down. Thus Josh Hawley, as Missouri’s attorney general, is part of that lawsuit against Obamacare’s regulation of insurers; but in his campaign for the Senate, he’s posing as a defender of Americans with pre-existing conditions. Dean Heller, running for re-election to the Senate in Nevada, voted for a bill that would have destroyed Obamacare, including all protection for pre-existing conditions; but he’s misrepresenting himself just like Hawley is. All of which brings me to a remarkable op-ed article on health care in USA Today, which was published under Donald Trump’s name . . . Part of the article claimed that the Trump administration is defending health insurance for Americans with pre-existing conditions, when the reality is that it has tried to destroy that coverage. And what did “Trump” say Democrats would do? Why, that they would “eviscerate” the current Medicare program. Oh, and that they would turn America into Venezuela. Because that’s what has happened to countries that really do have single-payer, like Canada and Denmark.

Why do Republicans think they can get away with such blatant lies? Partly it’s because they expect their Fox-watching followers to believe anything they’re told.

But it’s also because they can still count on enablers in the mainstream news media. After all, why did USA Today approve this piece? Letting Trump express his opinion is one thing; giving him a platform for blatant lies is another. And as fact-checker Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post put it, “Almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.” Even the president of the United States isn’t entitled to his own facts.

So will the G.O.P.’s Big Lie on health care work? We’ll find out in a few weeks.

Devin Nunes' Hometown Newspaper Endorses Nunes' Opponent

Other than Mitch McConnell, few have done more to harm American democracy and worked harder to protect Donald Trump from a full investigation of efforts to collude with Russia than Rep. Devin Nunes.  In fact, one would almost think that Nunes was on the Trump payroll given the bizarre efforts he has undertaken to protect Trump and thwart the House Intelligence Committee's investigation.  Now, facing a tough re-election fight, Nunes finds himself discarded by his hometown newspaper which has endorsed Nunes' opponent.  Never mind that during eight previous elections, the paper had endorsed Nunes.  A piece in Salon looks at this welcomed change in endorsement.  Here are article excerpts:

The Fresno Bee is backing Republican Rep. Devin Nunes' Democratic challenger in California's 22nd congressional district, after endorsing Nunes in eight consecutive elections.

The Bee, which had backed Nunes in every race since 2002, announced Saturday that it was endorsing Democratic challenger Andrew Janz.

The paper touted Janz's promise to hold at least four town halls each year and remain available to constituents. Nunes has come under fire for refusing to participate in an open town hall in his Central Valley district since 2010.

The Bee also noted Nunes' bizarre behavior as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, writing that he seemed more interested in protecting President Donald Trump from the Russia investigation than in his “constitutional obligations as an independent arm of government.”

The key policy reason the paper cited for backing Janz over Nunes, however, was health care.

Nunes voted for a Republican House bill that would have gutted coverage of pre-existing protections under Obamacare and included large cuts to Medicaid.

“In Nunes’ district, 313,000 people were enrolled in Medi-Cal as of January,” the Bee reported. “Of those, 74,000 would have immediately lost coverage, and all would have had their coverage impacted through loss of benefits or access to doctors.” Medi-Cal is the state's version of Medicaid.

Health care has been overshadowed by Trump, Russia and Brett Kavanaugh on the national stage but it remains the single biggest issue in many House and Senate races, with Democrats driving the conversation. . . . . Roughly 63 percent of voters said a candidate's position on pre-existing condition protections are either “very important” or the “single most important factor.”

Republicans are trying to erase their repeal record from memory -- they're scrubbing language from their website, pushing meaningless, toothless resolutions and avoiding constituent and reporter questions on health care. But the trouble for them is that we all remember the damage Republicans have done and continue to do to our health care -- and we're not going to forget it, either."

The polls suggest as much as well. A Fox News poll last month found that half of voters prefer Democrats on health care while just 34 percent said Republicans would do a better job on the issue. Among voters who named health care as their most important issue in a September CNN poll, 75 percent backed Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in the Arizona Senate race, compared to 14 percent who backed her Republican opponent, Rep. Martha McSally. In Tennessee, voters who said health care was their most important issue, 71 percent back former Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, compared to 21 percent who support his Republican opponent, Rep. Marsha Blackburn.

