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United States Congress of Fail (Part 2)


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Not even the insurers are on board with this Kill-Bill.

‘Simply Unworkable’: Insurers Blast New Provision In Senate Health Bill

Spoiler

Two organizations representing the U.S. health insurance industry just called a new provision of the Senate Republicans’ health care proposal “simply unworkable in any form” and warned that it would cause major hardship, especially for middle-class people with serious medical problems.

The organizations, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, speak for the businesses that would be responsible for making the new system work ― or at least attempting to do so.

That may help explain why, with a vote on the bill planned for next week, they are letting loose with what, by Washington lobbying standards, sounds like a primal scream.

In a publicly posted letter to Senate leaders, the two groups focused their attention on an amendment that would undermine the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

The amendment, crafted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), would allow insurers to resume sales of policies that leave out key benefits, such as prescription drugs or mental health. More important, it would allow insurers to discriminate among customers based on medical status, charging higher premiums or denying policies altogether to people with existing medical problems ― from the severe, like cancer, to the relatively mild, like allergies.

The Affordable Care Act prohibited those practices, forcing insurers to sell policies with comprehensive benefits and at uniform prices to everybody, no matter their medical status. This made coverage available to people who couldn’t get it before, but it also forced insurers to raise underlying insurance premiums, because it meant they had to cover medical bills they had previously been able to dodge.

The Affordable Care Act also has tax credits that offset these higher premiums, but they are based on income, and not everybody qualifies ― leaving many people, particularly in the middle- and upper-middle-class, paying a lot more for coverage. Republicans have seized on these high premiums as one of the big flaws in Obamacare, promising that, if given the chance to repeal the law, they would eliminate the costly “mandates” driving them.

But, tellingly, Republicans almost never speak explicitly about getting rid of pre-existing condition protections. Over the years, even as they were coming up with plans to weaken or eliminate the new insurance rules, they would promise publicly to keep those protections for pre-existing conditions in place. As recently as Friday, during an address to the nation’s governors, Vice President Mike Pence said the “legislation ensures that every American with preexisting conditions has access to the coverage and care they need ― no exceptions.”

Cruz has attempted to maintain the same illusion, describing his amendment as the best of both worlds because it would still require insurers to offer some policies that conform to the existing rules ― that is, with all of the Affordable Care Act’s essential benefits and available to all people at uniform prices.

On Friday, the insurer groups explained why that couldn’t work: “As healthy people move to the less-regulated plans, those with significant medical needs will have no choice but to stay in the comprehensive plans, and premiums will skyrocket for people with preexisting conditions.”

Subsidies would still shield some from the increases, but they would generally be smaller than the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and would be available to fewer people. For people who didn’t qualify for assistance ― because their incomes exceeded 350 percent of the poverty line, or $86,100 for a family of four in 2017 ― the prices would become unaffordable, the insurer groups explained.  

Cruz and his allies have said the amendment contains provisions designed to make it viable ― including a $70 billion “stability” fund to help insurers keep premiums in the regulated plans from getting too high. In the letter, the insurers said, “We also firmly believe dedicated funding included in the bill to address the cost of plans that cover people with pre-existing medical conditions is insufficient and additional funding will not make the provision workable for consumers or taxpayers.”

The insurers noted that a key element in any market-based coverage system is “risk adjustment” ― basically, an arrangement in which insurers that end up with more healthy beneficiaries relinquish some of their income, while those with less healthy beneficiaries get an injection of funds. But risk adjustment “can only work when there are uniform benefit requirements across the market,” the insurers warned ― and, under the Cruz proposal, benefits would vary wildly in the unregulated part of the market.

“Millions of more individuals will become uninsured,” the insurer organizations said, concluding that “we strongly oppose this provision.”

The substance of the warnings was not new. Ever since Cruz began discussing his proposal, and especially since it became apparent that Senate GOP leaders intended to add it to their bill, a chorus of independent experts, industry officials and trade groups has criticized it and warned of its potential effects.

