Core provisions of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, were ruled unconstitutional by a Texas judge on Friday following a lawsuit brought by a group of Republican attorneys general from 20 states against Democratic attorneys general from 14 states led by California's Xavier Becerra.Zero Hedge
In a sudden change of heart that kills senate Republicans’ effort to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare before a rule allowing Republicans to circumvent a Democratic filibuster expires at the end of the month, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is now saying he won’t support the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare repeal bill.
Cruz, who revealed his position during a panel discussion at a Texas Tribune conference in Austin, suggested that the proposal also lacks the vote of Sen. Mike Lee, according to Politico. The Texas Republican said he and Lee offered amendments to the Graham-Cassidy proposal last week that would go further in bringing down Obamacare premiums but that the changes weren’t included in the latest draft of the bill.Governing is harder than opposing.
The logic behind the design of the Affordable Care Act does not hold up well when faced with the reality of how markets actually work outside cities. ACA exchanges were built on the fundamental idea that competition between regulated private insurance companies would improve quality and hold down prices, but competition is lacking in most rural counties. That’s very unlikely to ever change....The Intercept
Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well.
One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it. Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry.
Fine, now 91, wrote to The Intercept recently to explain that Medicare was never intended to cover only the elderly population, and that expanding it to everyone was a goal that its architects long campaigned for....Could the GOP pick up on this?
After the death of the Senate healthcare bill yesterday, The Intercept reached out to Fine for comment about where Congress should go next. “Single payer is the only real answer and some day I believe the Republicans will leap ahead of the Democrats and lead in its enactment,” he speculated, “just as did Bismarck in Germany and David Lloyd George and Churchill in the UK.”
As I’ve mentioned before, the guy who had universal healthcare figured out was the gruff former Congressman Pete Stark. His Americare bill from 2009 should be updated and made the Democratic alternative to the Senate bill….Monetary Realism
The first step of any political reform, I’ve always believed, is to figure out how to achieve the desired goal with the minimum number of changes to the existing legal structure. [Beowulf if a lawyer.] As I’ve written before, Obama’s healthcare plan should have simply been a universal plan similar to Medicare (if not Medicare itself) that covered every American from the day they were born instead of when they turned 65. It would have been faster, cheaper, more universal (as in 100%) and more popular. It was a mistake Obama didn’t take that route and unlike Bill Clinton, he didn’t have an excuse for it....
“Over these past seven years people’s expectations have changed,” [Krauthammer] said. “The grounds [for healthcare debate] are all liberal grounds…It’s showing that the country is at a point where I think it believes in universal coverage.”For those outside the US or just not paying attention Charles Krauthammer is one of the deans of American conservatism. The Daily Caller is conservative media.
Democrats have a sharp message for Republicans crowing over Thursday’s House vote to dismantle ObamaCare: The healthcare system is now yours.
“Whether they voted for it or not, Republicans own TrumpCare now,” Rep. Linda Sanchez (Calif.), the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said moments after the vote.
“They put their name next to your paying more for less,” echoed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “And we’ll make sure that the public is aware of that.”...
Trump and Ryan seem to be the early targets of the Democratic rebranding effort.
“They’re going to own it –– absolutely. And as we move forward, everything here is either RyanCare or TrumpCare. Or RyanTrumpCare,” Connolly said.
“They’re going to own it,” he repeated.
The Republican plan to repeal and replace the the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which narrowly passed a vote in the House today, rolls back protections for people with pre-existing conditions, which could increase health care costs for an estimated 130 million Americans.
The American Health Care Act stipulates that states can allow insurers to charge people with pre-existing conditions more for health insurance (which is banned under the ACA) if the states meet certain conditions, such as setting up high-risk insurance pools. Insurers still cannot deny people coverage outright, as was a common practice before the ACA's passage, but they can hike up premiums to an unaffordable amount, effectively pricing people out of the market.Fortune
The House passed the American Health Care Act in a 217 to 213 vote, sending the bill to the upper chamber. Yet, Senate leadership has acknowledged the legislation will need to change in the chamber in order to get enough of its members on board.
“We can’t be for half a dozen different proposals; we have to be for a proposal for us to get 51 votes in the Senate,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) told The Hill an hour before the House vote.
“We’ll start with the House bill, but we’ll need to work with every member of the Senate conference to see what they need to get to yes.”
Likely changes could focus on Medicaid and adding increased financial assistance, in the form of tax credits, to help low-income Americans afford health insurance.
It’s possible the Senate could run into the same problem the House toiled over for almost two months. Move the bill to right, and moderates will defect. Move the bill to the center, and the measure will lose conservative votes.A big difference between the House and Senate is that many congressional districts are safe for incumbents owing to gerrymandering, while senators have to stand for general election by the entire state, putting their odds in greater play.
Republican lawmakers have a new plan to repeal and replace Obamacare in a bid to bridge the gap between the House Freedom Caucus and moderates, according to a document obtained by CNBC....