Republicans Continue to Undermine Pre-Existing Condition Coverage

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Josh Hawley apparently has taken the Hypocrite's oath.

America continues to have the most costly and inefficient health care systems in the world.  It literally costs multiples of what other nations with national systems are paying and it costs lives because many who need health care cannot afford it.  If Republicans have their way, health care insurance will become even more expensive and those with pre-existing conditions may find themselves un-insurable.  This from the party that claims to uphold "Christian values" even as it seeks to slash social programs to cut a deficit cause by a massive tax cut give away for the extremely wealthy and large corporations which have not reinvested their huge windfall in increased employee wages or massive capital investments.  It's little wonder Millennials are walking away from the GOP - and religion. A column in the New York Times exposes the Republican hypocrisy.  If you care about health care, vote Democrat in every race on November 6, 2018.  Here are column excerpts:

On graduation, most medical students swear some version of the ancient Hippocratic oath — a promise to act morally in their role as physicians.

When it comes to how political figures deal with health care, however, we’ve come to expect the opposite, at least on one side of the aisle.  It often seems as if Republican politicians have secretly sworn a Hypocrite’s oath — a promise to mislead voters to the best of their ability, to claim to support the very protections for the sick they’re actively working to undermine.

To see what I mean, consider the case of Josh Hawley of Missouri, who is running for the Senate against Claire McCaskill.

Hawley is one of 20 state attorneys general who have brought a lawsuit attempting to repeal a key provision of the Affordable Care Act — the provision that protects people with pre-existing medical conditions, by requiring that insurance companies cover everyone of similar age at the same rate regardless of medical history. Kill that provision, and millions of vulnerable Americans will lose their insurance.

But here’s the thing: Protecting coverage for pre-existing conditions is overwhelmingly popular, commanding majority support even among Republicans. And McCaskill has been hammering Hawley over his role in that lawsuit.

So Hawley has responded with ads claiming that he, too, wants to protect those with pre-existing conditions, as supposedly shown by his support for a bill that purports to provide such protection.

I have to say, you almost have to admire the sheer brazenness of the dishonesty here. For the bill Hawley touts is a fraud: It’s full of loopholes allowing insurers to discriminate in ways that would end up making essential health care unaffordable for those who need it most. For example, while it would require that they offer insurance to, say, cancer patients, it would allow them to sell policies that don’t cover cancer treatment — which would mean that policies that did cover such treatment would become prohibitively expensive.

And the fraudulence of this bill aside, even serious, nonfraudulent regulation of insurance companies isn’t enough in itself to provide affordable coverage for pre-existing conditions.

That was New York’s experience: Before the A.C.A., it had strong regulations on insurers, but high premiums meant that only people with health problems bought insurance on the individual market (as opposed to getting it from their employers), and this in turn kept premiums high.

To make regulation work, you have to back it up with incentives for healthy people to sign up, including subsidies that help lower-income families afford insurance. In other words, if you really want to make essential care available for pre-existing conditions while continuing to rely on private insurance companies, you need a system that looks a lot like … Obamacare. Indeed, New York premiums dropped in half when the A.C.A. went into effect.

Hence the Hypocrite’s oath. Republicans hate the idea of guaranteeing that all Americans receive essential health care, and they really, really hate the taxes on high incomes that help pay for Obamacare subsidies. And you can imagine an alternative political universe in which the G.O.P. openly admitted its true goals, justifying them on the basis of economic freedom, or something.

But in this universe, Republicans have decided that they must conceal their intention of taking health care away from those who need it most. So they’re doing what Hawley is doing: resorting to a combination of sabotage and smoke screen. On one side, they’re hacking away at the edges of the Affordable Care Act in the hope that it will implode. On the other, they’re pretending to want the very things — like guaranteed coverage of pre-existing conditions — they’re trying to destroy.

