DM: Good tidings. Your kingdom has recovered from the GFC and the birth rate is rising! GOP: I cast death by pre-existing conditions 24 million times DM: .... #GOPDnD
That may be true, but in the meantime, health insurers are reacting by raising premiums because of uncertainty.
Don't assume the Senate version will be significantly better, nor that the final version will be better once it goes through reconcilliation...
It's still hard to see how you can get to $400Bn for LESS than 40m people? Leaving aside the single-payer question, NO form of universal healthcare implemented elsewhere in the world costs anything like that.
Good news, guys! The Tweeter in Chief is tweeting! I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere. ObamaCare is dead - the Republicans will do much better!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2017 I don't think Donald Trump is clear on the concept of Republicans.
Excuse me, stewardess, I speak Doublespeak. He says "We need to add more dollars to healthcare", which translates to "Americans need to add more dollars to healthcare by paying more out of pocket," and "the Republicans will do much better!" translates to "at getting Americans to pay more out of pocket."
And Barbara Billingsley, known for saying the dirtiest sentence that ever slipped by the censors in the 1950s: "Ward, you were awfully hard on the beaver last night."
His quotes on health care are as if they were created by random bots, sometimes from a GOP engine, sometimes from one made by a Bernie Bro. He cares so little about this issue that he can't even keep the sides straight.
Can you guys say "Single-Payer"? It seems like Republicans are so bent on destroying healthcare that we might go SP sooner than we thought: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-senators-weigh-taxing-employer-health-plans-1496350662 A number of lawmakers are open to the idea, including Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), GOP aides said, but there is no consensus yet on whether it should be included in the draft bill being written during this week’s congressional recess. [...] House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), who floated the idea in his own health proposal, has said the tax code unfairly favors people who get their health insurance through work over those who buy it on their own. Republicans, Mr. Ryan said in March, want to “stop the discrimination in the tax code against people who want to go out in a free marketplace and buy the health care of their choosing.”
Unless I'm missing something, taxing health-care benefits through work and using those proceeds to subsidize health care for those who don't get coverage through work is a damn good idea. I don't see how it could pass, though.
So their plan gets rid of taxes on higher income individuals to finance the plan and instead goes to taxing everyone who has an employer-sponsored plan. Typical.
Didn't the ACA do that to certain extent? The GOP is trapped in an unsolvable puzzle and no matter how they try to rearrange the pieces, they are going to end up screwing (and pissing) a number of voters higher than those receiving tax cuts. Remember that most people in the US gets coverage through employer-sponsored plans. When next election comes around, a bunch of people is going to be pissed at whoever increased taxes on them. Hopefully it will be an easy message for the dems to convey.
Why? Maybe if they get Trump to tell his fans that single payer was a Republican plan all along, they can sell it to their base.
Oh well OK that is bad ... I was thinking of adding the tax on employer plans to the existing tax on higher-income individuals. But if the GOP is proposing to eliminate the latter and add the former -- which yeah, must be the case, I realize now that I haven't heard of them putting the high-income tax back into the bill -- then yeah that idea fails. Sad. There I was going to praise a GOP idea.. I really would like to be "bipartisan" but if that is to be the GOP has to get it right, and getting it right seems to be a mighty struggle for that party.
It's not going to happen. The same way that all ideas for making the corporate tax cut revenue neutral are now off the table -- the GOP members of Congress aren't willing to go home and explain that they took away a tax benefit from individuals so as to give a tax benefit to corporations. Instead, they will give a tax benefit to corporations and not take away a tax benefit to individuals, thereby blowing out the deficit. Then they will run on 2018 against fiscally irresponsible Democrats, knowing that GOP voters will never know and/or care about what actually happened. They won't be learning that from Fox.
Just read this about the California act which is headed for California assembly... http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/californias_medicare_for_all_plan_clears_state_senate_20170602 Wasn't this the one that someone suggested would cost 3 times MORE than the NHS for 2/3rd the number of people?
I think the issue here is that there is one report that implementing single payer in CA would cost $400 billion and another report that it will reduce healthcare costs by $400 billion... I'm not sure the two reports are mutually exclusive.
So, this: Under the normal legislative procedure, the bill would need to clear a 60-vote threshold before it could advance. In that scenario, Democrats would unite against the bill and it would fall short; Senate Republicans could in turn pin the blame for blocking Obamacare repeal on the minority. “How do you do it in a way that you allow Democrats to kill it?” the second GOP lobbyist said. “If you couldn’t find a way to blame it on the Democrats, you have an obvious problem.” But the Senate is moving its bill under “budget reconciliation.” The advantage is that advancing a bill would require only 50 votes, preventing a Democratic filibuster. But that only helps if you actually have the votes. If Senate Republicans decide they can’t get 50 votes, then the only way to definitively resolve the health care debate (other than announcing the impasse and hoping it will be left at that) might be to put the bill on the floor and force their own members to block it. What the GOP should do for political advantage is challenge the bill under the Byrd Rule. This will almost certainly happen anyway, as the Dems are likely to do it. When the challenge is posed, the GOP should not fight it or overrule. They should accept it and double down on it by moving to subject the entire bill to the normal rules. Then the Dems will block it with their votes, and the GOP could go on blaming Dems for blocking Obamacare repeal. Of course, the parliamentarian has to agree that the bill violates the Byrd Rule. And if this was really in the works, the Dems might not lodge the parliamentary objection. But it's fully within the power of the Senate to reconsider this under the normal rules. Truth is, the Senate can more or less do anything they want in terms of parliamentary procedure provided they get enough senators to agree. It might be more palatable to get 51 votes to kill the bill by reconsidering it under the normal rules than to have 51 votes voting against it directly under reconciliation.
Or they could just start talking to Dems about fixes to the current law. Or is that not a thing anymore ...