The Senate healthcare bill, which Mitch McConnell has been guarding with his life, the one that has been constructed by 13 fat white Republican men, all of whom pledge allegiance to their rich benefactors before their constituents, was released to lobbyists before it was released to the Senators who would have to vote on it. That is so McConnell. He wants to find out how the fat cats who have paid his way through a thoroughly crooked political career feel about what has been constructed, before his fellow Senators get a look at it. This is a guy who represents Kentucky, a state that has 7 of the poorest 10 counties in America, a state that will be decimated by the new Senate version of Deathcare This is how the GOP which has complete control of our government, runs things Happy yet?
So who will be affected by Mitch McConnell’s new healthcare bill?
Only-
20% of all Americans
39% of all children
49% of all births
64% of all nursing home residents
And all negatively!
The poor, the old, drug addicts, Planned Parenthood and the Centers for Disease Control will join those wretched victims.. If that doesn’t grab you where it counts, you’ve obviously got nothing left to grab.
Amid all this confusion and nastiness, McConnell has shut down the process until after the July Fourth recess. How did that happen? It happened because the GOP isn’t interested in healthcare. It simply wants to pass a bill with enough tax cuts that will allow them to do something significant with the tax legislation they are drooling to attack. Their inability to do the right thing with healthcare bodes ill for any future project. There’s nothing more complicated than tax legislation and it’s not for little boys to try to solve.
Donald Trump’s main pitch to get elected was that he could make deals. Yet in the passing of a functional healthcare bill, the landmark legislation of his administration, he has been an utter failure. He has insulted the House and then did the same to the Senate. Insiders will tell you openly that congress doesn’t want him involved in that all-important legislation. The bitter fact is that he really doesn’t want to be involved either. He just wants a bill to sign so that he can take a bow. He knows little or nothing about either the House or Senate bills. Seemingly, he hasn’t reviewed or studied the way other presidents have dealt with important legislation and he probably wouldn’t understand it if he did.
The great Trump lie about our healthcare system is that premiums have gone through the roof and will continue to do so until the system crashes. The truth is that under Obamacare healthcare premiums have gone up at the slowest rate in history. It is only under Trump that costs are skyrocketing. Obamacare premiums have risen by an average of 7% a year as opposed to 12% the year before Obamacare passed. Mitch McConnell’s new bill doesn’t mandate health care so a lot of young people think that lets them off the hook, but young people do get sick, just not as often as old people. Young people do get catastrophic illnesses or have accidents and if they do, under the new bill they will not have an opportunity to get insurance and that will ruin them financially, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
The problem is one of mathematics. If young people opt out of the system due to high premiums and their low rate of sickness, the insurance companies won’t be able to make a big enough profit and so they will opt out too. Under Obama there was some kind of coverage everywhere in the country. Under Trump we already have five states that have no coverage. Although it’s not in this bill, coverage for young people could be established at a lower rate because they are a lower risk. Insurance companies would fight this to the death because it’s in the high priced, low coverage insurance they sell to younger people that they make their biggest profits.
That is the real problem; insurance companies that pull their 20% to 40% profits out of the system in order to have that money available to create a $300 billion lobbyist pool they use to bribe our legislators to get them a good deal.
The solution is not mathematical but political. The solution is a single payer system, which would cut the 20% to 40% profits now paid to the insurance companies and put it back in the system. A single payer system would be able to charge reasonable premiums to those that can’t afford higher ones. Yes, it would probably have to be a mandated system but because it won’t have to support the profits now paid to the insurance companies and because it would have to be accompanied by legislation mandating that the government could set prices for drug companies, it would be able to extend insurance to young people at rates commensurate with their lower drain on the system instead of the usurious rates they currently pay for poor coverage.
The fact that McConnell and his slimy toads are so hot to get a tax decrease for the rich and keep the insurance companies happy should be enough to tell anyone who cares to listen that they do not have the good of the nation as their primary interest. That’s also true of Trump who, if you pay attention to what he has said, gives every indication that he has no idea what’s in the bill and is only interested in passing something, anything, just so he can brag he passed some kind of bill and finally get off the legislative schnied.
So here’s McConnell trying to figure out how he can move the negative Republican votes over to the positive side so he can pass this mess and what does the fat moron in the White House do, he attacks the Democrats instead of helping McConnell with his own party. He tweets;
Democrats slam GOP healthcare proposal as Obamacare premiums & deductibles increase by over100%. Remember, keep your doctor, keep your plan?
It’s amazing how this clown can lie about everything. 100% increase? Why not 1000% why not ten thousand? Donald Trump never met a lie he didn’t want to grab by the pussy.
The CBO has declared that through the next decade over 22 million people will no longer be covered under the McConnell health plan. After an initial three-year rise premiums might go down, but coverage would certainly fall through the floor.
