Republicans Again Targeting The Poor And The Sick On Healthcare Access

Lawrence O’Donnell played the Kimmel monologue a bit early last night so prime time audiences could hear Kimmel tell how Cassidy (of Graham-Cassidy) "lied right to my face.” Kimmel then urges everyone to phone Republicans in the Senate to tell them how evil this bill is.

202 224 3121

Again, the swing Republicans on this issue are Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona, and Susan Collins of Maine. Try to explain to them why this bill is so hard on the most vulnerable Americans, and why it is so damned unfair and cruel. Because they have a hard time comprehending it.

Earlier, Cassidy went on Kimmel’s show and smiled and promised his Obamacare repeal would not target the poor and the sick. It does target the poor and the sick. It cuts funding for the poor and the sick more aggressively than the previous Republican bills did.

Republican Senator Cassidy quickly responded to Kimmel's charges by saying Kimmel "just doesn't understand..." Saying his plan does indeed cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Reported in The Hill newspaper

Sure it does––but it allows insurers to jack their premiums sky high to punish them for being sick. What a cynical liar. Just as all Americans have the right to live in million dollar homes all Americans do have the right to buy decent health insurance––but they can’t afford it. Obamacare forced health insurers to stop offering junk coverage and also forced them to stop penalizing the people with preexisting conditions. The Republicans keep trying to push the poor back onto junk coverage that doesn’t really cover anything serious, and their plans keep punishing the sick for being sick.

The Republicans are rich. The Republicans represent the rich. The Republicans, like all members of Congress, have paid guaranteed Cadillac healthcare coverage for life and don’t give a damn about anyone else because they don’t comprehend what everyone else faces.

Here is President Trump’s healthcare advisor’s reasoning on the issue (via John Harwood): Trump adviser Moore on unfairness of the healthy subsidizing the sick: “People want insurance for their own families, not other peoples’ "

Which misses the entire point of health insurance, that the many who are healthy help support the few who are sick or in fear of their life. The Republican excuse is similar to their refusal to vote for hurricane relief because their districts weren't hit by the hurricane. (Until they were hit and then they demanded it.) The whole reason for covering everyone is the cost advantage of economies of scale.

It’s the familiar Republican refrain “I got mine. Fuck you.” Which they usually phrase more delicately.

So we need to flood the Senate with phone calls again: 202 224 3121

Because as long as they control the Congress they will keep trying to screw the poor and the sick.

It seems more likely the Republicans will kill our much improved healthcare system this time because they are being bribed/blackmailed by the giant money teats, the Koch Brothers, who have threatened to withhold cash from Republican candidates in 2018 unless they deliver on healthcare (removing millions from it) and tax “reform” (tax cuts for billionaires).

Koch blackmail on healthcare vote reported in The Guardian

Here is a discussion with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut earlier on Ari Melber's program

The Republicans are also attacking access to healthcare in another way, by drastically defunding the assistance poor Americans need to afford it: Analysis of how the GOP Reinsurance Plan would end up screwing the poor and the sick, from the StarTribune

Need more evidence that there’s something sinister about the Republicans’ healthcare strategy? News that a Russian oligarch (read mobster and Putin ally) is working with Washington insiders to invest millions of rubles in American healthcare.

Russian mob money targeting American healthcare reported by Bloomberg

Why? Because Republican healthcare is what’s known as a Killer Business Model.

The Republicans want to re-weaponize our healthcare system against us for profit.

The Russian/Republican Coup––With Jokes

Colbert explains how fun it will be to have a president who is a Russian asset.

A less humorous take on the Russian playing of the American electorate from the BBC. The implications are dire.

From the BBC

This explains why the Republicans are hurrying to confirm everyone Trump has nominated to run government departments. They don’t mind being tools of Putin as long as Putin lets them sit in the driver’s seat once in a while. Strange, isn't it? American sovereignty used to be important to Republicans. Right now the Republicans are quickly breaking our government into inoperable pieces before the public stops them. Is that vandalism what Putin asked them to do or is it their own idea? How can we tell the difference?

From The New Republic

The quick ObamaCare repeal doesn’t fix anything, it just undoes all the careful mechanisms of our healthcare system, especially the guarantees to people who need healthcare. Now we are all just fish in a barrel which Big Pharma and the healthcare giants can suck dry.

Oh… and it delivers a massive tax cut to rich people. I hope un-rich Trump voters will think about what they can do to fix this.

