David M Drucker/WashExaminer:
In talks with Trump, Conservatives make Ryan the scapegoat
Powerful conservative groups wary of alienating President Trump are blaming their opposition to his healthcare initiative on House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
The American Health Care Act, though authored by Ryan, with input from House and Senate Republicans, was crafted with an eye toward satisfying Trump's liberal inclinations on healthcare policy.
The president promised to repeal Obamacare on the campaign trail.
Benjy Sarlin/NBC:
Trump’s Backing a Healthcare Plan That Breaks His Promises
President Donald Trump rode to the White House making big promises on health care — pledges that he is now in serious danger of breaking. Let's look at how the president's words on the campaign trail stack up against what we know today.
In addition to Trump's comments on the stump, his administration has spent weeks raising expectations on its Obamacare replacement. Among the claims: The Republican plan would cover more people, reduce their premiums and costs, avoid cutting Medicaid, and leave no one worse off than under the former president's signature achievement.
Margot Sanger-Katz/Upshot:
No Magic in How G.O.P. Plan Lowers Premiums: It Pushes Out Older People
Currently, the subsidies under Obamacare are devised to help limit how much low- and middle-income Americans can be asked to pay for health insurance. The Republican plan works differently. It increases the amount that insurers can charge older customers, and it awards flat subsidies by age, up to an income of $75,000.
On premiums alone, prices would rise by more than 20 percent for the oldest group of customers. By 2026, the budget office projected, “premiums in the nongroup market would be 20 percent to 25 percent lower for a 21-year-old and 8 percent to 10 percent lower for a 40-year-old — but 20 percent to 25 percent higher for a 64-year-old.”
But the change in tax credits matters more. The combined difference in how much extra the older customer would have to pay for health insurance is enormous. The C.B.O. estimates that the price an average 64-year-old earning $26,500 would need to pay after using a subsidy would increase from $1,700 under Obamacare to $14,600 under the Republican plan.
What I am confused about is #Ryancare vs #Trumpcare. What I am not confused about: Bannon would rather have Ryan out. Consolidates power in WH.
Josh Rogan/WaPo:
‘Never Trump’ Republicans join call for select committee to investigate Russia and Trump
Democrats in Congress have long argued that the ongoing intelligence committee investigations into Russia’s interference in the presidential election and the Trump campaign’s ties to the Kremlin are unlikely to get to the bottom of the issue. Now a group of “Never Trump” Republicans are planning to pressure GOP leaders to establish a bipartisan select committee to take over the inquiries and settle the matter once and for all.
Stand Up Republic, a nonprofit organization led by former independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn, is launching a public campaign aimed at building support among Republicans for consolidating the various congressional Russia-related investigations into one empowered and fully funded select committee. The organization’s ad, which goes live Tuesday with a six-figure television ad buy, makes the case that the Russia issue is too important not to investigate fully.
“Trump’s Russia crisis. Secret contacts. Conflicting stories. Mounting signs of hidden ties and shady deals. Fear our president is compromised,” says the narrator. “The values of liberty, justice and honor shaped America. Generations fought for freedom, and presidents of both parties stood against foreign tyrants like Vladimir Putin. Why won’t Donald Trump? Tell Congress to name a bipartisan select committee to get the truth?”
Two pieces highlight the GOP lies:
Glenn Kessler/WaPo:
White House budget director’s false claims about the Obamacare legislative process
The Pinocchio Test
We’re not sure what Mulvaney has been smoking, except his own propaganda. The process that led to the Affordable Care Act was lengthy and complex, but involved numerous hearings and ample time for public comment and input. Any suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous.
Four Pinocchios
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
The Original Lie About Obamacare
You hear it from Republicans, pundits and even some Democrats. It’s often said in a tone of regret: I wish Obama had done health reform in a bipartisan way, rather than jamming through a partisan bill.
The lament seems to have the ring of truth, given that not a single Republican in Congress voted for Obamacare. Yet it is false —demonstrably so.
That it’s nonetheless stuck helps explain how the Republicans have landed in such a mess on health care. The Congressional Budget Office released a jaw-dropping report Monday estimating that the Republican health plan would take insurance from 24 million people, many of them Republican voters, and raise medical costs for others. The bill effectively rescinds benefits for the elderly, poor, sick and middle class, and funnels the money to the rich, via tax cuts.
The AARP doesn’t like the bill, nor do groups representing doctors, nurses, hospitals, the disabled and people with cancer, diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, it’s a great bill.
David Frum/Atlantic:
How Republicans Can Win By Making Their Peace With Obamacare
The long battle to repeal Obamacare has diverted American conservatives from their true heath-care work. The sputtering out of that battle in a completely self-inflicted failure may at last free Republicans from a doomed endeavor and liberate them to undertake the work that the country most needs from them: protecting productive enterprise and military spending from the undisciplined voracity of a health-care industry that takes too much and delivers too little.
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
Republicans are defining lunacy down
Children sitting in Professor Trump’s history class would learn that Obama was America’s first Muslim president; that his co-religionists celebrated in the streets following the 9/11 attacks; that their vaccination schedule is the dangerous scam of greedy doctors; that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the death of John F. Kennedy; that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster; that unnamed liberals might have been involved in the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Republicans Should Fear What Democrats Will Do When They Return to Power
The GOP is tempting fate by replacing Obamacare with Trumpcare.
What Republicans are attempting at the moment, by contrast, is a kamikaze mission not to repeal Obamacare, but to make Obamacare cruel and unworkable, while validating its underlying premises (such as that people who don’t have insurance through their employers should get subsidies from the government to buy their own). This is a curious thing to waste their once-in-a-generation majority trying to do.
If they succeed, they will cause tremendous suffering; but they won’t have settled the debate over the government’s role in health care once and for all. To the contrary, they will have traced the path by which a future Democratic majority dispenses with all the pleasantries and enacts a simple, and truly universal plan, like Medicare for all:
1. Demonize Trumpcare relentlessly (and, this time, with good reason);
2. Make a pledge to re-cement a true coverage guarantee the cornerstone of Democratic messaging;
3. Win control of the government by any margin;
4. Reduce the Medicare eligibility age to zero (or eliminate Medicaid income limits, or otherwise extend government programs to cover people without insurance) through the reconciliation process, immediately, without proper CBO cost estimates. Pay for it with largely progressive tax increases.
5. Apologize to no one.
Anyway it snowed, and it was pretty: