Taking away healthcare from the poorest 20% must've seemed like a sadistic wet dream to the GOP Congress. Anything to take from the poor; and give to the rich. But the dumb jerks didn't bother to do the math. As in take away insurance from 20%, who, when they get sick go to the ER, forcing hospitals to increase rates to the insurance companies. Who pass those costs onto the 80% who still have insurance, causing their rates to skyrocket. Add to that mess the many dozens of rural hospitals already on life support that will be going bankrupt--mainly in Red states and counties--and you've got the perfect storm of GOP-engineered misery.
Ok. I’m doing the math for the Crap and Cassidy plan. I have Multiple Sclerosis, make less than 700% of poverty and am 58. Right now I have a silver plan at $1400 a month that is subsidized in the ACA market that has been manageable at $63 a month. It goes up to $150 in January. I can still manage that but barely. The crap Cassidy plan means you are going to send me $1500 towards a bronze catastrophic plan that I won’t qualify for because of age and preexisting condition. And the insurance companies have no incentive to reform because it’s always more expensive to buy an individual bottle of bear than the pitcher of bear and insurance companies exist for profit. Oh yes. Makes sense.
Maybe members of Congress should try out this plan for themselves (replacing their current very generous healthcare plan for Congress) before foisting it on the rest of the country.
I'm sure that was deliberate but it would definitely change the politics if they had to suffer using the ACA the way they have hamstrung it as opposed to their own silver platter plan.
you make an outstanding proposal! Would that voters could make it happen. (And thank you for the word “foisting” I haven’t seen or heard it in ages and it’s just perfect!)
Over at the WSJ, one idiotic commenter said that pre-existing conditions were caused by “poor lifestyle choices.” Hence his lack of sympathy. MAGA are heartless and many are stupid.
I have a disability caused by a virus when I was a baby, too early to make any lifestyle choices. (I caught the flu which led to pneumonia, the antibiotics to treat it caused me to lose some hearing. Doctors didn't have a better choice back then. I'm happy they saved my life.)
Is it deliberately confusing? Do insurance companies use jargon and convoluted language to make people who are at any level of intellect, completely bewildered? Why is this so damn hard for Americans? Why have we allowed insurance companies to control who dies and who gets to live very sick, unable to pay and wishing they were dead? Most people in this country seem to be living from paycheck to paycheck with one catastrophic illness taking down the entire family, losing what little they have. Who would do this to their own people? What leaders have the gumption to fix, really fix this system which means rethinking how insurance companies work. Period.
Republicans are basically handing a line of attack to Democrats on the healthcare issue. Whether the Dems are willing and able to capitalize on the opportunity is, as is sadly too often the case, the question.
I'd love to see party leadership embrace the concept of universal healthcare, though I don't see that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, a full-throated defense of Obamacare seems like the minimum they should be doing.
Sen Sanders and AOC are ahead of the pack on this. The rest are...getting it. "It" being the simple economic equation that when the GOP takes away health insurance from the poorest 20%, they're essentially forcing the other 80% to carry them financially, in the form of higher monthly premiums.
GOP rural states like Iowa--with 28% on Medicaid--will be hit extra hard. The BBB Food Stamp and Medicaid cuts don't kick in until Nov. '26--right *after* the election. When things will get worse. A lot worse.
We have to push harder for Universal Healthcare. Republicans have had 15 years to develop something they like better. The same holds true with Immigration Reform. Instead of just going around flaunting our mighty muscles, it's time for the Republicans to re-introduce that Immigration Reform Bill that had bipartisan and bicambrial support, last year. We won't need ICE in our streets if they will just pass the legislation. It's time to shit or get off the pot. We way over pay them.
Single Payer is the ideal outcome; but has moved further away from possibility. Not closer. Something like 40% of seniors are now on Medicare Advantage--with that number growing.
What I find curious is that the Insurance industry didn't protest the gutting of Obamacare subsidies, as that was the GOP taking tens of billions of income from them.
