(promoted from the diaries by Streiff)
William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove summarized in an article titled: CNN poll: Fewer want GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare: :
Time to kill Obamacare was the 2012 election. With President Romney in place, he could snail-paced or even stop the implementation of Obamacare, even without Senate control. All rules and regulations could be changed. However, once implemented, it would be damn difficult to get rid of it. How many Big Big Big government programs have been killed? Preferably a handful? Instead, most become institutionalized and even when they fail, even with destitute results, they still stay with the company.
Of course it is: even the worst government program has some beneficiaries, people for whom maintaining the program is far more critical to their economic well-being than wasting money on taxpayers in general.
Patterico is furious:
Filed under: General — Patterico at 5:00 PDT
as I I mentioned yesterday, I’m amazed that so many people want to put the blame for the GOP’s failure to repeal ObamaCare on those who are least to blame: people like Rand Paul and Mike Lee. As I said, the real villains are the people who voted to (partially) repeal ObamaCare in 2015 but oppose it today.
Well, Mitch McConnell will soon call for a vote on a renewed version of the same bill. And now we’re starting to find out who these scoundrels really are.
At the top of the list of giant hypocrites are Senators Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — both have declared their intention to vote against the ObamaCare repeal bill they both voted for in 2015.
This means war.
Capito and Murkowski are there the most worthless type of hypocrite imaginable. They pretended to be against Obamacare, but they never really were. They voted for (partial) repeal in 2015, and yet they say they cannot vote for the same bill today, in 2017.
What is the difference between 2015 and 2017? Yesterday afternoon I sent emails to the press offices of Senators Capito and Murkowski asking why they decided not to vote for exactly the same bill that they voted for in 2015. I have not received any response from Senator Capito and canned statement from Senator Murkowski, who doesn’t even begin to address the questions I asked.
So what Is difference between 2015 and 2017? Let me tell you what the difference is. The difference is that today, in 2017, we have a president who would sign the repeal bill. We didn’t do that in 2015.
Senators Capito and Murkowski he knew This. They lied to their voters, bluntly.
More in the original. As I said yesterdaynone of the Republican plans were anything more than Obaminablecare Lite because there are only so many ways to operate a for-profit private insurance system to force insurance for everyone.
The plain fact is that about half of Republicans – myself included – oppose Obysmalcare not because of the way it tries to provide insurance to everyone, but because the government is trying to provide health care to those who cannot or do not want to first. everyone pay for it yourselves. The problem is that the other half of Republicans may hate Oumblecare¹ but agree with the maudlin view that the government should be responsible for providing health care, and the GOP’s electoral advantage depends in part on the significant number of people who would lose health insurance or Medicaid if the current law is passed. repealed.
There are only two significant ways to change the ridiculously named Affordable Care Act: either complete repeal without a replacement, or single-payer. Every Republican congressman and senator knows that voting solely for repeal will deprive some of their constituents of health insurance.
Conservatism lost when Mitt Romney was defeated in 2012. The ACA was passed but wasn’t in effect at the time, so it could be repealed without taking anything away from anyone. The option of returning to a government that doesn’t guarantee health care is dead in this election, and a realist must admit that.
I’ve said it many times before: the ACA was never intended to actually work, but was only meant to pass to establish the principle that ultimately the federal government is responsible for making sure everyone has access to health care. This principle has been established and will not be repealed.
I have previously supported some form of single-payer plan not because I like the idea of the government guaranteeing access to health care – I hate that idea, I despise the idea, I abhor the idea – but because if the government is going to do it, the most rational way there is a single payer.²
Oh, I still think this will be a disaster: Article by Sachi ab Hugh from 2010 the information about her father’s treatment under Japan’s single-payer system is the most telling I’ve ever seen, and the Veterans Administration hospital scandal was no surprise given the need to cut costs; it is qualitatively no different from the cost-saving method of delaying care used in the UK and Canada. However, assuming the principle that the federal government will ultimately be responsible for providing health insurance, there is little more that can be done.
Mitch McConnell is the lead Republican representative on the repeal and replace agenda. But the Distinguished Gentleman of Kentucky represents a destitute state in which Former Governor Steve Beshear’s (D-KY) Medicaid expansion lowered the uninsured rate from 19% to 7%.. Current Governor Matt Bevin (R-KY), the TEA Party’s challenger to Senator McConnell in 2014, who announced he would reverse his predecessor’s executive order, backed down and although he now has a plan to require able-bodied people to work to keep Medicaid, it’s a difficult sell.
The basic fact is that the Majority Leader’s home country is one of the largest recipients of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion provisions! Does anyone do you really expect him to be the 51st vote to repeal the ACA?
He must do what he must to remain majority leader, but ultimately he will not allow the Bluegrass State to lose Medicaid expansion. If we fail to achieve single payer in time and the ACA is not replaced, count on McConnell to try to keep the federal share of Medicaid spending in expansion rather than let it fall to the Commonwealth.
A grave question: How many Republicans might support the current Affordable Care Act if it weren’t named Obamacare? How much of the opposition results from the fact that they do not want our disgusting 44thvol The president gets credit for this?
The very gloomy fact is that we will either have some form of health insurance similar to the Affordable Care Act, or we will move to some form of single payer, most likely expanding Medicare to everyone. We will NO go back to 2008 status quo, although I would very much like it to be so, and I am not naive or stupid enough to think otherwise. At least with Medicare expansion, everyone will have to pay somethingbecause the Medicare tax hits all paychecks, and Medicare expansion will require a significant expansion of the Medicare tax, currently set at 2.9%³ Healthcare in this country accounts for approximately 17.8% of gross domestic productand the current Medicare tax rate of 2.9%, paying almost exclusively to people who are no longer in the labor force, I present a Medicare tax rate of 20.7% that would (hopefully) be offset by no longer having to pay for health insurance.4
There are some quick improvements you can make to your single-payer bill. A intelligent Republican could co-sponsor it with Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT), an expansion of Medicare that Mr. Sanders had already planned in his 2016 primary campaign, which confined coverage to American citizens and legal residents,5 and a confined range of necessary procedures, excluding elective “treatments,” including abortion, “sex reassignment surgery,” and non-reconstructive plastic surgery. Such restrictions would be attractive enough to conservatives to (maybe) gain their (reluctant) support.
Again, I expect any single-payer plan to be ugly and sloppy; I just don’t think it’s uglier or messier than the current ACA system.
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Cross-posted The First Street Journal.
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¹ – Sammy Finkelman asked me“I like the terms Obismalcare and Obumblecare. Why didn’t anyone think of this before, or did you get it from somewhere?” Including Obaminablecare, although I came up with it myself, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who did it; it’s possible that I heard one or more of them elsewhere and only registered it subconsciously.
² – Full disclosure: I will turn 65 in April 2018 and will therefore be eligible for Medicare. I have already said that even if I had a billion dollars in the bank, which I don’t, I would still take every last ruble from ZUS and Medicare, to which I am entitled because I have already paid for them.
³ – 1.45% for the individual taxpayer and 1.45% for the employer; self-employed people must pay the full 2.9%. Even people on Medicare usually pay some premiums for additional coverage.
4 – The previously cited article by Sachi ab Hugh noted that her family in Japan had three private health insurance policies to provide for Good Healthcare. I predict that any move to a single-payer system in this country will lead to similar situations for wealthy individuals in the United States.
5 – Excluding even those illegal immigrants who work and pay Medicare taxes.