[T]his is why many Democrats are talking about Medicare for all. Obamacare was a market-friendly health insurance reform designed in part to mollify conservatives; their response was scorched-earth opposition, followed by a series of attempts to exploit public confusion about how the Affordable Care Act works and what it will take to sustain it. So there’s something to be said for a simpler system that would be harder to game politically.

[P]olls show that Democrats hold a large edge over Republicans on the question of which party people trust more on health care. But that gap would surely be even bigger if more voters realized what the G.O.P. is actually trying to do.

So let’s be clear about this: If you or anyone you care about suffers from a pre-existing medical condition, Republicans are trying to take away your insurance. If they claim otherwise, they’re lying.

I truly believe the rise of deliberate and blatant dishonesty of the GOP directly tracks with the rise of Christofascists in the party base and party bureaucracy.  No one is more dishonest.

GOP Message to Most Americans: Get Sick, Go Bankrupt and Die

Liar and modern day Pharisee, Mike Pence.

Sitting in Le Marais area of Paris as I type this post, several things come to mind.  One is that the French truly have a love of life and, unlike Americans work to live rather than live to work.  Another is that they are free from the constant fear of that one major illness or pre-existing medial condition that could wipe them out financially,  Why this freedom of such fear?  It's simple: France's healthcare system, rated by many as the best and most cost effective in the world. Yes, the French pay higher taxes, but walking around the city one sees few signs of poverty and an enviable lifestyle.  The contrast could not be greater compared to America where health care cost remain a continued concern for all but the very wealthy.  Indeed, the message the Republican Party seemingly sends to millions of Americans is like the caption of this post: get sick, go bankrupt and die.  This from the political party that pretends to embrace "Christian values"  and that now finds it strongest support from evangelical Christians and white supremacists (in my view, the two are increasingly synonymous).  A column in the New York Times looks at the menace of the GOP towards millions of Americans:  Here are excerpts:

Despite his reputation as a maverick, John McCain spent most of his last decade being a very orthodox Republican . . . . But he redeemed much of that record with one action: He cast the crucial vote against G.O.P. attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That single “nay” saved health care for tens of millions of Americans, at least for a while.

But now McCain is gone, and with him, as far as we can tell, the only Republican in Congress with anything resembling a spine. As a result, if Republicans hold Congress in November, they will indeed repeal Obamacare. That’s not a guess: It’s an explicit promise, made by Vice President Mike Pence last week.

In the case of health care, however, there’s an even deeper problem: The G.O.P. can’t come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act because no such alternative exists. In particular, if you want to preserve protection for people with pre-existing conditions — the health issue that matters most to voters, including half of Republicans — Obamacare is the most conservative policy that can do that. The only other options are things like Medicare for all that would involve moving significantly to the left, not the right.

Health economists have explained this point many times over the years; but as always, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

If you want private insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, you have to ban discrimination based on medical history. But that in itself isn’t enough, because if policies cost the same for everyone, those who sign up will be sicker than those who don’t, creating a bad risk pool and forcing high premiums. That was the case in New York, where premiums for individual policies were very high before the A.C.A. For what Obamacare did was provide incentives to get healthy people to sign up, too. On one side there was a penalty for not having insurance (the individual mandate). On the other, there were subsidies designed to limit health expenses as a share of income. Republicans have tried to sabotage health care by doing away with the mandate, and have succeeded in driving premiums higher; but the system is still standing thanks to those subsidies.

The point, again, is that Obamacare is the most conservative option for covering pre-existing conditions, and if Republicans really cared about the scores of millions of Americans with such conditions, they would support and indeed try to strengthen the A.C.A.

Instead, they’re going to kill it if they hold on in two months. But covering pre-existing conditions is popular; therefore, they’re pretending that they’ll do that, while offering proposals that would, in fact, do no such thing.

Do they imagine that voters are stupid?  Well, yes. In recent rallies Donald Trump has been declaring that Democrats want to “raid Medicare to pay for socialism.”

But the more important target is the news media, many members of which still haven’t learned to cope with the pervasive bad faith of modern conservatism.

