The Coming Republican Quagmire - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14763211
Watching the Republicans stumble all over themselves to repeal Obamacare and, concurrently, stumble into a quagmire is almost going to be fun. Repealing the law will be fairly easy. Replacing it? There will most likely be no replacement or at best (at worst) a replacement that is such an obvious sham that even trump supporters will see it as a sham.

Why? The American medical industry is a remarkably complex entity with a multitude of big money players competing for ................ big money. Republican lawmakers attempting to craft a new law will be swarmed by a cluster fuck of lobbiests all grasping for $$. The #2 reason there will be no meaningful replacement is that 60 senate votes are required to pass a new law. Republicans who have been wetting their pants over their opportunity to freeze out and fuck Democrats cannot expect a whole lot of cooperation from Democrats.

Now, quagmire part 2. Let's say the Republicans are able to cobble together a "replacement". Since their primary goal was to repeal the Obamacare tax on rich folks, there will be little or no $$ available for their "replacement". Therefore anybody covered by their pretend insurance will find themselves paying double or triple what they paid for health care under Obamacare.

The outcome? Republicans now own millions of uninsured/underinsured VOTERS which could very well result in their primary fear coming true: a loss of power.

They will, predictably, try to bullshit their way out of it. Their Great Orange Leader's jaws will be flapping mightily. He may just pull it off with his bottomless kit bag of lies. But, as he well knows, money talks and bullshit walks. As those who voted for him get sicker, die and go bankrupt he may finally become ........ unbelievable.
#14763215
I believe your post also reveals the opposite fear. What if he succeeds in producing a better plan? Democrats are then in the crapper for a long time. The Democrats 'believability' is tied to Obamacare now. They don't have much else to fall back on. If Republicans can produce a better plan, then the Democratic party is dead.
#14763218
One Degree wrote:I believe your post also reveals the opposite fear. What if he succeeds in producing a better plan? Democrats are then in the crapper for a long time.


This is actually the pertinent question regarding all Trump's proposals. Nobody can really say because nobody knows what he will do. If Trump has an actual plan, he's not letting anyone know. At some point he gotta fess up.

I don't give a damn about the Democrats. They've earned what they got. They are guilty as hell in producing the conditions that led to a right wing reaction. They deliberately engaged in policies that hurt working Americans. This plan was pursued over decades and many administrations, and they own the result.

And it's still happening. Cory Booker - supposedly the great white hope of the Democrats - was among a number of Dems who shot down Sander's plan to allow Americans to import drugs from Canada. Because of "safety issues" doncha know. Right.

People are pretending to themselves and each other that solving this ACA boondoggle is some kind of intellectual puzzle. It's not. The only puzzle is keeping the insurance and pharma companies happy - if that's the prime goal, yeah, you're gonna be burning the midnight oil.

If your goal is to help uninsured people, then it's pretty damn simple. Extend Medicare to every citizen without health insurance. Basically, that's it. Is Medicare perfect? No, but it's a damn sight better than the maze of conflicting programs we have now. And it's infinitely better than the medical savings account sham.

So, you wanna drain the swamp? Start with two of the biggest swamps out there, the insurance and pharma swamps.
#14763881
One Degree wrote:I believe your post also reveals the opposite fear. What if he succeeds in producing a better plan? Democrats are then in the crapper for a long time. The Democrats 'believability' is tied to Obamacare now. They don't have much else to fall back on. If Republicans can produce a better plan, then the Democratic party is dead.

I would bet that this is virtually impossible. Medical industry lobbiests will be all over this like chickens on a June bug. A feeding frenzy. The biggest Obamacare win was dumping the "pre existing condition" screw job. At best that will be replaced by a "high risk pool" which is just a bullshit piece of window dressing. The big one is, as usual, money. IMO the biggest reason the Republicans want to dump Obamacare is one they are bashful to talk about. Insurance under Obamacare is generally funded by a tax on rich folks. Around 200 billion a year is collected. When the rich folks get their money back where will the funding come from? Right ......... poor folks. I hear some talk about how there will be tax breaks to reimburse poor folks for their monster health insurance premiums. Just another sop like "high risk pools". Let's do some simple math. Joe Schmuck pays $5000 @ year in taxes and $15000 a year for health insurance. There will be the usual complicated formula that gives Joe $2000 back if he is lucky.
Last edited by jimjam on 16 Jan 2017 15:17, edited 1 time in total.
#14763884
People are pretending to themselves and each other that solving this ACA boondoggle is some kind of intellectual puzzle. It's not. The only puzzle is keeping the insurance and pharma companies happy - if that's the prime goal, yeah, you're gonna be burning the midnight oil.


This is correct. They have no intention (on either side of the aisle) to reduce the cost of health care for Americans. Nor are they interested in moving the costs around much for that matter. We are spending right at 18% of GDP for health care now. This number is beyond preposterous.

We will never realize the efficiencies of European countries because we are so geographically large. We lack the ability to efficiently centralize most services. That said. We spend over double what France does and they have far better outcomes than we do. And virtually no bill to the patient. Most Americans are not aware of how bad their medical care is for so many people because they cannot imagine a system like France or Spain.