Reported in SLATE

The Republicans also passed a law that cancels all Federal authority to regulate important things like food safety and air quality and banks’ habit of defrauding people and stuff like that. This reminds me of how Enron (whose CEO was a key member of the Bush administration in that first disastrous year) gamed the California energy market, shutting off power to whole areas and hiking electricity charges sky high and laughing about the grandmas in Fresno who had to deal with it. That sort of thing will now be OK again, thanks to the Republicans. Consider it a late Christmas gift.

Reporting by Talking Points Memo

If Russia were controlling our new regime isn't breaking down the government the first thing they might do?

Oh, by the way, those true blue lefties who shunned Hillary because she wasn't pure enough? You were played by the Russians too. The Daily Beast details how Putin trolled the far left and helped split the liberals to elect Trump.

How Senator Rubio And The Republicans In Congress Rigged Your Healthcare Premiums To Go Up

"RISK CORRIDOR": THE REAL REASON OBAMA-CARE PREMIUMS ARE GOING UP IN 2017 -- THAT NO ONE IS TELLING YOU ABOUT

Hot off Wednesday's Thom Hartmann Show:

This is why the insurance companies participating in the Affordable Care Act are raising their premiums next year. As we know, the ACA ended the practice of denying coverage to people with previous conditions (which was causing people who were very ill to go without health care, and others to die). Even though the insurance companies would profit in long-term from overall increased number of enrollees, they screamed because of the short-term losses due to mandatory coverage of people who were already chronically ill. This period of short-term loss due to the addition of high-risk enrollees was dubbed "the risk corridor."

So to sweeten the deal, Obama then added extra subsidies for any losses incurred in the risk corridor. (Poor insurance companies! After all, CEO Helmsley must not be allowed to lose 1 cent of the one billion dollars+ he takes yearly in personal income from United Health Care.) The risk corridor subsidies were of course dependent on Congress passing budget bills that provided the funds for them.

This year, Senator Marco Rubio stripped out funds for the risk corridor subsidies, not as part of a budget bill (which is the honest way to do it), but as a rider to an unrelated bill, which Obama was compelled to sign, for whatever reasons pertinent to the purposes of the actual bill. As a result, the strip-out, and who did it, never got covered in the news. (Which is just how the Republicans wanted it.) And, as a result, the insurance companies will not get the subsidies that provide their short-term profits next year. Instead of "manning up," as the Conservatives like to say, and taking the losses next year in stride (which is what corporations used to do, and found acceptable as part of doing business, when we baby-boomers were kids), and disregarding that these losses will eventually be made up by long-term increased enrollments, the insurance companies are raising their premiums. A lot. Who knows... They may even end up making more money than they would have with the government subsidies.

Meanwhile, the enrollees are screaming bloody murder, as they should, and getting massively ripped off so Helmsley can buy another villa ala vineyard on the South Italy coast. Or whatever he and his CEO cronies do with all that money. And because MSmedia is owned and run by essentially the same people who own and run the insurance companies, and is therefore keeping its collective mouth shut, Republicans get to scream some more that "Obama-care doesn't work!" without revealing the real reason why, and that they're the ones responsible for it. Conveniently during the election.

This is how the Republicans do it. Remember this. Remember the name Marco Rubio and Republicans when your premiums go up. This is why we need single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All). Health care cannot work as long as it's conducted as a for-profit enterprise. And as it is essential to life, it should not be for profit, any more than water, or fire departments should be for profit. I'm not saying we shouldn't all pay for these services, nor that people should not make a decent living from helping to provide them. I'm saying that particular individuals should not be allowed to take ridiculous profits from doing work that is necessary to human beings' basic survival. Certainly people who simply shuffle the money around for these services, or coordinate the processes involved, should not be taking huge profits, adding to everyone's costs. Given that people die without them, that is extortion, and abuse of power. (We actually used to understand these principles in America. These things went without saying.)

Yeah. Obama-care: The only health care solution Republicans would even marginally accept. A system modeled after Republican plans (specifically, as I recall, Mitt Romney's). A system that doesn't work, because the Republicans won't allow it to work... Nice.

Health Insurers Have Figured Out How To Play The New System

Question: have the insurers pocketed the significant profits from the millions of low risk young people who previously were not required to have insurance?