This has nothing to do with reality and healthcare. Much of the maga hysteria was manufactured with false claims and false numbers. For instance attributing the number of “criminal aliens” in the country to Biden using numbers that went back 20 yrs. Then lying about people in the US illegally accessing federal healthcare plans.
I would caution people anywhere - CAN, US, etc - to take the comment section or other online comments as being representative of Americans. Bots are widely used in comment sections across social media etc to influence the audience.
Many immigrants that came into the country during the Biden administration are not "illegals". Take the Somali's, for example. The Somali's are here under a legal amnesty program. Many Venezuelans, also here under a sanctioned protection order. These immigrants are coming from countries where there is war and destruction and we offered them safe harbor, and now the MAGA Nation wants them deported saying they are illegals. But they are not. Not every person of color that came to America is here illegally. The MAGA NAtion is just bigotted at its core.
My comment was about the need for Universal Healthcare and you come along and tell me how mad MAGA is about "illegals". What was the point of your comment, I could ask. Instead, I decided that I would caution your use of the term "illegals". It is incendiary and totally unnecessary in a non-responsive comment to comment.
The answer has been and always will be Medicare for all. When Democrats take power in 2027 they need to pass it and see if Republicans dare to block it. When they have the trifecta in 2029 they need to pass it once and for all. With Pelosi and Lieberman gone, they may have a chance. Yes, Pelosi was instrumental in killing the public option when the ACA was passed.
Ermmm...whoa back. I was with you all the way up to that last bit. Please provide evidence for your assertion that Nancy Pelosi was instrumental in killing the public option of the ACA, because as I recall she was a strong proponent, calling it essential and avowing the bill wouldn't pass the House without that provision, but in the end couldn't muster the votes from the caucus so struck it to save the overall bill. So, in a sense she killed it, but insisting on leaving it in would have meant no bill at all. You can't seriously be holding that against her, and it definitely doesn't speak to her being against the public option.
You failed to mention that Pelosi passed the ACA by a whisker in a very complicated process requiring several votes. A public option would likely have sunk it. It still had to pass the Senate and we remember what a squeaker that was.
Now that people have had more access to healthcare and states see better health outcomes there is a better chance of support for a public option.
I'm old enough to remember that Obama promised a public option when he was campaigning for president and that it was a wildly popular idea. I'm also old enough to remember that while Pelosi gets credit for passing the ACA, no one ever asked about her substantial investments in insurance company stocks. People blame Lieberman and Backus, and they deserve it, but if she had supported the public option, there would be a public option.
I would say that is wild speculation. Pelosi is known for only bringing bills to the floor that will pass. That is not the same as saying she could bring anything to the floor and it would pass.
You’re old enough to remember the Dems were not chomping at the bit to pass the ACA & many of them lost their seats in the aftermath. It took 9 months to hammer out a bill. On the final vote in the House, 34 Dems still voted against it.
September 17, 2009: The House introduced its version
November 7, 2009: The House passed its bill.
December 24, 2009: The Senate passed its version, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with no Republican votes.
March 21, 2010: The House passed the final, combined bill with a vote of a 217-213. That means if 2 Dems had changed their vote to no it would have failed (215-215).
You wouldn't want Medicare for all if you had it. It's only a partial solution. We need total medical care, not something that fails to cover the entirety of medical needs, i.e. doesn't include vision, hearing, dental...
I have Medicare. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass, and I have to pay extra for vision and dental, but it is orders of magnitude better than the predatory, greedy insurance companies everyone else has to deal with.
I've worked in healthcare for 40+ years, so saw firsthand the lift up Obamacare gave our poorest individuals. Many had gone without health care for years. Newly discovered cancers, coronary disease, diabetes completely out of control...you get the idea. Suffering, lives shortened or lost, because of an inability to pay for adequate care. We currently have a serious health care crisis, a lack of physicians, months long waits for appointments, hoops generated by insurance companies to slow access to care, so much red tape. My own family, with knowledge of how the system works and the funds to pay, are waiting for needed care. And the Republicans want to make it worse. Deplorable and infuriating.