Health savings accounts are indeed a joke. Very few people could even afford to save the $5K per person that would cover them in a high-deductible situation. Long before they hit the $5K cap, the copays and prescriptions drugs would have sent them into bankruptcy Worse than that perhaps is the fact that people with high deductible policies often defer health care leading to very poor outcomes. For a great many Americans there is little difference between having an HSA coupled with a high deductible/copayment policy and having no insurance at all.

What the republicans will do is repeal the PPACA and kick the can down the road. They will delay implementation until after the mid-term elections.....at least.
#14763891
The Republicans have had 7 years to come up with a Healthcare plan, and so far, Nada.

The thing is, some of the party, the Ryan's, don't want health care, full stop. The rest know by now if they don't deliver, they might as well not run in 2020. Never mind getting or not getting Democrats support, they're too fractured to put their own party in the running.

If, however, they negotiated with hospitals and Dr's groups to make a plan similar to Medicare And negotiated internationally for pharmacueticals And If they started a nationally owned pharmaceutical company to manufacture generic drugs And a second pharmaceutical company to compete with Walmart that paid staff well but turned the profits over to the government, And a third government owned company of labs for blood tests, xrays etc. Which also turns over profits to the goverment, you might have a fighting chance.

What will tank you is continue to let everyone in health and drugs run the show on monster profits.

By the way, if you followed Bernie's plan, you'd just be buy drugs that we'd charge you for. Better you negotiate internationally, like we do, maybe with us, as partners. The bigger the buying block, the lower the cost as a rule.

And, what Bernie didn't tell you is Canadians pay the 2nd highest price per capita in the world, second only to the USA, which is why I get mine from Cuba.
#14766433
trump (The Promise Guy) has promised health insurance for everybody that will replace Obamacare within an hour or so of it's repeal. :eek: We do not yet know the details of such a plan but can assume that the Republican Con Artist Department is hard at work coming up with a plan that will magically replace the $200,000,000,000 per year tax on rich folks that was the life blood of Obamacare. There will, of course, be no talk of this tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. Here are two snippets of their thinking that have so far leaked out:

A "health savings account" where tax free earnings may be set aside for future medical expenses. This will be a tremendous boon to folks earning a minimum annual wage of $15,080.

A similar idea that will permit taxpayers to deduct medical expenses from the amount they pay annually in income tax. This will likewise prove to be a major boost to minimum wage earners who, in all probability, pay no taxes. They differ from The Donald in that their tax avoidance scheme involves making almost no money.

Their con job will most likely include a lot of hot air about how "Americans will have freedom to choose". Folks will no doubt be free to choose between bankruptcy and death. Their lexicon of bullshit will be called upon for heart warming words such as "American", "freedom" and more.
#14766478
The Republican Party has no interest in creating a workable alternative to Obamacare. The Republic Party is all about ignoring the needs of working people. Trump ran on the usual party myths, and nothing more.

How bad is it? Well, Corey Booker, a Democratic Senator, voted WITH Republicans to disallow the buying of drugs from Canadian pharmacies. Why did CB do this? Well, he gets a lot of donations from pharmaceutical companies.

Working Americans are screwed.
#14766543
The Republican Party has no interest in creating a workable alternative to Obamacare. The Republic Party is all about ignoring the needs of working people. Trump ran on the usual party myths, and nothing more.

How bad is it? Well, Corey Booker, a Democratic Senator, voted WITH Republicans to disallow the buying of drugs from Canadian pharmacies. Why did CB do this? Well, he gets a lot of donations from pharmaceutical companies.

Working Americans are screwed.


That is absolutely right. This is the real irony. The best hope for working people is Trump. Imagine that. He is the only one who claims to be committed to universal coverage. The only one. It is a pathetic indictment of both parties.
#14766579
Republicans have no intention of replacing Obamacare. Many of them are probably taking bribes from bosses in the pharmaceutical or insurance companies. You gotta love the power of lobbying.

jimjam wrote:A "health savings account" where tax free earnings may be set aside for future medical expenses. This will be a tremendous boon to folks earning a minimum annual wage of $15,080.


How many people have extra change to set aside for a HSA? By the time people are done paying for expenses and food, they might not have anything left.
#14766588
jimjam wrote:Watching the Republicans stumble all over themselves to repeal Obamacare and, concurrently, stumble into a quagmire is almost going to be fun.

Although I abhor D. Trump and company I admit part of me just want to keep giving them rope and rope.... In fact, part of me is that the opposition should still oppose him but as quietly as possible but allow him to do most/all of what he is saying. Perhaps this would once and for all open the eyes of the "stupid majority". Democrats cried about fillibuster for decades, I think its time for them to use it just as long to piss republicans so that they introduce a bill to ban Fillibuster and democrats pass it... And let Trump mess around just enough to open people's mind and so that Trump loses (again) in 4 years. I understand this might be very sad 4 years but I think its a bitter pill we should take to immunize ourselves from this cyclic stupidity.
Also protest and criticism only works to fuel his brainwashed supporters and to lower the expectation bar even further. It was so painful to watch him suck so much at debates yet somehow that was not a deal breaker because the bar was so low he could literally have a meltdown and rape someone in stage that he would still pass the standards set for himself (very low).
So in short, just give him more rope please....
#14766767
One Degree wrote:I believe your post also reveals the opposite fear. What if he succeeds in producing a better plan? Democrats are then in the crapper for a long time. The Democrats 'believability' is tied to Obamacare now. They don't have much else to fall back on. If Republicans can produce a better plan, then the Democratic party is dead.