Sadly, when it comes to the GOP base, they are stupid.  Or, in the alternative, are so motivated by their racial hatreds that they blinded to the reality that they are voting against their own interests in most instances. 

Trump’s War On Pre-Existing Condition Protections

As noted in the prior post concerning suicide, Trump and the GOP, but Trump in particular, is waging a war to kill the pre-existing condition provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act.  If successful, this will mean many Americans will lose coverage completely or face skyrocketing premiums.  Oh, and did I mention that almost anything can be deemed a pre-existing condition by insurance carriers who only want to accept premium payments but never have to pay out to their insureds?  With fewer and fewer Americans receiving health insurance through their jobs, this is a big deal and will cause significant harm to many already beleaguered individuals and families - especially among the GOP base.  Belatedly, some in the GOP are waking up to the danger of their handiwork in the lead up to November 218.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the issue.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans were already worried that the nation’s health care woes could sink them in 2018. Now they feel like the Trump administration just tossed them an anvil.

The Department of Justice’s announcement Thursday night that it will take aim at Obamacare’s most popular provisions — a ban on insurance companies discriminating against people based on pre-existing conditions, and limits on how much insurers can hike premiums for older Americans — will be ammunition Democrats can use this November.

The long-shot lawsuit from 20 conservative states, now endorsed by the DOJ, argues that because Republicans repealed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty as part of their tax overhaul, the mandate itself can no longer be considered a tax — the basis on which the Supreme Court upheld it in 2012. And, the DOJ added, since the ACA’s rules on pre-existing conditions are “closely intertwined” with the mandate, they too must be struck down.

Republicans had begun growing hopeful that good economic news and some improving poll numbers might save them in the midterms. But they now fear that Trump has handed voters proof positive that his party doesn’t care about those with preexisting conditions.

“This is definitely the most popular aspect of the Obamacare legislation, and it clearly creates an opening for Democrats going into the final months of the election year,” GOP strategist Ken Spain, a former communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, told TPM.

Poll after poll has found that protecting people with pre-existing conditions is the most emotionally potent health care argument for voters. A survey conducted by the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates for Protect Our Care this past January and shared with TPM on Friday found that the issue was one of the most effective in the healthcare debate: 63 percent of voters had “very major concerns” and another 20 percent had “somewhat major concerns” with the GOP’s efforts to repeal pre-existing condition protections. Among independents, that number rose to 73 percent with “very major concerns.”

Now, thanks to the Trump administration, the issue is poised to come back into the headlines at the worst possible time for Republicans. Most insurers inform their customers about their new insurance rates in October, just weeks before voters go to the polls. Insurance rates were already set to rise next year, in large part because of Republicans’ repeal of the individual mandate, and insurers say Trump’s latest move could push premiums higher still.

“Removing those provisions will result in renewed uncertainty in the individual market, create a patchwork of requirements in the states, cause rates to go even higher for older Americans and sicker patients, and make it challenging to introduce products and rates for 2019,”America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), health insurers’ major lobbying group, warned in a Friday statement.

Now, a year later, after receiving significant political blowback for these repeal attempts, GOP lawmakers are once again in the hot seat as the Trump administration tries to use the courts to get rid of the ACA protections they were unable to abolish through Congress.

“If I were a House Republican I would have woken up to my morning newspaper and thrown it against the wall. He just made clear the thing they’ve done their best to hide from,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson.

As Republicans squirm, Democrats are pouncing on the administration’s attempt to have the ACA’s most popular protections ruled unconstitutional. By Friday morning, candidates in competitive House and Senate races were blasting out statements on the legal filing and attacking their GOP opponents for siding with President Trump on health care policy.

With their eyes on retaking at least one, if not both chambers of Congress this fall, national Democratic groups are confident that the issue will be a major political liability for the GOP.  

“No issue is more personal than health care, and this is a perfect storm of two of the most personal aspects of health care coming together: skyrocketing premiums and the loss of protections for people with pre-existing conditions,” Tyler Law, the national press secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), told TPM.