For me, the saddest part of all this is that I believe COVID was our "warning shot across the bow". I think we saw how important it is to have reasonable, well-informed people at the helm of healthcare. I also thought we understood "once and for all" how incredibly dangerous and expensive it is to have healthcare tied to employment. But we just went back to business as usual, like we learned nothing.
Yes Jenne, even Trump admitted how complicated the health care system was during his first horrible term. Too complicated for any administration since Obama to tackle anyway. As a retiree, it is a scary place to be.
Will there be enough suffering to motivate folks to vote Blue in the midterms? Will the "let them eat cake" economy wake folks up? Or will they continue to blame Biden (and/or immigrants, women and windmills)?
Feel cynical for the hurt the GOP are unnecessarily inflicting on the 20% of Americans who will lose health insurance. And next year their SNAP benefits.
But understand that all this misery will be happening under a GOP President & Congress & Supreme Court. Even the Reddest of MAGA voters is going to figure out who it was that made them and their families a whole lot poorer. No matter how much FOX tries to pin it on the Dems.
The Dems need to start behaving like they are in a knife fight. The message that the Republicans are about to screw up health insurance for millions (disproportionately in red states) needs to be hammered home repeatedly and in language everyone can understand. Trump is a master at misdirection and it needs to be strangled at the gate.
No one will have trouble understanding this after April's Tax collection when no one gets a subsidy to offset the tens of thousands of dollars they spent in medical expenses (mostly prescription drugs).
Good point - I think the challenge is one of accountability. Trump and crew will try mightily to pin this on anyone but themselves. Sadly they will succeed with some. If the Dems can get out ahead of it maybe more of the ownership can be attributed to the perpetrators.
Judd- love your stuff. How hard would it be to have someone work with you to put it in language accessible to 6th graders? I quote and repost your material, but I think it goes over the heads of the readers on Parler and Facebook I'm targeting. I tried Truth Social but didn't last ten minutes before I was permanently banned.
I still wonder why Medicare For All, single-payer healthcare, isn't being touted as the solution here. I know that as long as the Republicans and their capitalistic dreams stand in the way, this is a pipe dream, but when, and if, we Democrats get a large enough majority in both houses, I sure hope that they can make this a reality.
It will have to be done in a way that is irreversible from Republican greed, but I'm sure once it gets here and our citizens see how great a single-payer system works, they will not allow anything to happen to it. See? Problem solved.
Don't people remember what it was like before Obamacare?
Denial for pre-existing conditions was a very serious problem.
Insurance companies found any possible excuse to kick people off their insurance when they got a serious illness such as cancer. Such as one small error on some paper work years ago.
It was nearly impossible for start-up companies to get insurance for their employees.
It was a disaster for so many people.
And, get this: what we now call Obamacare (ACA) was originally envisioned by that right wing group the Heritage Foundation as the best solution they could think of. Given that politics prevents single-payer, they were right.
So what are Republican politicians thinking now???
Tired of the incompetence of the Senate? Republican Senators not doing enough to help you? 20 Republican Senators are up for re-election in 2026.
Vote. Make a difference.
Fu*% yeah!
Taking away healthcare from the poorest 20% must've seemed like a sadistic wet dream to the GOP Congress. Anything to take from the poor; and give to the rich. But the dumb jerks didn't bother to do the math. As in take away insurance from 20%, who, when they get sick go to the ER, forcing hospitals to increase rates to the insurance companies. Who pass those costs onto the 80% who still have insurance, causing their rates to skyrocket. Add to that mess the many dozens of rural hospitals already on life support that will be going bankrupt--mainly in Red states and counties--and you've got the perfect storm of GOP-engineered misery.
Thank you for this reminder, Judd. This is suicidal legislation.
We don’t have a “health-care” system in this country, we have a “welfare-system” for the insurance industry.
