Obamacare is the law of the land

And it’s not worthless. So here is a new thread to talk about health care and stuff.

But what happens when the GOP eventually guts Obamacare by defunding parts and replacing other parts?

New thread! Remember, Discourse gets wonky with long threads, anyway :P

(breathes in all the new thread smell)

Mmmmm. Thank you!

I continue to be annoyed by the descriptor “Obamacare” and I insist that we start a new thread calling it ACA. And I have no Idea how to create an emoji to tell you that I’m maybe 10% serious here, so I’ll just tell you elcor-like.

That’s kind of what they tried to do just now, and it failed. It failed because one group wanted it gone entirely, another didn’t think it was gutted enough and another group seems to care whether or not they get voted back to Congress and realize their voting block needs and wants ACA.

Trump’s current plan, assuming he and the GOP actually have one, is to wait and hop ACA implodes. I’m not sure that’s going to happen even with premium increases and some insurers exiting the marketplace. There were what, two states already expanding Medicaid?

Why do you hate Obamacare? GOP started that term and Obama owned it. That fact that so many GOP voters can’t figure that out is not a reason to hate it.

to a degree, it already happened.

“While the Obama administration can still administer the risk-corridor program, for one year at least, they won’t be able to use taxpayer funds to bail out insurance companies,” Rubio said.

His provision sparked little opposition at the time, but it has proved to be a poison pill that is killing the measure from within.

Last year, insurers lost $2.9 billion more than expected on the ACA. But insurers had paid only $362 million into the program — leaving it more than $2.5 billion short. Thanks to Rubio’s provision, the administration was allowed to pay only 13 cents of every dollar insurers requested. Without the taxpayer bailouts, more than half of the the the ACA insurance cooperatives created under the law failed.

Which as we know, has made political hay for the GOP. Was it the right thing to do? I don’t know. I think that given the higher percentage of initial issues with how many people who had been denied/didn’t have coverage and needed it, phasing it out would have been a better idea (essentially propping up the markets until they have a chance to come to an equilibrium), but that’s only if you wanted to see the market-based approach actually work.

The Onion got a laugh from me with this headline.

Yay for the shiny new thread!

I shall be “Watching” it.

So, is it true that the IRS under this joke of an Administration will not be enforcing the tax penalty for not having insurance?

Wow, this thread is, so far, remarkably free of shit all over the walls, unlike the other one. Well done!

What IRS under this Administration? They’ll be investigating the President’s enemies, if anything, with a loyalty officer to make sure friends get their benefits…

So, I only just saw that ad that ran after the vote was pulled thanking Republicans for repealing the ACA. It’s totally a Veridian Dynamics ad.

Veridian Dynamics

American Action Network

My god. You’re so right.

I was trying to remember where I’d heard of Veridian Dynamics. ;-)
Good stuff.

Interesting set of observations from TPM’s Josh Marshall (not Qt3’s Josh Marshall) about Obamacarae on Twitter last night.

Basically he pointed out that while there’s some mewling in the House to restart a new repeal bill, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans aren’t going to have it. At all. And so Marshall pointed out as well that the number of red states taking a Medicaid expansion is growing. (Improbably, Kansas has voted for it, and although the Governor has vetoed the bill, the heavily Republican legislature may have enough votes to override.)

And so, quietly, Republicans are starting to look as if they’re going to help maintain Obamacare. For instance, some lawsuits against the Obamacare CSRs (cost sharing subsidies) have been pulled back by their GOP sponsors.

Still plenty of work to do, but as repeal loses steam and insurance companies realize that the ACA is going nowhere, it’s possible that some who jumped out may get back in. It’ll be important for Congress to keep looking at ways to offset costs, too. But increasingly, it’s looking like the future of American healthcare puts legislators of both parties against the rock of mandate healthcare systems like the ACA, or the hard place of seriously considering single payer.

Ha! I’ve always wondered about that

If you needed any more evidence that Brownback is a sack of shit:

How I would do things:

  1. Medicare tax: the income limit on it gets eliminated to raise revenue if needed. Only impacts people making above 128k

  2. Subsidies:
    I’d make subsidies work for all Americans who fit the guidlines
    Medicaid-eligible folks get a 100% subsidy on deductibles under a silver plan in states that reject the subsidy.

All folks get the following: refund via tax credit on all premiums that exceed 5%+2.5% per dependent on income, and refund via credit on all deductibles that exceed 10% of income if they are on a silver plan or above. If this pushes folks into negative taxes so be it.

This makes health insurance effectively affordable by capping the amount you’d have to spend on it to 15% for a single person. This to me is the limit of affordability.

Someone earning $50,000 a year would have their health care premiums capped at $2500/yr, and their deductibles capped at $5000 per year.

  1. Out-of-State insurance. allowed if there are fewer than 3 in-state providers in an area. If the in-state providers go above 3 in the future, they are allowed to stay in.

  2. Federal government power in healthcare: The federal government is allowed to investigate and negotiate rates when it is subsidizing.

  3. Anyone who is not insured via subsidy can get non-ACA insurance, provided it meets the current regulations allowed under the non-ACA exemptions for folks who bought their own insurance before the ACA.

  4. The federal government has the option of offering Medicare to all citizens in an area if they prove malfeasance by a company or if there are no providers in an area at cost-neutrality to the government before subsidies.

One Freedom Caucus member told HuffPost that a meeting between Pence and the HFC on the day that Republicans were supposed to take a vote two weeks ago only solidified oppositions to the bill. When White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Freedom Caucus they had no choice but to support the legislation, one member reportedly replied: “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.”

Even a meeting with Trump seemed to crystallize the opposition when he met with the Freedom Caucus. According to one Freedom Caucus member, Trump told the group to not worry about “the little shit.
(Emphasis mine)

Obamacare is the law of the land…sort of.