The White House, which can always be depended on to strike the lowest blow, immediately issued a statement condemning the CBO and its ability to predict how things will work out. So after reading the White House statement and going back over past CBO predictions to see how they actually worked out, it is quite clear that the White House staff that wrote this attack have developed a serious attachment to a certain inhalable white powder.
Trump, when he needed the votes declared that he would never cut Medicaid or Medicare but this bill will take almost a trillion dollars from those programs over the next ten years. What will happen to that money? It will go to the fat cats that donated to his campaign and fill the lobbyist coffers that bribe congress.
Obamacare brought the uninsured rate down from 18% to 10%; lower than it has ever been. Under the Senate bill it would go right up to 18%. And with all the noise by the GOP about rising premiums under Obamacare it’s time we took a gander at some real figures:
If you make an income in the area of $26,000 per year, your yearly premiums will look like this under:
Obamacare $1,700
House Bill $16,100
Senate Bill $6,500
If you make in the neighborhood of $56,000 per year in income your yearly premiums will look like this under:
Obamacare $6,800
House Bill $16,100
Senate Bill $20,500
That’s Republican math on how to reduce premiums.
Of course the problem is that the GOP doesn’t want to face the truth. Andy Card, former Chief of Staff for George Bush, was on the Morning Joe show trying to prove he hasn’t had an original thought since before Bush was elected. The first thing Card said on the show was that Bush showed the ability to lead in dangerous circumstances. He sure did but it was always over a cliff. When asked what he would do if he were still in his old job we found out why the Bush administration crashed the economy. It was because they had men like Andy card running the country.
Card starts out by telling us that Obamacare is not working and you can’t go back to Obamacare. When asked why; he’s stuck for an answer. When it is suggested they fix it, he says it will then look very different. Yes, Andy, that’s what happens when you fix something. He next blurts out the old GOP lie that the Democrats haven’t been willing to fix Obamacare. Actually they have. They have been begging the GOP to help fix it for seven years while the GOP voted, senselessly, to repeal it over 50 times.
So the point of this sidebar is that the problem comes from the fact that the Republican leadership is just like Card. They don’t want to think coherently about healthcare, they just want to repeal Obamacare simply because it was instituted by Obama. They really don’t want to replace it, but they realize that they have to come up with something or their constituents will burn their homes to the ground and run them and their families out of the various states they now inhabit.
The basic problem with the whole healthcare system is that the Republicans really don’t want to solve it; they only want to find a way to use it to solve other problems like the tax code.
Why do I say that? Because the solution to the healthcare problem is really very simple and just as obvious. It isn’t like we don’t have any working examples around. Every civilized country except us has a universal healthcare system of some kind. We are the only civilized country that allows our sick to die and our poor to stay sick. We want to identify ourselves as a Christian country but we show no evidence that we have any idea of what that phrase means. The GOP, who claim to be the most Christian among us, are the most mean spirited, the most immorally hard-hearted and the most penurious of our citizens.
Universal healthcare means that every citizen has complete healthcare as his or her right. If approached on that basis, mainly because of the numbers involved the cost per person will come down drastically but we will still have to pay for it and the only fair, equitable way to do that is through the medium of tax dollars. That is specifically why taxes exist. It’s time that the people of this country understand that if they want to live a good life they have to pay for it. THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.
Universal healthcare must be entirely paid for by taxes, all of it, so that it does not add to the burden of our debt. Interest paid on debt is the most complete waste of money imaginable so we must pay our way. Not just for healthcare but for everything.
After WWII we reduced a massive war debt to almost nothing by raising taxes to pay it off. At that same time we enjoyed our most upwardly mobile era as a nation. We built a strong middle class, we created the greatest infrastructure in the history of man, we had high employment that worked for functional wages, we made serious profits and we lived the American dream. We paid substantial taxes but despite that we all lived a better life. That’s the key.
Right now the America that was built by that labor and those taxes is crumbling under our feet; the only people benefitting from the change are the very rich because it is their taxes that are being saved. They are getting richer while the rest of the nation is getting poorer, so poor that they can’t even afford a doctor when they need one.
Yes, there is a solution and as I said, it’s a simple one. A single payer system paid in full by taxes; paid by everyone but mainly by the super rich. And for those who cry out to stop government’s takeover of many previously private businesses I say that taking care of its citizens is government’s first priority. If government isn’t there to protect and serve us then government has no function at all.
So it’s time to make government do what it’s supposed to do and if the lazy, crooked slobs in the capital building don’t want to help us, we have to get rid of them. 2018 is coming up fast and this blog says that the people must demand that every politician running for office swear an oath that they will back a single payer healthcare system and the taxes to pay for it. Then and only then will this country get the healthcare system it deserves and the citizens who inhabit this country the kind of lives they can enjoy.