Among those weighing in recently were the American Academy of Actuaries, who released a report Friday that even included illustrations to explain how insurance is supposed to work ― and what would happen if healthy and sick people gravitated to different sets of plans.

That report did not mention the Cruz proposal by name, but it made the same points ― stating, among other things, that, “in a market with separate risk pools for compliant and noncompliant coverage, costs would no longer be spread over the broad enrollee population.”

But Friday night’s blast from the insurer groups is noteworthy because AHIP, in particular, has a relatively conservative outlook and tends to have close relationships with Republicans. Among health care groups weighing in on repeal proposals over the last few months, insurers have been among the more reserved ― generally offering a nuanced mix of support and criticism.

That changed Friday, just in time for a weekend when a handful of holdout Republicans have said they will study the bill and consider how to vote on it. Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have already said they oppose it ― and would not vote yes on a so-called motion to proceed, which is necessary to begin formal debate and, eventually, have a vote on the bill.

If one more Republican joins them, GOP leaders won’t have the 50 votes necessary to pass the motion, thereby halting the process and quite possibly killing the bill.

8

 

To offset all this nastiness from the repugliklan Kill-Bill, here's some news about some epic trolling that made me laugh.

Congressmen Troll Donald Trump Jr. With Giant Time Magazine Cover On House Floor

Quote

Two Democratic congressmen used Time magazine’s latest cover on Friday to make a political point about the Donald Trump Jr.-Russia affair.

Reps. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) brought onto the House floor an enormous printout of the publication’s most recent front page, where the words “Red Handed” accompany a picture of President Donald Trump’s eldest son.

The pair then read into the congressional record an email exchange between Trump Jr. and music publicist Rob Goldstone, where Trump Jr. expressed enthusiasm about meeting a Russian lawyer during the 2016 election campaign to obtain dirt gathered by the Russian government on his father’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“Don Jr.’s emails are a smoking gun,” said Gallego. “They prove that the Trump campaign was not only aware of the Russian government’s efforts to meddle in our elections, they were enthusiastic about accepting Russian support.” 

Gallego said the email chain painted a “disturbing picture” of a campaign, and now an administration, that was “willing to break the law and sell out to an adversary of the United States in order to advance their own petty interests.”

“Our hope is that the American people will carefully consider the content of these messages and what they say about the fitness of Donald Trump and his senior advisers to hold high office,” he added.

 

There's a video of the address in the article.

 

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10 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

How ironically sad, that they're waiting for McCain, who has had surgery covered by health care insurance, to vote for this Kill Bill that's going to take away health care from millions. 

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How ironically sad, that they're waiting for McCain, who has had surgery covered by health care insurance, to vote for this Kill Bill that's going to take away health care from millions. 


And you know Mitch McFuckstick would never show the same depth of concern for a Democrat.
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2 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

 


And you know Mitch McFuckstick would never show the same depth of concern for a Democrat.

 

I don't think he's concerned for McCain either. His only concern is for his vote ...

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"GOP opponents to Senate health-care bill see vote delay as an advantage"

Spoiler

An unexpected delay in plans to hold a vote on the Senate health-care bill will strengthen the position of conservative critics by giving them more time to mobilize, according to one of the measure’s most outspoken opponents.

“The longer the bill is out there, the more conservative Republicans are going to discover it is not repeal,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday in an interview with CBS.

“I think it’s absolutely wrong,” Paul said of the bill. “It’s not at all consistent with Republican principles. . . . We promised repeal.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) put off plans to hold a vote this week on the bill after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he would be at home in Arizona recovering from a surgery to remove a blood clot from above his left eye. McCain’s absence will leave Republicans without the votes necessary to advance the legislation.

Paul and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), for different reasons, have said they will not vote even to move the legislation to the Senate floor. Along with all 48 senators in the Democratic Caucus — and without McCain — their opposition would be enough to block the bill from advancing.

President Trump did not mention the health-care bill or McCain’s surgery in an angry tweetstorm Sunday morning that mentioned Hillary Clinton and the Russia controversy now engulfing the administration, among other topics.

