Trump advisor Mick Mulvaney, head of the Budget Office was on This Week, lying about how this new Healthcare bill that would both reduce the debt and save money. One of the first things out of his mouth was that the GOP loves competition and this will give the people a chance to benefit from insurance company competition.
The GOP loves monopoly not competition. The basic fact is, no plan will work until Paul Ryan and his sycophants come up with a way to a pay for it. Cancelling taxes so their rich friends can afford another condo in St. Bart’s isn’t going to achieve that. There is only one way to pay for universal healthcare and that is for the government to run the program. It’s called single payer, it’s called Medicare and Medicaid. It works because those government programs cost 3 to 4% per treatment to run whereas insurance companies charge 20 to 40% per treatment. That difference is the difference between a program that is affordable and one that breaks the bank
Look, this doesn’t take a genius. It just takes some honest men who have the welfare of the country instead of the enrichment of their wealthy sponsors at heart. We already have the model in Medicare and Medicaid. Universal Medicare is the answer. Its cheaper than the insurance run ACA, it provides better care, it’s loved by doctors and hospitals because it pays right away and there is a ton less paperwork and it gives the government the ability to rein in the drug companies which now have a free run at your wallet.
Why does an Epi-pen cost $300 here and $2 in Europe? The answer: because the drug companies have bought off our regulators.
Paul Ryan being interviewed on Face the Nation, denied that the process of legislating the healthcare law is being rushed. He claims that the process has been going on since 2010. All that has been going on since 2010 is the attempt to kill Obamacare. Until yesterday, nothing viable has showed up to replace it and what they have isn’t close to viable. Ryan is another smooth talker who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it bit him in the ass.
Ryan tries to sell the idea that the screams of pain coming from both sides of the aisle over the huge sellouts included in his bill are the sounds of negotiation. But that’s just another lie. Selling out the tax part of the bill to the rich is not a negotiation. Selling out the insurance part of the bill to the insurance companies is not negotiation. Selling out the cost of drugs is not negotiation. This is all part of the process of selling out the American people, the ones Ryan is supposed to be representing. But he’s not representing the people. He’s only representing the 1%, the insurance and drug companies and everyone who’s trying to screw the people he claims to represent.
I say this again and again and again. The only solution to both care and cost is single payer. But Ryan and his GOP cronies won’t even consider it. They are in this for their own personal gain. They care nothing for the people they represent, they care only for the people who fill their pockets. The only real solution to healthcare is that which we already have and which we can see already works. Medicare for all is the solution. That, of course, would eliminate healthcare as a source of income for the insurance industry. It would regulate the drug companies, the medical manufacturing companies, and the big hospital chains while creating affordable healthcare for the people. Yet all that means nothing to Ryan and his GOP thieves. They are only about lining their pockets.
Tax credits, medical savings accounts and all the other schemes that the Republicans have come up with are just con games that make Trump University look like a real college. Ryan keeps pounding home that the ACA is going bankrupt. It isn’t! That’s just another lie propagated to make it look like Ryan is doing as he claims, “saving America.” Obamacare isn’t going broke. In fact it would actually be doing very well if the GOP had tried to help the Democrats fix it instead of wasting over fifty attempts at getting it repealed over the last seven years. And don’t forget, they didn’t have any hope of a replacement during that time. If they had been successful they would have thrown 24 million people off healthcare with nothing to replace it. They didn’t care about those people then and they don’t care about them now. All they care about are the taxes they will save the already rich, the money they will make for the insurance companies and the profits that will soar at the drug companies. Their constituents, the ones who will die without healthcare can just go fuck themselves.
Rand Paul calls this bill “Obamacare lite,” which would be okay if that were true but like most of his GOP colleagues Rand doesn’t usually speak the truth. He does point out that this bill keeps the subsidies, keeps the taxes for a year, keeps the Cadillac tax forever, keeps the individual mandate but instead of having to pay a tax to the government if you don’t buy insurance you’ll now have to pay that tax to the insurance companies. What, you’re surprised? This is a GOP bill. It also has bailouts for the insurance industry if it doesn’t make a big enough profit. So the Republicans have written a bill that screws their voters and protects the insurance and drug industries while saving the rich on their taxes, Oh yeah, and rates will still go up.
Ryan complains that we tell people we are giving them healthcare for free but it’s not free, it increases the debt. Sure it does but it doesn’t have too, not if we increase our tax rates, especially on those who already benefit most from the bounty that this nation creates. The Republicans are so scared shitless of paying taxes that they are ready to let the whole country fall apart just to keep the tax rate low. That’s ridiculous – and very un-Christ like.
Everybody was waiting for the CBO report on Ryan’s plan and although no one expected it to be too negative it actually trashed Ryan’s plan. It established that 24 million people will lose their healthcare, 24 million of the poorest people in the country while the top 1% will enrich themselves by $883 billion over the next ten years just through the tax dollars they will save with the tax cuts Ryan is throwing them. Of course that will mean that those who need the money will lose $880 billion in support. Those are the people who will lose their healthcare. This is just ugly. This is un-American. This is un-Christ like. There is no excuse for Ryan’s plan except geed. He has shown himself to be a disgusting human being; actually not even a human being but some kind of slug.
And while we are reading the CBO report Trump’s appointees like Tom Price Secretary of Health and Human Resources, are trying desperately to cover up the facts with lies and bullshit!
With all the debate about this bill in the few days that it has been on the table the thing that none, or at least not enough, of the pundits are willing to discuss is that the bill is just bad for the American people. This bill that will return money to the rich who don’t need it (I said need, not want) and take that money from the desperately poor who absolutely do need it, is a catastrophe. That has to make it a no brainer. It’s obvious why the greedy Republicans are considering it, but why are independent pundits even giving it lip service? Why hasn’t it and all approximate versions of it, been universally condemned? Mainly, it is because everyone in the news and pundit class is trying to be even handed. There is certainly a time to be even handed but this is not it. This is the time to drag Ryan and his cronies to the guillotine.