CBO: Senate plan will lead to 22 million losing insurance.
Hey! Thatâs better, right? Things are looking up!
They predicted 23 million from the House version, right?
Yeesh. What wonders have the Senate wrought on this golden bill!
Yup. The GOP is covering 1 million more people under this plan! Wooooooooooooo!
Itâs almost like socialism!
Or maybe a million more will die without care, you naysayersâŚ
If youâre interested, (you should be) the full text of the CBO assessment is here:
GOP talking point incoming:
âThe Better Care Act dramatically reduces the number of uninsured Americans*, ensuring affordable coverage for everyone.â
* 1 million more insured than the previous house plan, not the AHCA
Additional talking point:
Mission accomplished: with this bill we are freeing 15 million people from being forced into buying something they donât want. FREEDOM!!!
Democratic talking point: are we TOO committed to womenâs rights? Maybe we areâŚgotta compete in Kansas yâall know!
In Kansas, that maybe makes sense.
Itâs better to have someone from Kansas who agrees with you on some stuff, than a far right Republican who agrees with you on nothing.
I mean ideally, no one is ever allowed to vote Republican again and the problem solves itself!
Insurance isnât a good model to pay for health issues. Insurance is good for rare but catastrophic events - car accidents, house fires, unexpected death or disability. But everyone has health problems and needs health care. Itâs universal. Now, itâs more likely to be a pressing need after age 40, but itâs literally everyone. Not everyone will have an auto accident or have their house burn down.
Health care isnât something people choose not to have - when they need it, they will use it, regardless of their ability to pay or coverage with insurance or lack thereof. And our system allows this, in large part because of EMTALA.
EMTALA says that an ED must provide screening and stabilization for anyone regardless of their ability to pay - this leads to people without insurance using the ED for issues that should be handled by their primary doctor - colds, coughs, fevers, broken bones (yes, PCPs can handle most of these), diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. Now EDs could send people who donât have emergent conditions away after they have been screened, but hospitals rightly expect such actions to lead to bad publicity and lawsuits, particularly since people without insurance have been using the ED for their primary care for decades now and simply expect it to be available to them. Of course, they donât pay their hospital bills for this care, and those costs get spread to the actual paying customers. This is part of why a tylenol in the hospital appears to cost half the national debt. Itâs like a cost-balancing system run by the hospitals for their paying vs non-paying pools. If you donât have insurance and donât have to pay for an ED visit, then the ED is a no-brainer - itâs fast, effective, and crazy expensive, but you arenât paying that crazy expense, so why do you care?
Insurance simply doesnât work with these issues. We need cost controls, which is a hard sell in a country with the expectation of rugged individualism combined with entitlement, who expect to get better care if they throw more money at something. And then people who donât have that money expect to get that same care because equality. And the research into new testing and treatment is expensive, so the companies have to recover those costs with high prices, but people want that new testing or treatment. This is a large part of why we are going bankrupt on health care - huge cost increases for marginal return. Nobody will take this issue on politically because itâs suicide to a career - death panel levels of bad publicity.
So what options are possible to control costs? Either thereâs an entity with so much sway that they can place limits on what gets paid, like medicare, that can help drive down costs indirectly by not paying silly prices for marginal improvements (but death panels), an entity that controls the purse strings for research and development to help keep costs down (but free markets, 'merica, etc), making health care not for profit (again, free markets, 'merica, etc), stopping the EMTALA unpaid mandate/loophole/lawsuits that makes EDs the de facto PCP for those without insurance (but think of the children without insurance). Single payer would make the government that entity, with all of the costs, benefits, and bad press that goes along with it. Dems may be ok taking on that burden for the possibility of a working system and healthcare for everyone.
None of these work for the GOP, however, so instead they are taking the other possible tack - just getting themselves out of the health care business altogether. Sure people are going to die, but thatâll be their fault for being too poor, uneducated, etc, not because of a GOP death panel. Sucks to be poor and uneducated, but thatâs your fault, you know, cause public education was available and you didnât work hard enough. Itâll play just fine to the GOP voters and they can dodge any responsibility.
Make no mistake, fixing healthcare in the US is hard. Actually making a working system means making choices that people will go to the mattresses over, and it would ruin political careers. I doubt that any of our congressmen have the moral fortitude to do the right thing here and actually reign in spending, so we get abdication of responsibility instead. With the ending of medicaid, itâs literally not the governmentâs problem anymore aside from pesky medicare, but I anticipate thatâll be next on the list after the baby boomers stop voting due to natural causes and that voting block becomes less important than millenials. What a mess we have in store for us.
OrâŚ
Iâm gonna throw a party as soon as practicable after that mother[bleeper] dies. Heâs a waste of human flesh.
Iâd like to welcome you to my Annual McConnell Grave Pissing group on Facebook. Weâll make a whole day of it, go see the place where they race the horses and everything.
Hereâs âmyâ senator, Cornyn sent out to his electorate just a couple days ago:
[quote]THE LONESTAR WEEKLY
ABOUT FOR TEXANS ISSUES NEWSROOM CONTACT
Rescuing Americans from Obamacare
This week, Senate Republicans released a draft health care bill, a critical step in rescuing Americans from Obamacare. In the coming days, we will listen to feedback from both sides of the aisle to build on this health care reform proposal to create a better way for Texans get the coverage they need at a price they can afford.
Click here to watch the video.
This draft will help stabilize insurance markets that have left millions with no options, while freeing Texans from mandates that force them to purchase insurance they donât want or canât afford. It preserves access to care for those with pre-existing conditions and allows children to stay on their parentsâ health care through age 26. For Medicaid recipients, it strengthens the program by giving states more flexibility and ensuring those who rely on it donât have the rug pulled out from under them.
Right now, one out of every three counties in Texas has only one insurance option. Premiums in Texas have gone up 82 percent in the past four years alone. Itâs time you have options for your health care. You can read a more detailed summary here, and access the full text of the draft here.
[/quote]
Called both my senators today to tell them to oppose the bill. Casey already will, and I assume Toomey will vote for it no matter what, but supposedly calls help maybe. I plan on calling them both every day.
