Yesterday, the Republican House voted to bring back pre-existing conditions and take health coverage away from about 24 million people. According to the Congressional Budget office, premiums for older and poorer people could increase by as much as 750%. The bill included a provision that would prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds which will make access to care even more difficult for millions of mostly poorer women. It was cause for a big celebration at the White House.
While the House members and Donald Trump were patting themselves on the back, the Senate was rolling its eyes. The bill was dead on arrival in the upper chamber. Senators say they’ll start from scratch. Good luck getting that bill through conference.
Democrats, for their part, were almost gleeful. As the GOP House members left the chamber, some Democrats taunted them, singing “Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, good-bye.” Most don’t believe the bill that was passed will ever become law but they do believe the GOP gave them ammunition to launch some brutal attack ads.
Republicans passed the bill because they had to. They’ve been promising for seven years to repeal Obamacare. Now, they’ve at least voted to do it. They can tell their base that they followed through on their promise. As Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel tweeted, “If it dies in the Senate, at least 40% of base voters will enter 2018 thinking Trump repealed Obamacare.”
Last week, a pollster friend of mine said that, nationally, they’ve found that only 5% of likely voters are swing voters. To put that in perspective, when I started doing politics in the early 1990s, swing voters made up about 20% of the electorate nationally. The rest are partisan. In gerrymandered districts, those numbers are probably even smaller. The GOP members of Congress who voted for the bill are more concerned with keeping their base happy and less concerned with persuading anybody.
The bill that passed yesterday was much more about politics than health care. Republicans don’t really care too much about providing health care to people. They’re much more concerned about keeping taxes low for their deep-pocketed donors and repealing Obamacare is the first step in their tax “reform” plan. In their world view, if we just let everyone keep as much of their money as possible, everybody will be better off, even if it means people can’t afford health care. They’re wrong, of course, but that won’t stop them from taking health care away from millions and giving billions in tax cuts to millionaires. The only thing that will stop that is a big wave in 2018. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see if this bill stirs or calms the electoral sea.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Jay, your last sentence says it all. Sadly.
The pièce de résistance is that the House exempted themselves from the effects of the AHCA!
That’s right, the ACA made Congress go out on the exchanges and purchase insurance. The Trumpcare bill removes that requirement.
Wasn’t that noble and just of them? Kick 24 million off, exempt themselves from the effects.
It’s not even about politics it’s about plutocracy. They are doing what the donors asked, not what the voters asked. Counteracting this requires educating voters about the income inequality effects of passed laws as they happen, and about how to recognize and discount dark money ad blitzed before they start.;
Republicans attacked the poor and the rest of us with a massive tax cut for the richest Americans and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act which provides medical insurance for at least 20 million people. An estimated 52 million Americans have some form of preexisting condition. The Trumpcare will permit insurance companies to exclude a wide variety of those conditions or charge much higher premiums for those who have them.
The 217 Republican voted for the bill not knowing how much it would cost, what impact it would have on one-seventh of the nation’s economy and, for the most, without even reading what they had voted for. That is the definition of legislative malpractice.
Any Republican who regurgitates the party line that insurance is being returned to the free market should be tatooed with the label “incompetent fool.” When one buys groceries, the buyer pays with a check, cash, debit or credit card. The bank is involved in the transaction in that buyer and seller uses the bank as a device to complete the transaction, but the bank itself does not affect the cost of beer, hamburgers, eggs or vegetables. The bank is a financial intermediary. Insurance companies do not produce drugs, practice medicine or sell x-ray machines. The insurance companies are essentially a form of payment for medical goods and services. The Congressmen who argue that more insurance companies in competition with each other will lower cost of care display a profound ignorance of capitalism and the role of a free market. They are liars or idiots or both.
Here is the free market at work in health care. “You’re going to die if I don’t help you out. How much money do you have? Give it to me. That’s not enough.”
The Republicans fundamentally do not believe that the poor and those who are struggling are entitled to the care they cannot afford.
From an accounting perspective, a dead poor person is much less costly than a patient in a hospital. So yesterday, Republicans wrote a massive dividend check in the form of tax cuts which they will cash when the hospitals and doctors stop taking care of poor people. They turned their backs on people who will die by the thousands as a result of their malpractice.
The cutthroats in House have done their bloody work. It now goes to the Senate. The bill will land like a large tumor in that chamber. The country would be more healthy in general if there were fewer Republicans in it. They are killing us for money without conscience.