“Whoever tends to be disruptive on healthcare tends to get punished,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), a former NRCC chairman, told TPM. “When Republicans come in and try to undo Obamacare, they’re being disruptive.”

Revised GOP Healthcare "Reform" Still Harms Millions

Mitch McConnell has unveiled his latest abortion of a healthcare "reform" bill that at the moment has failed to secure the support of 51 Republican Senators.  Why?  Because it still harms millions of Americans and would force them off of healthcare coverage - McConnell and his cronies describe this as  a "voluntary" decision ignoring the fact that tax cuts are worthless if one is not making enough income to pay significant amounts in income tax or pay insurance premiums - and seemingly double or triple counts various funds in a pathetic attempt to disguise the negative impact on citizens. The CBO is supposed to release its scoring of the bill on Monday and the  likely outcome is that the harm will be significantly worse than what is claimed by McConnell and his fellow GOP liars sycophants.  Meanwhile, Republicans continue to disingenuously  claim to care about "working families" and "Christian values." A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the GOP's difficulties in selling a foul rotten fish.  Here are excerpts:

GOP leaders unveiled the Senate’s revised health care bill on Thursday, and the updated legislation included a version of a controversial amendment drafted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would allow insurers to offer cheap, bare-bones plans that cover few health care services as long as at least one plan per state complies with Obamacare’s regulations. To address concerns that Cruz’s amendment would lower prices for the young and healthy by making them skyrocket for the people who need a comprehensive insurance plan or have a pre-existing condition, the amendment purports to allocate billions in additional funding that states could use “to assist such health insurance issuers in covering high risk individuals.”

But as Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told reporters on Thursday, there is no additional money. Instead, the amendment takes money already appropriated in the bill for other needs and says it can be used for these payments to insurers under the Cruz Amendment.

“It seems to me you’re using that money over and over again,” she said. “It’s supposed to relieve the cost of high premiums. It’s supposed to solve the problem with deductibles being unaffordable. It’s supposed to be available for high-risk or reinsurance pool. It’s supposed to be available under the Cruz Amendment to help prevent a huge increase in rates for people with pre-existing conditions.”

Matthew Fiedler, a fellow at Brookings Institute’s Center for Health Policy, confirmed this double-dipping to TPM.

“The overall bill adds $70 billion to the stability fund,” he said. “But the Cruz amendment then redirects that same money to make payments to insurers designed to mitigate the problems that the Cruz amendment would create in the ACA-compliant market.”

“That funding will, of course, not be available to serve the stability fund’s other purposes,” he added.

Those other purposes include assisting the people booted off of Medicaid due to hundreds of billions of cuts in funding for the federal health care program, easing their transition into the individual health insurance market. It is also meant to provide funding for health savings accounts (HSA) that people could use to pay their insurance premiums.

Another piece in Huffington Post sums up the latest bill as follows:

At its core, however, the revised version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act ― which McConnell pulled two weeks ago because too few Republican senators planned to vote for it ― remains a vehicle for massive cuts to Medicaid, less financial assistance for people who buy private health insurance, and the return of skimpy junk insurance policies and discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions. Taxes on the rich would remain, but health care companies would enjoy a major tax cut.

This part of the bill is in addition to the sweeping changes the underlying measure would make to the health insurance system, including allowing insurers to sell policies with less coverage but higher deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs than are permitted under the Affordable Care Act.

The bill also would repeal the law’s individual mandate that most Americans obtain health coverage or face a tax penalty and its requirement that large employers offer health benefits to workers.

States would be allowed to waive that law’s requirements for coverage of core benefits ― such as hospitalizations, prescription drugs, maternity care and mental health. This would undermine protections for people with pre-existing conditions, who could be offered plans that don’t cover medical services and products needed to treat their ailments. People whose health coverage lapses for more than 63 days would be locked out of the insurance market for six months.

And insurers could charge older customers five times what they charge younger people, up from three times under the Affordable Care Act.

