The administration and flacks were on the Sunday shows flat out lying about what is in the Senate bill. The CBO score is as early as today. Let’s see what happens next. Making those phone calls still matters.
NY Times:
Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees Out of Nursing Homes
Medicaid pays for most of the 1.4 million people in nursing homes, like Ms. Jacobs. It covers 20 percent of all Americans and 40 percent of poor adults.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in proposing steep cuts to Medicaid, part of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Conservatives hope to roll back what they see as an expanding and costly entitlement. But little has been said about what would happen to older Americans in nursing homes if the cuts took effect.
Republican health care economist:
It’s not just Fleischer:
But not the only lie. Here’s another:
Evan Seigfried (conservative Republican):
Senate’s BCRA does not help Americans or health care system
The Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), the Senate’s health care bill, is a draconian proposal. Following in the footsteps of the House’s AHCA, the bill does nothing to lower the cost of health coverage, while also failing to improve the quality of care. On top of this, the BCRA is a bill that leaves the health care system worse off and ignores the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.
One would think that after the AHCA debacle, Senate Republicans would have proposed a vastly different bill, but they did not. The BCRA disproportionately impacts Americans on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Take how the bill proposes aiding low income individuals and families by giving them federal tax credits to help them purchase insurance. In no way would that be of assistance to those Americans, as they do not earn enough to pay federal income tax in the first place. Without paying federal income tax, they cannot receive the tax credits. This portion of the bill sounds good, but does not actually have a meaningful impact.
Norm Ornstein/Atlantic:
The Kabuki Theater of the AHCA
Normally, a bill this unpopular wouldn’t stand a chance. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health-care bill seems designed to let reluctant senators amend it, and claim victory
With such a slim margin for error, this bill could still easily fail—and given that it is wildly unpopular and would likely create a major backlash in many parts of the country, and was put together without any real input from most of the stakeholders including the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate, it should and would fail under normal circumstances.
But we do not reside in normal times, McConnell is not a normal leader, and the contemporary Republican Party—one contemptuous of normal standards of behavior or representative process—is itself anything but a conventional American political party.
NBC:
GOP Health Bill Breaks Trump’s Promise to Lower Deductibles
President Donald Trump may not have the most detailed knowledge of health care policy, but he knows what people hate: High deductibles.
“There’s no question that people in the individual insurance market would end up with higher deductibles under the Senate bill, much like the House,” Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told NBC News.
It’s not hard to understand why deductibles would go up under the two Republican plans. There are two major provisions in the Senate bill, for example, that specifically affect deductibles and expenses.
First, the Senate bill encourages customers to sign up for plans with higher deductibles. Under Obamacare, the amount of subsidies customers receive to buy coverage are pegged to the price a “silver” plan, which covers about 70 percent of the average user’s medical costs. The average deductibles for these plans right now are about $3,500 for individuals and $7,500 for families, according to an analysis by the consumer site HealthPocket.
But the Senate bill instead pegs its subsidies to insurance plans that cover only 58 percent of costs. Similar plans on the marketplace this year have average deductibles of more than $6,000 for individuals and $12,000 for families.
That means customers face an increase of thousands of dollars in deductibles unless they pay more in premiums.
That's not the only provision that hikes deductibles, though. Both the House and Senate bills eliminate subsidies that were created just to lower deductibles for low-income customers.
Justin Ordoñez/NY Times:
President Trump has portrayed Obamacare as a cesspool. The problem was never Obamacare. It was uninsured America — people who had been cut out of the system, but who were nonetheless pushing us toward collective bankruptcy. Obamacare just cleaned the water enough for us to finally see the time bomb in the depths.
Republican plans to fix health care simply put mud back into the pool, finding new ways to stop covering sick Americans. Medicaid rolls will shrink again; insurers in certain states may cut what they cover. Even pre-existing conditions could become a problem again. While the draft of the Senate bill still technically requires insurers to cover these patients, it would let states petition to limit that coverage — who knows by how much. And the House version would let insurers charge them much more, putting private insurance out of reach for many.
Ibram X. Kendi/NY Times:
Sacrificing Black Lives for the American Lie
When black criminality ceased, black death would cease, President Roosevelt suggested. Black people were violent, not the slaveholder, not the lyncher, not the cop. Many Americans are still echoing that argument today.
This blaming of the black victim stands in the way of change that might prevent more victims of violent policing in the future. Could it be that some Americans would rather black people die than their perceptions of America? Is black death more palatable than accepting the racist reality of slaveholding America, of segregating America, of mass-incarcerating America? Is black death the cost of maintaining the myth of a just and meritorious America?
This is not just the America people perceive. This is the America people seem to love. And they are going to defend their beloved America against all those nasty charges of racism. People seem determined to exonerate the police officer because they are determined to exonerate America.
Pew:
Public support for ‘single payer’ health coverage grows, driven by Democrats
A majority of Americans say it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. And a growing share now supports a “single payer” approach to health insurance, according to a new national survey by Pew Research Center.
Currently, 60% say the federal government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, while 39% say this is not the government’s responsibility. These views are unchanged from January, but the share saying health coverage is a government responsibility remains at its highest level in nearly a decade.
Among those who see a government responsibility to provide health coverage for all, more now say it should be provided through a single health insurance system run by the government, rather than through a mix of private companies and government programs. Overall, 33% of the public now favors such a “single payer” approach to health insurance, up 5 percentage points since January and 12 points since 2014. Democrats – especially liberal Democrats – are much more supportive of this approach than they were even at the start of this year.
It’s up, but it’s still only 33%. Advocates need to explain how it is paid for.
AP:
Analysis indicates partisan gerrymandering has benefited GOP
The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.
The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.
Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010.
The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.