But leading officials with the Trump administration have spent the past several days trying to persuade Republican governors, including those in states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, to support the Senate bill.

Yet the effort led by Vice President Pence at the summer meeting of the National Governors Association seemed not to change minds and might have hardened some opposition to the legislation.

Collins disagreed with Pence’s comment to governors that the bill “strengthens and secures Medicaid for the neediest in our society.”

“You can’t take more than $700 billion out of the Medicaid program and not think that it’s going to have some kind of effect,” Collins said in an interview Sunday with CNN.

“This bill imposes fundamental, sweeping changes in the Medicaid program, and those include very deep cuts that would affect some of the most vulnerable people in our society, including disabled children and poor seniors. It would affect our rural hospitals and our nursing homes, and they would have a very hard time even staying in existence.”

Paul criticized the Republican bill for keeping the same “fundamental flaw” that he said has caused premiums to surge under the Affordable Care Act.

“They are subsidizing the death spiral of Obamacare,” Paul said. “They don’t fix it — they just subsidize it with taxpayer moneys.”

Both senators raised doubts about wider Republican support for the bill.

“There are about 8 to 10 Republican senators who have serious concerns about this bill, so at the end of the day, I don’t know whether it will pass,” Collins said.

Asked if McConnell has the votes for passage, Paul was blunt. “I don’t think right now he does,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

So, there are "about 8 to 10 Rep senators" with serious concerns. That doesn't matter -- McTurtle is going to twist everyone's arms off.

@candygirl200413 -- he won't rest until he screws over the American people.

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To back up what @GreyhoundFan said:

Governors skeptical after 'pretty atrocious' session with top Trump health officials

Spoiler

Governors confronted President Donald Trump's top health officials over the cost of the Republican health care push to their states in a tense, closed-door session here Saturday.

Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma made a frantic bid at the National Governors Association meeting Friday and Saturday to win over -- or at least silence -- skeptical GOP governors.

But their efforts left major questions unanswered, Republican and Democratic governors said.

And Pence's speech Friday resulted in the vice president openly feuding with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who didn't attend the governors' meeting.

Price and Verma had been dispatched to the meeting in Rhode Island to convince governors that their states could absorb the elimination of enhanced Medicaid funding for low-income adults who received coverage under the Affordable Care Act and the reduction of federal support for their overall Medicaid programs.

They urged governors to ignore Congressional Budget Office estimates that 15 million fewer people would be covered by Medicaid by 2026 and that $772 billion would be cut from the program, compared to current law, under a Senate Republican bill that would eliminate Obamacare's expansion of the program.

Their argument: States would gain the flexibility to overhaul their traditional Medicaid programs through block grants or per-enrollee caps, allowing them to save money that could be used to stave off losses of coverage.

But the closed-door session with Price and Verma on Saturday was "pretty atrocious," said Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy.

"They repeatedly pretended that the federal government saving hundreds of billions of dollars won't translate to actual cuts," he said. "I was told that I'll innovate sufficiently to save them hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars."

Republicans also emerged from the meeting saying they remain concerned about the long-term financial fallout of the bill.

"I think there's disagreement on the outcomes and what that means and whether that is manageable," said Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican whose state expanded Medicaid.

"It is a huge challenge for us in terms of communicating what the future is going to be like to our health care providers," Hutchinson told CNN after the meeting. "That is the challenge for governors -- we're on the front lines here. ... It's the long term that people want to know about."

Another key governor, Nevada Republican Brian Sandoval, told reporters afterward that he remained concerned about the bill's elimination of funding for Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which led 210,000 Nevadans to gain coverage. Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller has closely linked his vote to Sandoval's position.

Malloy said he argued with Price and Verma when -- after Verma had taken issue with the Congressional Budget Office forecasts of coverage losses -- Price cited the CBO analysis to back up a separate point.

"They were incredibly inconsistent between themselves," he said. "They support what they like from CBO, and they attack CBO. But at least the secretary was forced to admit that's the only public generated analysis."