It must have been a nice percentage of their profits. I think they have carefully segregated that large increase in low risk revenue from the higher risk people they can punish for their illnesses. Insurance is supposed to use economies of scale to spread risk, but I think insurers are instead carefully segregating risks to maximize premiums where possible.

When insurers selectively refuse to spread the risk for the benefit of their policyholders it is a fundamental violation of the whole idea of insurance.

I am in a new captive category: individuals who are no longer welcome in the insurance companies’ economies of scale for the “crime" of being an individual and not an employee of a large company. It’s the same old category from before. It appears the insurers have figured out how to sort the insured back into the ghettos which maximize their profits and minimize their expenses.

Wendell Potter, the sharpest observer we have on health insurance issues, has this to say.

Vox has published an interesting conversation about the sudden "problems" with Obamacare.

I think we’ve turned back toward the vicious cycle we saw previously, where the health insurers were motivated to exclude all the unlucky people who actually needed healthcare.

The insurance companies' new insurance pools where premiums are still affordable begin to look like exclusive clubs. The people who are welcomed in enjoy the lower premiums that they qualify for as healthy people and they are encouraged to approve the exclusion of people who are sicker than they are because they benefit from that exclusion.

This is a near perfect example of a vicious cycle, a competitive pursuit of inhumane practices. A more virtuous approach would be to put all Americans into one single risk pool: we are all human beings and all Americans.

There must have been an enormous Obamacare windfall to the insurance companies from the millions of premium-paying low risk young people who suddenly were forced to buy insurance policies. What happened to that windfall? If that revenue was consumed entirely by the increase in healthcare needed by the less healthy who were now insured, how much are the large pools of employee insurance plans being insulated from the increase? It's a perfect example of safety in numbers. Large groups protect their members, but they also select their members. What about the unfortunate people who are not invited in? Working people tend to be healthier than people who are not working, but less healthy people find it harder to stay employed, so these employee plans self segregate, insulating themselves from the ills of "other people."

How are we supposed to respond to this as human beings? If the previously uninsured were suddenly able to get needed care, why are we blaming the system which made the care possible? Obamacare's innovation was pretty simple: it accepted everybody, sick or well, employed or unemployed, as human beings. More than that: it required us to step up to some basic responsibility toward ourselves and our fellow citizens. Why do so many Americans reject this?

An analogy: a person is drowning and crying for help and we jump in to save them. Afterwards when we notice we are cold and wet are we angry about that? Do we blame the person who was drowning? Or do we simply acknowledge that this discomfort is the price we sometimes pay for being and behaving like a human being? The anger over the rise in premiums is like blaming the person who otherwise would have drowned, suggesting we would have been better off if we hadn’t heard their cries for help.

A fairer and more humane way of looking at this is to recognize we are all in the water. We are all human and mortal and prone to disease and catastrophe. Do we want to live in a society where disaster sorts us out as undesirables, leaving us alone and without help? Single payer would be a more rational solution. It would save us from that heartless and selfish part of us that would rather ignore the people in trouble, or that greedy part of us that would actually try to profit from their misery.

Explained: Why Health Insurance is a Waste of Money

The New York Times published an interesting and alarming story today.

I think what this NYTimes writer is trying to say is people who can’t afford health insurance die more quickly and cheaply than those who have insurance. Problem solved!

Here's a useful mantra rich people learn at their parents’ financial advisor’s knee.

If you pretend other people don’t exist you don’t have to help them.

If you don’t spend money trying to fix a problem there is no problem.

If something doesn’t happen to you it doesn’t happen.

All money spent helping other people is money wasted.

All money paid to other people is money that’s been stolen from you.

If someone dies horribly in a forest and there’s no healthcare there it doesn’t make a sound.

Republicans Resort to Pettifogging to Undo ObamaCare

Nobel prize economist Paul Krugman uses his column to ridicule the latest Republican effort to undo the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately the Republicans are immune to ridicule. (Also shame, reason and irony.)

There is a rumor circulating around Republican circles that the leadership is considering making a successful completion of the drinking game Cardinal Puff a requirement for all citizens applying for healthcare through any of the ACA’s marketplaces.

Several Republican states have already been using Cardinal Puff to screen people applying for the right to vote.

The Self-Reinforcing Conspiracy Theory

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’

This excellent piece from Ezra Klein's VOX got me thinking. What is it about Benghazi that has Republicans so obsessed? Does the time they've spent digging make them more certain there is something there? Did they begin digging with a certainty in their heads?