That's why we need to use the European model of health care.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Ok. I’m doing the math for the Crap and Cassidy plan. I have Multiple Sclerosis, make less than 700% of poverty and am 58. Right now I have a silver plan at $1400 a month that is subsidized in the ACA market that has been manageable at $63 a month. It goes up to $150 in January. I can still manage that but barely. The crap Cassidy plan means you are going to send me $1500 towards a bronze catastrophic plan that I won’t qualify for because of age and preexisting condition. And the insurance companies have no incentive to reform because it’s always more expensive to buy an individual bottle of bear than the pitcher of bear and insurance companies exist for profit. Oh yes. Makes sense.
Maybe members of Congress should try out this plan for themselves (replacing their current very generous healthcare plan for Congress) before foisting it on the rest of the country.
Exactly. They are cut off from the reality of the rest of us.
I'm sure that was deliberate but it would definitely change the politics if they had to suffer using the ACA the way they have hamstrung it as opposed to their own silver platter plan.
They are treated like other federal employees.
https://www.opm.gov/retirement-center/publications-forms/benefits-administration-letters/2013/13-204attachment2.pdf
you make an outstanding proposal! Would that voters could make it happen. (And thank you for the word “foisting” I haven’t seen or heard it in ages and it’s just perfect!)
Congress does get insurance through the ACA marketplace IF they don’t have a private plan or Medicare.
I'd love to see a list of which members have ACA plans. I'll bet not a single member of the GOP
Ah. Does that mean that their premiums are increasing as well?
That means they are treated just like other federal employees.
Over at the WSJ, one idiotic commenter said that pre-existing conditions were caused by “poor lifestyle choices.” Hence his lack of sympathy. MAGA are heartless and many are stupid.
I have a disability caused by a virus when I was a baby, too early to make any lifestyle choices. (I caught the flu which led to pneumonia, the antibiotics to treat it caused me to lose some hearing. Doctors didn't have a better choice back then. I'm happy they saved my life.)
It was a remarkably ignorant comment, even for MAGA.
Is it deliberately confusing? Do insurance companies use jargon and convoluted language to make people who are at any level of intellect, completely bewildered? Why is this so damn hard for Americans? Why have we allowed insurance companies to control who dies and who gets to live very sick, unable to pay and wishing they were dead? Most people in this country seem to be living from paycheck to paycheck with one catastrophic illness taking down the entire family, losing what little they have. Who would do this to their own people? What leaders have the gumption to fix, really fix this system which means rethinking how insurance companies work. Period.
Republicans are basically handing a line of attack to Democrats on the healthcare issue. Whether the Dems are willing and able to capitalize on the opportunity is, as is sadly too often the case, the question.
I'd love to see party leadership embrace the concept of universal healthcare, though I don't see that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, a full-throated defense of Obamacare seems like the minimum they should be doing.
Sen Sanders and AOC are ahead of the pack on this. The rest are...getting it. "It" being the simple economic equation that when the GOP takes away health insurance from the poorest 20%, they're essentially forcing the other 80% to carry them financially, in the form of higher monthly premiums.
GOP rural states like Iowa--with 28% on Medicaid--will be hit extra hard. The BBB Food Stamp and Medicaid cuts don't kick in until Nov. '26--right *after* the election. When things will get worse. A lot worse.
We have to push harder for Universal Healthcare. Republicans have had 15 years to develop something they like better. The same holds true with Immigration Reform. Instead of just going around flaunting our mighty muscles, it's time for the Republicans to re-introduce that Immigration Reform Bill that had bipartisan and bicambrial support, last year. We won't need ICE in our streets if they will just pass the legislation. It's time to shit or get off the pot. We way over pay them.
Single Payer is the ideal outcome; but has moved further away from possibility. Not closer. Something like 40% of seniors are now on Medicare Advantage--with that number growing.
What I find curious is that the Insurance industry didn't protest the gutting of Obamacare subsidies, as that was the GOP taking tens of billions of income from them.
MAGA is still furious over the illegals from the Biden years and want them all deported.
The WSJ had an article suggesting leaving the existing illegals here and crafting new legislation for the future.