Just before Price and Verma spoke Saturday morning, the consulting firm Avalere Health delivered a presentation that forecast cuts in federal Medicaid funding to the states of 27% to 36% by 2036 under the Senate legislation when compared to current law.

Some governors said that presentation left them less certain about the Trump administration's claims that Medicaid funding would not decline.

"I think there's still some confusion on numbers," said Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican. "And so, frankly, I wish we would have had more time this morning to ask questions. There's still a lot of questions from Republicans and Democrats."

Mead said there is a clear divide among GOP governors based on whether their states expanded Medicaid. Mead's state did not. But he said he's still struggling with a "state of flux" on Capitol Hill over health care.

At the center of the case Pence, Price and Verma made to governors was increased flexibility to make changes to their states' Medicaid programs. Under the bills, states could opt to receive a lump sum of money -- known as a block grant -- to cover certain Medicaid recipients. They would receive more control over their programs in exchange.

The bill's critics, however, say that cash-strapped states won't be able to make up for the losses in federal funding even with the additional flexibility. States would be forced to cut enrollment, benefits or provider rates, they argue.

The Trump administration has pledged to aggressively grant states' requests for waivers that would allow them to deviate from traditional Medicaid, and the House and Senate health care bills would give federal officials even further authority to grant those waivers, giving states additional freedom to craft their own programs using federal dollars.

That, Republican governors said, is good news. Hutchinson said Price and Verma gave governors "a number of new ideas that had not been considered before."

Pence's speech Friday drew a tepid reception from Republicans and Democrats in attendance.

He made a reference to Kasich, saying, "I suspect that he's very troubled to know that in Ohio alone, nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck on waiting lists, leaving them without the care they need for months or even years."

That claim, though, is bogus, Kasich's office said. The waiting lists are related to Medicaid's home and community-based services and had nothing to do with Ohio's decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

"The claim is not accurate. It's been fact checked twice," Kasich's communications department said on Twitter, linking to fact-checks from The Los Angeles Times and the Columbus Dispatch.

At the same time Price and Verma were attempting to win over governors, the White House was circulating a new op-ed in The Washington Post in which Trump aides Marc Short and Brian Blase argued that Americans and lawmakers should give "little weight" to CBO projections that millions would lose coverage under the Senate GOP bill.

"The CBO's methodology, which favors mandates over choice and competition, is fundamentally flawed," the two argued. "As a result, its past predictions regarding health-care legislation have not borne much resemblance to reality. Its prediction about the Senate bill is unlikely to fare much better."

1

I'ts good to see that there are also quite a few R's that have their doubts. However, who knows what McTurtle and co are doing to twist their arms?

So I'm not holding my breath.

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The WaPo published a great article by Uncle Joe: "Joe Biden: Americans decided health care is for all. The GOP wants to roll that back."

Spoiler

As vice president, I met with Americans all across our country. What they told me over and over is that the Affordable Care Act gave them peace of mind — that if they got sick, or if their child got sick, they could get care and not have to worry about going broke as a result. They no longer had to lay awake at night wondering: Can I pay for this treatment? What happens if she gets cancer? How will I feed my family and afford the care?

They told me that because when the ACA became law and health-care coverage was extended to millions of people, it meant we had finally decided, as a nation, that health care is a right for all and not a privilege for the few.

Republican leaders in Congress believe the opposite. And if they take that peace of mind away, they’ll have to look Americans in the eye and explain to them that they have to start worrying again.

Last week, Vice President Pence told the National Governors Association that the GOP health-care bill currently being debated in the Senate “strengthens and secures Medicaid for the neediest in our society.” Respectfully, that’s simply not the case. Their bill tries to deal with opioid addiction on the cheap, eviscerates the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and guts the ACA’s promise that care like maternity and mental health and substance-use disorder services must be part of any viable health coverage system. They want to drag us back to a time — not all that long ago — when Americans could be denied basic health care because they were unable to afford it. That’s the reality of where we are today and it’s enough to make your blood boil.