Fitting our conclusions to our preconceptions is bad philosophy. It’s illogical. It’s what made Galileo recant his discovery about the solar system. It’s stupid. But that is the guiding principle of modern Republican thought. Eisenhower, TR, Lincoln, every admired Republican in the party’s long history would be embarrassed. The leaders of the party should be ashamed of where it’s got to.

There seems to be a greater habit among Republicans to fit conclusions to preconceived ideas, to shape policy around an unproven belief system. To take one example, denying science while at the same time criticizing the public education system for the way our students are failing at science. (Bill Moyers takes a look at this tendency towards stupidity.)

Republicans seek government office, run for it, or buy it, and then they use it to make government stop working. Why? Is it because they believe government is automatically and a priori bad? Do they believe this so much they have to make it true? What does it mean when they spend their lives in government trying to make it fail? (New Yorker piece: the Republican War on Competence.)


Why do Republicans oppose everything Obama does, even when he proposes a health care reform their own Heritage Foundation devised? You reach the unavoidable conclusion that it’s because Obama is black. They cannot bear it that a black Democrat is so much more intelligent and capable than their hapless George W. Bush was. White superiority has become an unspoken but deep principle among Republicans. It’s their secret handshake. It too is a preconceived notion that doesn’t fit with reality.

Or is this a preconceived notion? Here are some statistics about it from Nate Silver's 538 blog. Unsurprisingly the racial bias is higher among white Republicans than white Dems, but not that much more. How much information is suppressed in these answers? Which group is more likely to hide its “inappropriate opinions” in a public forum? Which party is likelier to act on inappropriate opinions in concert with their like-minded friends?

Or is that just a conspiracy theory of mine?

The Rich Live Larger And Longer Than You And Me

I read an interesting article at the Atlantic and it got me thinking...

The core philosophy of the Republican Party these days is that a problem only exists if you spend money on it, meaning tax dollars, meaning THEIR tax dollars.

If you stop spending money trying to solve poverty (or the healthcare crisis) the problem ceases to exist.

In the mind of the Republican Party, poverty is only a problem because solving it costs rich people money they’d rather spend on another home in another tropical tax haven or on another corporate takeover.

If you stop spending money to alleviate poverty or the ill health of poor people the poor will go away and die and solve the problem more cheaply and therefore more efficiently.

As Scrooge said “Let them die then and decrease the surplus population.”

Why the American public doesn’t find this repugnant is a mystery until you realize that vast wealth also buys a lot of PR, a lot of network time, or, in the case of FoxNews, a whole network. (The Koch Brothers now hold a partial veto power over programming on PBS because they help fund it.) The .1% own most of the media.

The rich are not necessarily fascists, but they benefit from fascist policies so they often aren’t inclined to oppose them. It takes time out of their leisurely existence. Those who donate to liberal and progressive causes are to be applauded. They are acting against their own financial interests, just as the rural poor are voting against theirs, but what use are so few in the face of so many?

There is a meme going around that suggests that poverty is caused by the poor. You hear this on right wing talk radio.

Oddly enough, it’s true. In a way not quite captured by the right wing meme.

The poor who listen to right wing radio and watch FoxNews and nod obediently are helping deepen their own poverty and ignorance and ill health, by cooperating with the rejection of ObamaCare and by disbelieving science, by obeying their masters, by voting for Republican candidates who perpetuate their powerlessness. They are not stupid people, even though they are behaving stupidly. They are ignorant, not stupid. They may not even be ignorant, just ignorant of their predicament. They have been conned and are now invested in that con game, too embarrassed to admit it, because admitting you were tricked is harder than losing what was stolen from you in the process.

You have to reach a very low point before you admit you did something dumb, and, luckily for the Republican Party, most of the poor people who vote for them would rather die first.

Hedge Fund Billionaires are Saints and Schoolteachers are Greedy Bastards

So, let's try and understand this...

Fifth grade teachers and firefighters who rescue kittens from trees are greedy bastards.

And hedge fund billionaires are saints devoted to the wellbeing of the community.

I will pause while your mind explodes.

This is really happening. Voters in Rhode Island have elected a fearless crusader who is going after the greedy schoolteachers on behalf of the heroic hedge funds.

