WaPo:
Heartburn is just the latest problem for Clyde, a patient Keisha sees every three months. Like so many in this corner of Appalachia, he used to have a highly paid job at a coal mine. Company insurance covered all of his medical needs. Then he lost the job and ended up here, holding a cane and suffering not only from heartburn but diabetes, arthritis, diverticulitis, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Because of the ACA, Clyde’s visit is covered by Medicaid. Before the law, most West Virginians without children or disabilities could not qualify for Medicaid, no matter how poor they were. The ACA — better known here as Obamacare — expanded the program to cover more people, such as Clyde, who can depend on Keisha to fix his heartburn without having to worry about the cost.
As for the other problems in his life, he has put his hopes in Trump, who came to West Virginia saying he would bring back coal and put miners back to work. When Trump mentioned repealing Obamacare, Clyde wasn’t sure what that might mean for his Medicaid. But if he had a job that provided health insurance, he reasoned, he wouldn’t need Medicaid anyway, so he voted for Trump, along with 74 percent of McDowell County.
My best guess is the ACHA passes the House and fails in the Senate. If it fails in the House, it takes Paul Ryan down, but not if it fails in the Senate. But ultimately, the GOP and Trump own this bill, not just Ryan. Run on that in 2018. More below.
Obama should have thrown more banksters in jail. It will never happen now.
NBC News:
No one will be adversely affected by the Republicans' new health care bill once its enacted, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
"I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we're going through," Price insisted when pressed by NBC's Chuck Todd during Sunday's "Meet The Press." "They'll have choices that they can select the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their family, not the government forces them to buy."
"There's cost that needs to come down, and we believe we're going to be able to do that through this system," he added. "There's coverage that's going to go up."
Politico:
Democrats to turn Obamacare attacks against GOP in 2018
After years of playing defense, Democrats say the politics of health care have turned in their favor.
The uptick in Obamacare's popularity and GOP's assault on it means the five Democratic senators up for reelection in very conservative states are no longer forced to defend Barack Obama’s unpopular policies. Instead, they're attacking GOP proposals that will make it hard for some of Trump’s lower-income supporters to keep their insurance.
“The threat was always very theoretical. Now it’s very real,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the party’s 2016 vice presidential nominee who is up for reelection next year. “I have colleagues where Hillary and I lost but they won [in 2012] where it was really tough. But the repeal of the ACA is one of the things that’s working in their favor right now.”
Moderate Democratic senators up for reelection next year agreed.
“I don’t think what [Republicans] are doing is very well thought through,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a top target for the GOP in 2018. “If they had worked with us to fix some of the problems, we would be in such a better place right now. And they would too.”
NY Times:
The House leadership is making gestures toward covering the uninsured by retaining popular portions of the A.C.A. and offering a suite of “market-based” programs like health savings accounts and tax credits. In some ways, that’s their problem; if the Republican bill designed to replace the A.C.A. fails, it could well be because of pressure from the far right, which is insisting on repeal, full stop. For a large number of Congressional Republicans, any effort to cover the costs of care for the poor and uninsured smacks of socialism and unwelcome government interference in the market.
It’s easy, politically, to make that case against the A.C.A., since the Republicans have spent the better part of a decade demonizing it. And it’s easy to forget how bad things were for tens of millions of Americans before Obamacare.
To begin with, consider the numbers. A percentage of the 20 million Americans who gained insurance under the A.C.A. will very likely lose it if the law is repealed. Even with the provisions in the proposed American Health Care Act, the “replace” part of the Republican approach, an estimated 10 million people would fall off the rolls.
Some of them will be glad to be free of the law’s yoke; many others, probably a vast majority, will be terrified by the idea of living without health insurance. As was the case before the passage of the A.C.A., many of the uninsured — the terrified and relieved alike — will end up using hospital emergency departments for their health care needs, even if they cannot afford it.
Brad Fay/Huffpost:
Comey Letter Swung Election For Trump, Consumer Survey Suggests
Emotion and peer influence play much bigger roles in influencing behavior than previously understood.
More important than the absolute results for each candidate were their relative performances, as well as the trends over time. While both candidates were always firmly in negative territory, Clinton nevertheless enjoyed a persistent lead over Trump that opened up after the first debate. Both candidates experienced significant drops in the immediate aftermath of the infamous audio recording of Billy Bush and Donald Trump, although Clinton still had the advantage.
Most decisively, there was a sudden change in the net sentiment results that followed immediately after FBI Director James Comey released his Oct. 28 letter to Congress about a renewed investigation of Clinton emails. Immediately afterwards, there was a 17-point drop in net sentiment for Clinton, and an 11-point rise for Trump, enough for the two candidates to switch places in the rankings, with Clinton in more negative territory than Trump. At a time when opinion polling showed perhaps a 2-point decline in the margin for Clinton, this conversation data suggests a 28-point change in the word of mouth “standings.” The change in word of mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.
Based on this finding, it is our conclusion that the Comey letter, 11 days before the election, was the precipitating event behind Clinton’s loss, despite the letter being effectively retracted less than a week later. In such a close election, there may have been dozens of factors whose absence would have reversed the outcome, such as the influence campaign of the Russian government as detailed by US intelligence services. But the sudden change in the political conversation after the Comey letter suggest it was the single, most indispensable factor in the surprise election result.
No surprise here, if you are a regular reader of this feature.
Jonathan Cohn/HuffPost:
3 Arguments Republicans Are Using To Rebut Predictions About What Obamacare Repeal Would Mean
They are gearing up for this week’s CBO projection.
Christopher Stroop:
Educated Evangelicals, Academic Achievement, and Trumpism: On the Tensions in Valuing Education in an Anti-Intellectual Subculture
Fundamentalism is authoritarianism in microcosm, or on the margins. Fascism is essentially fundamentalism in power, and it continues to nurse a sense of being “the moral majority,” as well as a sense of being “beleaguered” and “treated very unfairly” – at the same time. As I tweeted on February 11, “There’s a reason that one scholarly framework for approaching authoritarian ideologies is ‘political religion.'” See also my analysis in “#ChristianAltFacts, or, How the Christian Right Broke America,” and Christopher Douglas’s excellent article “The Religious Origins of Fake News and ‘Alternative Facts.’“
But perhaps this is all very abstract. And perhaps it might imply that all Evangelicals are simply anti-intellectual, with no ambivalence. In fact, in the kind of Evangelical environment I grew up in–a generally college or postgraduate educated, middle to upper-class part of the broader enclave community–attitudes about education and knowledge are riddled with tensions. In an attempt to help others better understand the dynamics of living with Evangelical anti-intellectualism while simultaneously theoretically valuing education, I’m going to explore this topic through my personal experience below.
The Week:
Did Paul Ryan intentionally sabotage his own health care plan?
Another, and perhaps more plausible, answer is that Ryan couldn't possibly be this inept. He didn't get his allies on board for a simple reason: He doesn't actually want any major repeal plan to pass.
This isn't to say that Ryan would not, all things being equal, like to kill the Affordable Care Act. His entire political career has been devoted to attacking programs for the poor to pay for upper-class tax cuts. But now passing and maintaining tax cuts and achieving other crucial objectives means Republicans must keep control of Congress — and that's where ACA repeal becomes a major political liability.