House leaders postponed a vote Thursday on their plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system, as they struggled to meet demands of conservative lawmakers who said they could not support the bill.
Earlier Thursday, conservative House Republicans had rebuffed an offer by President Trump on Thursday to strip a key set of mandates from the nation’s current health-care law, raising doubts about whether House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) had the votes.
Trump met at the White House with the most conservative House Republicans, hoping to close a deal that would help ensure passage of the party’s health-care plan by shifting it even further to the right. But the session ended with no clear resolution, and some lawmakers said they needed more concessions before they would back the bill.
March 23, 2017 - U.S. Voters Oppose GOP Health Plan 3-1, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Big Opposition To Cuts To Medicaid, Planned Parenthood
American voters disapprove 56 - 17 percent, with 26 percent undecided, of the Republican health care plan to replace Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. Support among Republicans is a lackluster 41 - 24 percent.
If their U.S. Senator or member of Congress votes to replace Obamacare with the Republican health care plan, 46 percent of voters say they will be less likely to vote for that person, while 19 percent say they will be more likely and 29 percent say this vote won't matter, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds.
(Granted, most of the 46% who say they're less likely to vote for them are most likely Democrats anyway, but still).
Republican Pete Sessions just literally said "Nobody is going to lose their coverage, you'll be able to keep your same doctor," "same plan." pic.twitter.com/nn0f4dFloc
Seven years ago, President Obama repeatedly made an infamous promise: That under the Affordable Care Act, "If You Like Your Plan, You Can Keep It...If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep Them."
As a big fan of Obama and a supporter of the ACA, this statement has been making me, and any intellectually honest Democrat, wince ever since.
The changes in question appeared to include a) hurting even more poor/disabled people more quickly than before by speeding up the Medicaid expansion cut-off and block-granting non-ACA Medicaid...but also a vague reference to beefing up the individual market tax credits for older enrollees.
Now the Medicaid cruelty aside, I've long been an advocate of beefing up the indy market subsidies myself, so this isn't necessarily a terrible idea, although the devil would be in the details. I assumed, for instance, that Ryan & Co. planned on changing the age-based structure from this:
UPDATE: After thinking about it all day, I've decided to remove the "scrotum" nickname from the headline. I reserve the right to keep it in the body of this and future posts, however.
After being lambasted by pundits, reporters and politicians across the political spectrum for pushing an ACA replacement bill which would effectively raise insurance premiums on older enrollees up to eight times higher than they would be otherwise (eating up over 50% of their annual income in some cases)...
I've spent the past two months painstakingly crunching the numbers in an attempt to project just how many people would likely lose their healthcare coverage if the ACA were to be: a) fully repealed; b) with immediate effect; and c) without any substantive replacement policy put into its place.
My conclusion, after much analysis, double-checking and updating, is that the grand total would be roughly 24 million people: Around 8.2 million current exchange enrollees, nearly 15 million via Medicaid (expansion or otherwise), and the 750,000+ people enrolled in BHP programs in Minnesota and New York.
When I was 18 years old, my father died of a brain tumor.
A few weeks after the funeral, I left for college at Michigan State University. Freshmen were required to room blind, so I had no idea who my roommate would be. When I met him, a tall blonde guy named Brian, I was still wearing the Kriah ribbon--a small torn piece of black cloth.
We shook hands, introduced ourselves, and then Brian asked me what the torn ribbon was for. I explained that my father had recently passed away, and that Jewish custom was for mourners to wear torn black cloth as part of the mourning process.
His response?
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that he's burning in hell right now."
I should note that this was less than 5 minutes after we had met. I was assigned to live in the same room as this guy for the next 9 months.
For 2017, the weighted, average, unsubsidized (that's critical!) premium rate increase for ACA-compliant individual market healthcare policies was roughly 25% nationally.
There were plenty of reasons for this, including normal inflation/healthcare costs; the discontinuation of two of the three stabilization programs (Reinsurance and Risk Corridors, although the RC program had already been sabotaged a year earlier anyway); correction for under pricing by many carriers in the first couple of years of the ACA exchanges; and, of course, the fact that the ACA exchange risk pool continues to be worse than hoped for in numerous states/counties.
Of course, for the roughly 10 million exchange enrollees who are receiving tax credits, this didn't really impact them much at all:
On average, ACA marketplace consumers receiving tax credits are literally paying exactly the same this year as last year -- $106 per month. pic.twitter.com/WzqA6DsWRN
You may have noticed that I haven't been posting as many blog entries the past week or two. This has been partly due to our 5-day power outage, of course, as well as various other personal odds & ends. The main reason, however, is that I've been driving around the metro Detroit area giving a PowerPoint presentation about the ACA and Trumpcare to various groups. Last night was my 4th or 5th presentation, and while it was kind of sloppy and scattershot the first few times, I'm streamlining and modifying for each new event.
Even so, I'm cramming a lot of information into an hour or so, and several people at each event have asked if I could upload the slideshow to the website for easy download.