Now, I hear some folks say: But hospitals don’t turn anyone away from the emergency room. Before the Affordable Care Act, though, hospitals provided about $40 billion each year in uncompensated care. People who didn’t have health insurance or couldn’t cover their co-pays were putting off needed medical care and skipping out on preventive care altogether. That’s not a sustainable model, and we’re better than that. A health-care system built around emergency room visits isn’t a health-care system at all.

The ACA isn’t perfect, but the choices we made when designing the law flowed from a commitment to provide the best possible care to the most people. Compare that to Republican proposals, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said will mean more than 20 million fewer people will have health coverage by 2026, and millions more will no longer have the same protections provided by the ACA.

Here are just some of the people who could lose access to care if congressional Republicans get their way:

More than 70 million Americans rely on Medicaid, including close to 2 million veterans. Medicaid, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, covers 39 percent of children in America, 49 percent of all births, 35 percent of Americans with disabilities and 64 percent of nursing home residents, around seven in ten of whom are women. Rural hospitals would be hit especially hard by proposed cuts because they’ve benefitted most from the Medicaid expansion that has meant fewer uninsured requiring uncompensated care, and yet Senate Republican leadership is looking to cut Medicaid by about three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

Slashing the Medicaid expansion would affect over a million Americans who’ve used it to cover mental health and substance-use disorder treatment. The original Senate bill proposed spending $2 billion to address the opioid epidemic — a drop in the bucket when it comes to addressing a crisis that is ravaging communities and ripping the heart out of our country.

After facing an outcry, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell increased that to $45 billion. But my longtime Senate colleague is, I believe, missing the point. You can’t take away comprehensive health insurance from people struggling with opioid addiction and then just throw $2 billion or, for that matter, $45 billion their way for treatment. Experts say we need closer to $183 billion over 10 years to provide those on Medicaid with treatment for addiction and to provide care for other illnesses that often affect those addicted to opioids. Americans in communities affected by this epidemic understand firsthand that the status quo is grossly inadequate. We must do more to address this crisis, not less.

A middle-class family getting health insurance through a small employer could lose coverage for maternity care, mental health care or substance-use disorder services. Under the Senate’s bill, they would bear the burden of paying for these services out-of-pocket or having to go without them.

The new bill would create two individual insurance markets: One in which insurers must cover people with preexisting conditions, and one in which they don’t. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to guess what would happen next: Healthier, younger people would flock to the less expensive, unregulated market. Those remaining in the regulated market will be older and sicker, and their premiums would increase to the point that they could be left with an option for insurance that exists on paper, but not in practice.

If you’re young and healthy, maybe this bill means that you’d pay lower premiums. But the thing about life is that if you’re lucky, eventually you grow old, and, in the meantime, you don’t know what will happen next. In the blink of an eye, or in one phone call from a doctor, your outlook may change. And if, God forbid, you find yourself in that position one day, I hope we still have the ACA in place so you can have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that no matter what, you can still get affordable care.

Senator McConnell says there’s still time to make changes to the bill before it gets to the Senate floor. But it shouldn’t even get there, because his bill can’t be fixed. By denying that all Americans have a right to health care, it’s fundamentally flawed. And Republicans are underestimating the American people if they think a few changes to the bill here or there will convince us that this bill is anything but a big step backward.

In my 36 years as a senator, I saw my colleagues take plenty of hard votes. This just isn’t one of them. If Republican leadership wants to improve the ACA, let’s first come to an agreement that everyone should have health coverage. Then, based on that premise, let’s have a debate about how best to improve care and reduce costs. Let’s again make the commitment that in America, health care is a right for all, not a privilege for the wealthy.

 

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Sometimes being an insomniac has it's advantages. Like being one of the first to see this good news. :dance:

It's about time! 

Of course the toddler is being totally delusional about it.

Dems wil join in. Riiiiiiiight.

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I was just coming here to post this. God, he's so delusional. 

Edit: continue here:

 

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