:lol:

Yeah I'm pretty sure the guy who didn't even bother to do his homework for the debates is going to really pull it together now.

At best he'll oversell health savings accounts, which are bullshit, and maybe if he's lucky it will take people a while to figure out how fucked they are.
#14766781
Yeah I'm pretty sure the guy who didn't even bother to do his homework for the debates is going to really pull it together now.


I actually hope he does not try to pull it together and just insists on others delivering what he wants. I am afraid I already see small signs of him being overwhelmed by establishment experts convincing him changing nothing is the best thing to do. Trump wants affordable care for all. The worst thing he can do is try to make himself more knowledgeable right now. He should stick with the instincts that got him elected.
#14766816
Trump wants to be seen as wanting affordable care for all. There's a difference between claiming credit and actually working toward a goal. Trump is far more interested in the former.

In reality he's a narcissist who is unable to care for others.
#14766847
The issue with an HSA is that it takes a lot of time to accumulate money to cover any thing significant. I personally like it actually, but I don't believe it's a good solution for most people.

My guess is that republicans will basically want you to have an investment HSA. That is, it's not just a savings account, it's actually invested in the markets so that it can "grow". Forcing us to put yet more of our money in the markets is basically what all Republicans like to do. They tried to do it with social security as well.

Basically, if you get cancer during a recession (which we're expecting on in he next year or two), you're fucked.
#14766936
They're basically IRAs/401ks but you're not supposed to invest them. If you're at the point where you're already receiving all/most of your taxed income back at the end of each year they are effectively useless. As a replacement for insurance they are worse than useless, you're actively locking up your money for a future health emergency you're already unable to afford. HSA's were originally meant to supplement an existing insurance plan and help people with high deductibles prepare for future emergencies, so offering them as a replacement plan is already a bad faith gesture.

You won't even get much of a tax rebate if you're not even earning more than $37,650 per year. Since deposits to an HSA are tax deferred, lowering your income below that point only nets you 15% back of whatever amount of income you contribute to the HSA.
#14766945
I agree, they aren't good for most people. I would be against some sort of mandate that everyone get on an HSA plan. If you don't make a lot of money, it stinks.

I think it works for me personally. My plan is to accumulate a lot of money in there specifically for when I'm old and retired. If I don't use that money when I'm old (I'm sure I will), that's fine. I will pass it to my wife, kids, or another family member. Anyway, outside of htat, this is why I think it works for me personally:

    * Reduces my tax burden.
    * I do not use it much, since I'm relatively young and healthy. Thus, I can accumulate money for when I'm old and not working.
    * Tech companies tend to offer better insurance. I still get basic stuff for free. Dental cleanings/exams, physicals, flu shots, etc.
    * I plan is, when I get older, to then switch out of an HDHP with HSA. Though, Republicans can fuck that up of course.
#14766975
As a replacement for insurance they are worse than useless,


Hospitals currently bill individuals 3 to 6 times what Medicare and large insurance companies pay them. Based on this, negotiating your own health care costs will probably cost you 3 to 6 times more.
#14767209
XogGyux wrote:Although I abhor D. Trump and company I admit part of me just want to keep giving them rope and rope.... In fact, part of me is that the opposition should still oppose him but as quietly as possible but allow him to do most/all of what he is saying.


My feelings also. One of the main acts in the trump/Republican soap opera will obviously be watching the Obamacare chapter play out. Hatred for Obama is so fierce that it has blinded Republicans to any concern whatsoever for the health of Americans and any realization of the complexity of the mess that, in their glee, they are stumbling into. A few less rabid Republican senators are expressing concern but they will likely be swamped by the myopic hatred of their colleagues.

The primary plusses of Obamacare for the little guy on the street are subsidies and removal of the preexisting condition screw job. My wife (an Obama hater :lol: ) is a good example. She was simply unable to get health insurance due to the preexisting screw job. She has had insurance for a few years now and, while her monthly premium is an eye popping $800@month, she pays "just" $300 due to subsidies. This year she makes it to medicare so ............ thank you President Obama for providing decent healthcare for my wife and saving us from transferring our wealth to the Medical Industrial Complex. This has been BIG.

How the Republicans will "replace" these features is rather predictable. Pigs will fly before trump and his billionaire cabinet become traitors to their class. The $200,000,000,000 @year tax on rich folks will be removed and replaced by bullshit sops like HSA's and tax deductions for people too poor to even pay taxes.

Preexisting conditions will be back and "mitigated" by another sop: high risk pools.

The primary tool the Republicans will count on is their formidable propaganda operation combined with the amazing gullibility of the masses. They may well be able to pull it off if citizens are unable to discern that "Americans freedom to choose" involves a choice between poor health/death and bankruptcy.
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