The people who worked their whole lives on behalf of the community, teaching children, fighting fires, cleaning streets, policing parks, taking less pay in exchange for a pension, are actually terrible selfish greedy monsters who must be reined in and their retirement must be confiscated by the good, honest, crusading friend of Wall Street who is working diligently to return those pension dollars to the offshore bank accounts of the brave, honest hedge fund billionaires who know best what to do with that money.

Up is down. Good is bad. Greed is admirable. Unselfishness must be punished. Jesus was wrong. Hitler was right. ...Wait a minute, Obama is Hitler... I'm confused.

What do we know for certain?

Questioning billion dollar bonuses for Wall Street bankers is like lynching. We know that. It was in the papers the other day.

ObamaCare is like what Hitler did to the Jews. That was in the paper the other day too.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs is more saintly than Mother Teresa. That was also reported this week.

Mr. Rogers, who talked about kindness and unselfishness, was a sick individual who sapped the life force from two generations of Americans. I heard that on FoxNews.

And, yes, public school teachers and firefighters are horrible greedy bastards. It's been widely reported.

It's so hard to keep a solid grip on reality, on our values. Luckily America has talk radio to tell us what to believe.

Hey Romney––Disaster Isn't a Business Opportunity

Even Republican governors are praising Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy. Such a contrast with the guitar strumming response we got from a recent Republican president. Romney has urged shutting FEMA down altogether. There's a difference between the two parties. Mega-disasters like this remind us of the importance of good government that works for everyone. Sometimes we really need it.

At Raw Story.

The Washington Post.

Under a President Romney this hurricane's aftermath would look a lot different. Instead of FEMA being ready, fully equipped and on the ground, Romney would open the devastated areas up to the "magic of capitalism". Disasters are a business opportunity in Romney's eyes. An opportunity for profit, and you can imagine how prices could be affected by sudden mass shortages. Don't worry, his friends on Park Avenue would win a bidding war for bottled water, and would probably do well selling their excess. If you think about it, Mr. Romney, looting is a business opportunity, we just don't condone it.

Worth reading and sharing with your fence-sitting friends.

A very good post on the New York Times blog.

At The New Republic.

Also this, also at TNR.

Want irony? Remember "Heckuva Job" Brownie? The man who ran FEMA for Bush, who fumbled the Katrina response, whose previous experience before his government job was running a horse show association? (Maybe he knows Rufalka...) Brownie has criticized Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy, saying he responded too quickly... Story reported by The Hill newspaper.

I think it comes down to something I saw on a wall last week:

"ObamaCare. RomneyDon't"

Mitt Romney Praises Israel's Socialized Healthcare System

"When our health care costs are completely out of control. Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation.” ~Mitt Romney praising Israel's socialized healthcare system, reported in FORBES

Only In America

Political observers are predicting an armed insurrection against Obama's Affordable Care Act. Only in America would you find overweight, diabetic, out of work militants willing to die barricaded in their homes rather than have private healthcare provided to them by law.

Is it the paying for it part they dislike? If they can't pay, other Americans will help them pay.

Is it the concept of the helplessly ill being assisted by the society that irks them to the point of violence? Are Americans that uncaring?

Are they simply nuts?

Or are they dangerously, violently misinformed? Like the Tea Partiers who showed up at protests in 2010 with signs demanding the government get its hands off their Medicare... which is and always has been a government program, run, I might add, at a much greater rate of efficiency than private medical programs. (It was the private companies trying to poach patients from Medicare who spread this disinformation.)

According to a Kaiser Foundation study, Medicare dedicates more than 97% of its dollars to actual medical care, compared to private healthcare companies which bridle at the idea of spending more than half of their revenues on the care of patients.

One of the most alarmingly funny memes that came in the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision to uphold ObamaCare were the many who spoke angrily about moving to Canada to escape the ObamaCare tyranny.

Canada has full universal healthcare run by the government, and it's very popular. In a recent poll the Canadian of the 20th Century voted by all Canadians (and it was no contest apparently) was the politician who was the father of their socialized system. Oh, Canada.

Rush Limbaugh threatened to move to Costa Rica, which also has universal healthcare.

And every Republican who voted and filibustered and threatened to shut down the government to prevent government from providing or requiring healthcare for everyone, every one of them, has government paid healthcare themselves.

They are ginning up a rebellion against a benefit they enjoy. What's good enough for them is apparently too good for everyone else.

Rick Ungar, who writes about healthcare for Forbes, presents a particularly good analysis of the Republican hypocrisy.