As the GOP has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act once again, this time tying it to the budget, Cathy McMorris Rodgers is taking a more active role in pushing it. I’ve really noticed that they aren’t pushing for anything. It’s been repeal, repeal, repeal, and now it’s defund and delay.
“To get the entire bill repealed, or defunded, is probably not realistic,” McMorris Rodgers said Thursday following a spirited town hall discussion in Spokane Wednesday night in which the Affordable Care Act took center stage. “But I do think there are provisions in the law that we can get delayed, or provisions in the law we can get defunded.”
[…]
“I think there’s growing recognition that … portions of the law are not ready,” McMorris Rodgers said, citing recent votes in the House in which Democrats joined Republicans to delay the mandates in the law requiring employers and individuals to sign up on subsidized health insurance exchanges.
They are complaining and obstructing. They are demanding delay and attempting to defund the law. What they aren’t doing is proposing any alternative. The House GOP plan is to go back to before the health care law passed.
If you remember back when George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, the House and Senate Democrats were consistently opposed to his plan without offering any plan of their own. In that way, they made the status quo on Social Security their plan. They made Social Security the Democrats’ plan and privatizing it the Republican plan.
In the same way, the GOP plan for health care in America is how things were before Obamacare. The GOP plan is preexisting conditions and HMO’s. It’s tens of millions of Americans without health care coverage. It’s kicking kids off their parents’ plan. It’s shrinking of Medicaid and dissolving the other ways to make sure the poor can afford to be covered. It’s making it so that the power of the market doesn’t bring down costs in exchanges. It’s the out of control health care inflation that marked the period before the law passed. They ought to at least own up to that.
The House RETHUGS have kicked the ball and are holding their breath. Now it is up to the Senate RETHUGS to carry it to the end zone. Can it be done? Can they do it?
Or are they going to start a feeding frenzy and turn on each other?
Get out the popcorn, I think TV is going to be amusing this weekend.
Just remember, if they do defund the Affordable Care Act, this resolution is just for a couple of months and we can do this all over again and we can see what the next big thing the tea baggers would want extort from us.
“The South used to be a swamp of slavery abutting dry land called ‘free states.'”
Still is, but they now call it “right to work” instead of “slavery.”
Roger Rabbit may go on vacation for a few days.
Where’s Groucho when we really need him?
Then, as now, this is how the GOTFP runs things. That song was a direct poke in the eye of the industrialist/capitalist class that was running congress in 1931 and had pretty much owned it since the 1880s. Bear in mind, that was filmed right after the 1930 midterm elections, when Herbert Hoover was President. The first major GOFP loss of Congress in almost 40 years was the year Horsefeathers was released, 1932.
I have a feeling that the Republicans in the senate are as tired of the Teahadists in the house as the Democrats are. It’s not a matter of will the senate Republicans break with the house, it’s a matter of when.
The Republican alternative is don’t get sick. If you do, die quickly.
Spent some time with my Brother-in-law today. He’s the dumbest dumbfuck I’ve known. He started in on how much Obamacare is raising his healthcare and he got the Lifewise letter saying they were cancelling his plan and moving him to a crappier plan. And it was going to cost him more.
I got him to show me the letter.
Previous plan, Deductible $5800, Insurance covers 90% of all charges with in-network doctors after paying the deductible. Out of network doctors, insurance covers 60% of costs
New plan, Deductible $5400, Insurance covers 100% after deductible, insurance covers only 40% of out of network doctors.
He was fixated on that out of network 60% vs 40%.
I asked him if his family has ever in the last five years used an out-of-network doctor. No.
I patiently explained to him that his premium is the same, his deductible is LOWER saving him money AND if the family’s health care decisions about using in network doctors exclusively continue he will no longer pay 10% after hitting the deductible.
He still thinks Obamacare will cost him money.
He’s a dumbfuck who watches Fox News.
Well he married your sister. So what does that say for her?
Ohhhhhhhhhhhh snap!
Actually, he married my wife’s sister. One of a series of epically bad decisions since she was about fifteen.
Nice try though.