A Freedom Caucus source told CNBC the changes to the health bill would secure 25 to 30 "yes" votes from the Freedom Caucus, and the new bill would get "very close" to 216 votes. The source said that 18 to 20 of those "yes" votes would be new.CNBC
Two senior GOP aides told CNBC no vote is scheduled for next week, but a discussion is expected via conference call on Saturday....
Some polls have shown majorities in favor of single payer health care. In the last election cycle we also went rather quickly from a widely believed politician-and-media-backed falsehood that Social Security was in serious financial trouble, to even Hillary Clinton saying that benefits needed to be expanded, not cut. That is the direction that the country is going, with Bernie Sanders, despite losing the Democratic presidential primary, being one of the most popular politicians in the country; and Trump in the doghouse with 37 percent approval....Counterpunch
It is hard to overestimate the role of the Affordable Care Act in the Republican resurgence.
Over the last seven years, the GOP has won successive elections by highlighting problems with Obamacare, airing more than $235 million in negative ads slamming the law, and staging more than fifty high-profile repeal votes. In 2016 every major Republican presidential candidate, including Donald Trump, campaigned on a pledge to quickly get rid of it.
Now in total control of Congress and the White House, some GOP legislators are saying that the political assault on Obamacare was an exercise in cynical politics, and that an outright repeal was never on the table.
“We have Republicans who do not want to repeal Obamacare,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., on Sirius XM Patriot on Wednesday.
“They may have campaigned that way, they may have voted that way a couple of years ago when it didn’t make any difference,” Brooks continued. “But now that it makes a difference, there seems to not be the majority support that we need to pass legislation that we passed fifty or sixty times over five or six years.”…Cue enraged base.
In the wake of the Republican failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Friday, leading figures in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rallying behind a single-payer health insurance and a raft of other bold reforms.The Huffington Post
These lawmakers and grassroots leaders have long believed that the problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are rooted in the original health care law’s attempt to accommodate, rather than gradually replace, the private, for-profit health insurance system.
Now that efforts to eliminate the law wholesale are effectively dead, they are again arguing that the best way to improve the country’s health care system is to confront the power of corporate health care provider more directly.…
It is hard to say exactly who was in each group because no vote was taken to put members on record, but this appears to be generally how things fell apart:
1) By far the largest group would have consisted of the house’s largest conservative faction (172 members), known as the Republican Study Committee, probably joined by members of the House Republican Conference who do not identify with any particular faction. I’m talking here about the group that solidly supported President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on the AHCA as originally drafted.
The Republican Study Committee — formed in 1973 to keep an eye on the party’s moderate leadership during the Nixon-Ford years — is the House’s oldest active faction....
2) The smallest, rewest, and most conservative faction of the House Republican Conference, called the “Freedom Caucus,” was established in 2015 to battle then Speaker John Boehner, particularly to fight his approval of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). These members of congress can be seen as the present rabble rousers because this is the faction that was willing to shut down the government in the original fight against Obamacare. ...
3) A larger faction of the House Republican Conference consists of about fifty people, who are the left-most Republicans in the House of Representatives (meaning only that they are moderates since no one in the Republican party is a leftist). This group was established in 1994 as the “Tuesday Group” when Republicans took control of the House under the more conservative leadership of Newt Gingrich. Gingrich rallied Republicans around his Contract with America. The Tuesday Group formed to resist Gingrich’s more conservative positioning of the Republican party.
The actual battle went like this: Unquestionably, those aligned with the Freedom Caucus felt the original AHCA bill, as proposed by Paul Ryan, did not go far enough in repealing Obamacare. Therefore, the group of Republicans who were with Trump and Ryan modified the bill to strip out more of Obamacare by taking down some of its Medicaid provisions and other benefits in order go gain some of the more conservative votes. That resulted in those aligned with the Tuesday Group (the most moderate Republicans) feeling the bill now went further right than they could tolerate. As a result, the Republicans lost some moderate votes when they compromised to pick up more conservative votes, and they never gained all of the conservative votes. So, they could not find a majority that could agree on any bill, and they had already thumbed their noses at Democrats completely, so they certainly wouldn’t get any help there....
President Donald Trump signaled he was finished with trying to repeal and replace Obamacare, telling reporters at the White House he was ready to move to tax reform.The purpose of the Ryan Plan was supposedly to make space for tax reform.
As Vox and The Hill among others have reported, Republicans are trying to reduce premiums by eliminating the ACA's list of 10 mandated benefits insurers must provide. These provisions regarding prescription drug coverage, hospitalization, out-patient treatment, mental health care, pregnancy and maternity care and much more not only set a baseline for insurance offerings under Obamacare, but also help spread the risk for insurers across a much larger pool of policyholders. And that, CBO warned Obamacare repealers in December, is a big problem as far as the agency is concerned...PERRspectives