Hundreds of MAGA showed up in the comments, demanding deportation now.
That horse left the barn a long time ago. What Trump is doing is ethnic cleansing under another name.
Agree.
This has nothing to do with reality and healthcare. Much of the maga hysteria was manufactured with false claims and false numbers. For instance attributing the number of “criminal aliens” in the country to Biden using numbers that went back 20 yrs. Then lying about people in the US illegally accessing federal healthcare plans.
I would caution people anywhere - CAN, US, etc - to take the comment section or other online comments as being representative of Americans. Bots are widely used in comment sections across social media etc to influence the audience.
I know they lie and exaggerate.
Many immigrants that came into the country during the Biden administration are not "illegals". Take the Somali's, for example. The Somali's are here under a legal amnesty program. Many Venezuelans, also here under a sanctioned protection order. These immigrants are coming from countries where there is war and destruction and we offered them safe harbor, and now the MAGA Nation wants them deported saying they are illegals. But they are not. Not every person of color that came to America is here illegally. The MAGA NAtion is just bigotted at its core.
You don’t need to lecture me. I know how bad MAGA are. I’m not sure what the point of your comment is. I’m 100% opposed to MAGA.
My comment was about the need for Universal Healthcare and you come along and tell me how mad MAGA is about "illegals". What was the point of your comment, I could ask. Instead, I decided that I would caution your use of the term "illegals". It is incendiary and totally unnecessary in a non-responsive comment to comment.
I’m sorry. I think I responded to the wrong comment.
I’m totally in favour of universal healthcare (I live in Canada where we have it.)
The answer has been and always will be Medicare for all. When Democrats take power in 2027 they need to pass it and see if Republicans dare to block it. When they have the trifecta in 2029 they need to pass it once and for all. With Pelosi and Lieberman gone, they may have a chance. Yes, Pelosi was instrumental in killing the public option when the ACA was passed.
Ermmm...whoa back. I was with you all the way up to that last bit. Please provide evidence for your assertion that Nancy Pelosi was instrumental in killing the public option of the ACA, because as I recall she was a strong proponent, calling it essential and avowing the bill wouldn't pass the House without that provision, but in the end couldn't muster the votes from the caucus so struck it to save the overall bill. So, in a sense she killed it, but insisting on leaving it in would have meant no bill at all. You can't seriously be holding that against her, and it definitely doesn't speak to her being against the public option.
You need to cut the insurance companies out completely (Trump is actually right) and fund it out of taxes like we do in Canada.
You failed to mention that Pelosi passed the ACA by a whisker in a very complicated process requiring several votes. A public option would likely have sunk it. It still had to pass the Senate and we remember what a squeaker that was.
Now that people have had more access to healthcare and states see better health outcomes there is a better chance of support for a public option.
I'm old enough to remember that Obama promised a public option when he was campaigning for president and that it was a wildly popular idea. I'm also old enough to remember that while Pelosi gets credit for passing the ACA, no one ever asked about her substantial investments in insurance company stocks. People blame Lieberman and Backus, and they deserve it, but if she had supported the public option, there would be a public option.
I would say that is wild speculation. Pelosi is known for only bringing bills to the floor that will pass. That is not the same as saying she could bring anything to the floor and it would pass.
You’re old enough to remember the Dems were not chomping at the bit to pass the ACA & many of them lost their seats in the aftermath. It took 9 months to hammer out a bill. On the final vote in the House, 34 Dems still voted against it.
September 17, 2009: The House introduced its version
November 7, 2009: The House passed its bill.
December 24, 2009: The Senate passed its version, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with no Republican votes.
March 21, 2010: The House passed the final, combined bill with a vote of a 217-213. That means if 2 Dems had changed their vote to no it would have failed (215-215).
You wouldn't want Medicare for all if you had it. It's only a partial solution. We need total medical care, not something that fails to cover the entirety of medical needs, i.e. doesn't include vision, hearing, dental...