Trumpcare: American Conservatism Doesn't Gives a Damn About Others

As I have often noted, I grew up in a family with long ties to the Republican Party.  For eight (8) years I held a City Committee seat for the City Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach which I actually incorporated back in the 1990's.  But the Republican Party changed from what it had once been in the days of my parents and grand parents.  The catalyst for the change in my view, the Christofascists who deliberately and steadily infiltrated to local city and county committees, with foolish moderates voting extremists on to such committees. and thinking that they could still maintain control.  As this occurred the party morphed into a sectarian party with slavish obedience to Christofascists and falsely labeled "family values" organization which in reality were hate groups and veiled white supremacy groups.  The intertwining of Christian extremism and civil laws got to the point where I could no longer remain a part of the deepening cancer and resigned, stating that until the concept of separation of church and state was again recognized, I could no longer be a Republican.  Things have only worsened in the years since.   Now the party that claims devotion to "Christian values" has become a party of hate and utter mistreatment of the less fortunate.   The healthcare bill passed by House Republicans exemplifies the moral sickness that is now mainstream in the GOP.  Andrew Sullivan sums up the situation well and why many of us are now former Republicans:

You might think Obamacare would violate my generally conservative principles, but it didn’t. In fact, it seemed to me to be an effective marriage of conservative principles and, well, human decency. The decency part comes from not blaming or punishing the sick for their condition. The conservative part comes from the incremental nature of the reform, and its reliance on the private sector to provide a public good. For good measure, it actually saved the government money, and it slowed soaring health-care costs. The exchanges, with predictable early hiccups, largely worked — a case study in the benefits of market competition. The law allowed for experiments to test how efficient health care could be. It even insisted on personal responsibility by mandating individual coverage. And the concept of insurance is not socialism; it’s a matter simply of pooling risk as widely as possible. If any European conservative party were to propose such a system, it would be pilloried as a far-right plot. And yet the Republican Party opposed it with a passion that became very hard for me to disentangle from hatred of Obama himself.

The Trump GOP’s attempt to abolish it is therefore, to my mind, neither conservative nor decent. It’s reactionary and callous. Its effective abandonment of 95 percent of us with preexisting conditions will strike real terror in a lot of people’s hearts. Its gutting of Medicaid will force millions of the poor to lose health care almost altogether. It will bankrupt the struggling members of the working and middle classes who find themselves in a serious health crisis. It could hurt Republicans in the midterms —though that will be cold comfort for the countless forced into penury or sickness because of Trump’s desire for a “win.” But it’s clarifying for me. It forces me to back a Democratic Party I don’t particularly care for. And it destroys any notion I might have had that American conservatism gives a damn about the vulnerable. It really is a deal-breaker for me. I hope many others feel exactly the same way.

Thankfully, the U.S. Senate has made it clear that the House bill is not acceptable, but be prepared for Republicans to continue to try to include its most hideous aspects.  Meanwhile, as Trump/Republican voting "Christians" pack the pews in church tomorrow morning, understand that it is all a charade. Such people are not adherents of the Gospel message.  They do not give a damn about others.  Hate, greed and vile treatment of others are the real basis of their "faith."  No wonder the numbers of "Nones" are growing rapidly. 

The GOP's Obamacare Repeal Problem

So far the Republican Party's only real plank going into the 2014 midterm elections is to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a/ Obamacare.  The problem, however, is that the GOP has nothing to offer to replace it and, if it were to be repealed, many Americans would suddenly see themselves losing popular benefits.  Thus, outside the lunatic world of the Tea Party/Christofascists this single focus could be a problem.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this substantive problem.  Here are excerpts:

Here’s more evidence — culled from a new interview with a leading GOP Senate candidate – that the GOP Obamacare repeal stance is deeply problematic, even in states where the law is very unpopular and has Dems on defense.

North Carolina is ground zero in the Obamacare wars. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity has already spent over $8 million in ads battering vulnerable Dem Senator Kay Hagan over the law. A Dem Super PAC is hitting back with an ad that blasts her likely GOP opponent — State Rep. Thom Tillis — for wanting to return to a time when insurance companies could discriminate against preexisting conditions and prescription drug costs for seniors were higher.

Now watch how Tillis responds to that charge in the interview.  Tillis is asked whether he supports a proposal championed by Senator Richard Burr — also from his state — to replace Obamacare with an alternative that would supposedly reduce government spending and regulations while keeping the good parts of the ACA, i.e, consumer protections and expanded coverage.

Tillis responds by saying that of course he would replace Obamcare with something. But he makes two key concessions. While reiterating he supports repeal, he implicitly admits Obamacare’s core goals are worthy. And he adds: “Republicans need to communicate that we agree that there are serious health care issues among the American people that we need to solve”.

This is the GOP repeal dilemma. Tillis effectively concedes repeal alone is unsustainable. But he can’t bring himself to support the leading GOP alternative, referring to it as an “outline” worth considering.

The upshot: GOP candidates who understand that repeal alone is unsustainable — as Tillis clearly does — will not have an easy time escaping the implications of their own position. This gives Dems like Hagan a way to call for fixes to the law — achieving some distance from its problems — while blasting the opposition for wanting to go back to the old system, which is unpopular. It reframes the argument as flawed problem solving versus ideological hostility to government improving people’s lives.

GOP Schizophrenia On Health Care Reform

At times I wonder if some of the GOP leadership suffers from schizophrenia.  On the one hand we have Marco Rubio ranting that a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year must include provisions to defund Obamacare in its entirety.  Meanwhile, a group of top House Republicans have written a letter to President Obama asking him to preserve a temporary program included in the law that provides health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.  Obviously, one cannot have it both ways.  Here's what Rubio was saying during an interview via Think Progress:

Rubio parroted the usual litany of wild — and widely debunked — conservative hysteria about the dire consequences that Obamcare will have on American businesses and the U.S. health care industry, asserting that he would only vote to avert a government shutdown if Obamcare implementation is halted completely:

HEWITT: Senator Rubio, the continuing resolution is headed your way. How is this stacking up as Act III of the spending drama?

RUBIO: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that’s where we’re headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem… But here’s what I’ve said about this continuing resolution. Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund Obamacare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence, if they get a continuing resolution and we can get a vote on that and pass that onto the bill, I’ll vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent, and that’s defund this health care bill, this Obamacare bill, that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy.

One can only assume that Rubio has not bothered to have a chat with his GOP compatriots in the House of Representatives where something quite different is underway.  Think Progress reports this:

In another sign of the growing political support for health reform — or the sense that opposing its most popular elements has become politically perilous — a group of top House Republicans have written a letter to President Obama asking him to preserve a temporary program included in the law that provides health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The so-called Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) was designed as a bridge to the exchanges for families and individuals who don’t have an offer of coverage from an employer and cannot find insurance in the individual market. The $5 billion program, which covers only sick people is incredibly costly, and will soon stop processing new applicants. 

Republicans however, are incensed, and are demanding that the White House shift funds from prevention or comparative effectiveness research to keep the PCIP running. 

“Your administration’s action will leave thousands of Americans with pre-existing conditions without access to health care,” the group of House Republicans write in a letter first obtained by the Talking Points Memo’s Sahil Kapur. The letter reiterates the GOP’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act as a whole but notes, “to allow PCIP to continue to accept new enrollees, we urge you to support efforts to transfer the funds necessary from other PPACA programs, such as the Prevention and Public Health Fund, the Secretary’s transfer authority to assist with state based exchanges, comparative effectiveness, planning, or another similar program to PCIP.”

 The letter to Obama was signed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Energy & Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-MI), Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee Chair Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX).

The truth is that this country desperately needs health care reform and the reality is that the Affordable Health Care Act went nowhere near far enough in fixing the problem.   I for one support a single payer program because nothing else is going to rein in exploding hearth care costs - my firm heath plan premiums are going up over 11% even though we have had no major claims filed - and end the monopoly games being played by hospital systems.

The other irony is that the House GOP leaders are suddenly worried about those with pre-existing conditions while seeking to kill Obamacare and leave millions totally uninsured.  For a political party that claims to so supportive of Christian values, kicking millions to the curb as disposable garbage is the height of hypocrisy.