I have Medicare. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass, and I have to pay extra for vision and dental, but it is orders of magnitude better than the predatory, greedy insurance companies everyone else has to deal with.
Medigap and other policies still a headache that mean dealing with insurance companies.
I've worked in healthcare for 40+ years, so saw firsthand the lift up Obamacare gave our poorest individuals. Many had gone without health care for years. Newly discovered cancers, coronary disease, diabetes completely out of control...you get the idea. Suffering, lives shortened or lost, because of an inability to pay for adequate care. We currently have a serious health care crisis, a lack of physicians, months long waits for appointments, hoops generated by insurance companies to slow access to care, so much red tape. My own family, with knowledge of how the system works and the funds to pay, are waiting for needed care. And the Republicans want to make it worse. Deplorable and infuriating.
For me, the saddest part of all this is that I believe COVID was our "warning shot across the bow". I think we saw how important it is to have reasonable, well-informed people at the helm of healthcare. I also thought we understood "once and for all" how incredibly dangerous and expensive it is to have healthcare tied to employment. But we just went back to business as usual, like we learned nothing.
Yes Jenne, even Trump admitted how complicated the health care system was during his first horrible term. Too complicated for any administration since Obama to tackle anyway. As a retiree, it is a scary place to be.
Will there be enough suffering to motivate folks to vote Blue in the midterms? Will the "let them eat cake" economy wake folks up? Or will they continue to blame Biden (and/or immigrants, women and windmills)?
I've never felt more cynical.
Feel cynical for the hurt the GOP are unnecessarily inflicting on the 20% of Americans who will lose health insurance. And next year their SNAP benefits.
But understand that all this misery will be happening under a GOP President & Congress & Supreme Court. Even the Reddest of MAGA voters is going to figure out who it was that made them and their families a whole lot poorer. No matter how much FOX tries to pin it on the Dems.
I hope you're right.
The problem is they don’t reason, they feel, and the GOP is pretty good at pushing those buttons.
Trump T
Dump T
Had a Great Fall
Trump hates his voters. It is a different matter if his voters will ever realize that.
The Dems need to start behaving like they are in a knife fight. The message that the Republicans are about to screw up health insurance for millions (disproportionately in red states) needs to be hammered home repeatedly and in language everyone can understand. Trump is a master at misdirection and it needs to be strangled at the gate.
No one will have trouble understanding this after April's Tax collection when no one gets a subsidy to offset the tens of thousands of dollars they spent in medical expenses (mostly prescription drugs).
Good point - I think the challenge is one of accountability. Trump and crew will try mightily to pin this on anyone but themselves. Sadly they will succeed with some. If the Dems can get out ahead of it maybe more of the ownership can be attributed to the perpetrators.
Judd- love your stuff. How hard would it be to have someone work with you to put it in language accessible to 6th graders? I quote and repost your material, but I think it goes over the heads of the readers on Parler and Facebook I'm targeting. I tried Truth Social but didn't last ten minutes before I was permanently banned.
I still wonder why Medicare For All, single-payer healthcare, isn't being touted as the solution here. I know that as long as the Republicans and their capitalistic dreams stand in the way, this is a pipe dream, but when, and if, we Democrats get a large enough majority in both houses, I sure hope that they can make this a reality.
It will have to be done in a way that is irreversible from Republican greed, but I'm sure once it gets here and our citizens see how great a single-payer system works, they will not allow anything to happen to it. See? Problem solved.
Great reporting Judd…Listen to Celeste K she is absolutely right on!
Don't people remember what it was like before Obamacare?
Denial for pre-existing conditions was a very serious problem.
Insurance companies found any possible excuse to kick people off their insurance when they got a serious illness such as cancer. Such as one small error on some paper work years ago.
It was nearly impossible for start-up companies to get insurance for their employees.
It was a disaster for so many people.
And, get this: what we now call Obamacare (ACA) was originally envisioned by that right wing group the Heritage Foundation as the best solution they could think of. Given that politics prevents single-payer, they were right.
So what are Republican politicians thinking now???