The Blaze:
Congressional Republicans inched closer toward repealing Obamacare early Saturday morning when the Senate passed its version of tax reform.
What happened?
Included in the Senate’s bill was a provision that eliminates Obamacare’s infamous individual mandate. The mandate forces every American to have health insurance, and if they don’t, it levies an annual penalty, or as the Supreme Court ruled, a “tax” to be paid to the IRS.
The provision has been widely unpopular since the bill’s passage in 2010. However, its removal signals a real possibility that Congress might begin dismantling former President Barack Obama’s signature achievement. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.) hailed the accomplishment after its passage, according to The Hill:
Families ought to be able to make decisions about what they want to buy and what works for them –not the government.
I believe if people don’t want to buy the Obamacare insurance, they shouldn’t have to pay a tax penalty to the IRS.
However, some have warned that simply repealing the mandate without addressing the law’s mandated coverage for pre-existing conditions will make the health care situation even worse, since the two provisions work in tandem.What’s next?
The Senate’s accomplishment, which paves the way for Trump’s first major legislative achievement, still has a ways to go before Republicans can declare victory. That’s because the House has already passed their own version of tax reform, meaning the two bills will have to be reconciled in committee before they can be sent to Trump’s desk.
As far as the individual mandate repeal goes, the House’s bill didn’t include it. But chances are, House Republicans will approve it.
No Democrats supported either bill, but Trump said on social media early Saturday that he expects to sign a final bill before Christmas.
Next in line repealing all those UN treaties especialy the Small Arms Control Treaty signed by American Traitor John Kerry
Guess I wait to see if the tax cuts actually help https://days.to/until/15-april add 1 year.
No one has seen the “final”, final bill so I wait, I have little faith in the uniparty.
Yes, indeed. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this elimination will result in 13 million Americans losing their health insurance by 2027, in addition to causing 10% annual increases in health insurance premiums for most of those same 10 years, for all those who don’t buy insurance as part of a group plan.
So, this is republicans, knowingly screwing things up for millions of Americans, with the deliberate intention of killing a program that they don’t have the balls to openly repeal.
And it’s part of a tax reform scam that will permanently benefit corporations and the wealthy, while ultimately raising taxes on all other taxpayers.
You’re actually supporting this?
You do realize that the republican bill eliminates the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, don’t you? Have you been receiving that deduction?
It also phases out and then eliminates the tax cuts it initially provides to individual tax payers, beginning in 2025. Their hand is in your pocket, but you won’t realize your wallet is gone until several more elections—uh, I mean years—have gone by.
After that, nearly half of all middle and working class Americans with be left with actual tax increases, while the cuts for corporations and the wealthiest remain, because they are permanent.
You’d better keep your eye on your Social Security and Medicare. They still have to figure out how to pay for a reform bill projected to add an additional $1.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. And that’s on top of the current debt growth projection.
@Greg:
They won’t “lose” it… they will exercise their right of freedom of choice and not pay for something that has such high deductibles so as to be useless anyway.
The CBO scoring of Obamacare predicted that not only would it cost $2 trillion but 30 million would STILL not have insurance.
No it doesn’t. It caps how much you can deduct.
You still cannot explain how, if more people will suffer a tax increase, the tax bill results in a $1 trillion deficit, yet you keep repeating that lie.
Here’s your major achievement:
June 8, 2018 — Trump’s DOJ labels the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, placing healthcare for 133 million at risk
Remember this?
Total bullshit. No such plan has come out, nor is any such plan in the works. The plan has always been to kill the Affordable Care Act, after which the public will have to accept whatever replacement they somehow patch together. How about this?
Right. Insurance for everybody—even those who can’t afford it. That’s always been their goal, hasn’t it? They just don’t support any actual means of getting there.
Other than those presently covered under the Affordable Care Act who have preexisting conditions.
If you like your plan you can keep your plan. Period.
People will save 2500 dollars a year.
Propaganda and total BS.
Trump administration tells court it won’t defend key provisions of the Affordable Care Act
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act effectively kills the individual mandate.
Let’s look at the bright side. Maybe it’s better to accelerate the adverse effects of destroying the Affordable Care Act so the public will be aware of them before the 2018 elections.
@Mully, #7:
Do you or any family members have any preexisting conditions? If so, good luck with that.
@Greg: Obamacare put everyone’s health care at risk. Fixing it is going to be risky, too. Cleaning up Obama’s disasters takes time and will be painful. That’s why we shouldn’t elect socialists to President.
The Affordable Care Act could have evolved into precisely what the people of the nation needed, had Congress spent the past eight years correcting problems and improving it rather than doing everything possible to kick out its financial underpinnings and sabotage it.
Remember that, when all of the beneficial provisions are gone, and your insurance is cancelled or becomes prohibitively expensive because you’ve become a profit liability. The people bent on its destruction have come up with nothing in the way of a credible replacement, and they’ve had those same eight years to do so. Their inaction in the face of skyrocketing healthcare costs and declining insurance access was what led to the ACA in the first place.
Twenty million Americans gained health insurance coverage thanks to Obamacare. Countless others were spared policy cancellation when lifetime coverage limits were reached or jobs were lost.
Tracking Trump administration efforts to sabotage America’s health care through attacks on the Affordable Care Act.
@Greg:
Odd you blame Congress when Obama spent 8 years altering, modifying, delaying the law with his little pen instead of letting it go fully into effect and crater Democrat election hopes.
You’re too late; I lost the insurance I had three years ago, yet I distinctly remember being promised that, if I liked it (I did) I could keep it. Nope… a great big, fat, Obama lie.
Obamacare sucked. Premiums went up and kept going up, along with deductibles. If left in place, it would have added two trillion to the debt. Gruber had it exactly right; Obama exploited stupid people to get it in place. Now, it is going to be painful to fix. Don’t blame Trump, blame Obama. He f**ked it up.
Why? Does it make the republican majority’s heads hurt to think too hard?
They’ve been too chickenshit to take the matter up again before the elections. Deficits? They seem to have had no problem at all passing top heavy tax cuts that will boost the national debt by a trillion dollars per year
Republicans embrace a hideously unpopular position just before the elections
Believe me…they are not nuts.
@Greg: I noticed you didn’t dispute my two simple sentences. Always doing a diversion instead. So lets review. The Democrats put together what they called a a health care bill that never had majority support of the American people. They locked out all Republicans from any crafting of it. No bi-partisanship for them they didn’t need nor want Republican input. Oh they said it was a Republican bill that was crafted from an old Heritage Foundation idea. If so then why lock out all Republicans from the crafting? Of course it was a lie and propaganda. Now that the Democrats are out of power they are mad the Republicans won’t support their law in the manner in which they desire. Gee if they had made it bipartisan this probably wouldn’t be happening but the Democrats are the party of force and submission and used it the first chance they got. Now they whine like children.
When the ACA went into affect I had friends who lost their plans, the ones they were told they could keep by Obama and every Democrat who lied about it. The new plans had higher deductibles and cost more than the previous ones. If your deductible is so high you can’t use the plan then preexisting conditions aren’t really covered except by you and your wallet. I have friends who are having to pay for maternity coverage even though they were past childbearing years and are not going to have any more children. The kicker was even the men were forced to have maternity coverage. This isn’t a preexisting condition but a non-existing one. These friends are what we called the little guy the ones Democrats are supposed to be the guardians of. More propaganda and BS.
You don’t get it and never will. It was all based on a lie. Even the points you try to make in support of it are subject to the lies of Obama.
@Greg:
Because Obamacare, by designs, got its tentacles into everything that 1/6 of our economy involves. Since Obamacare dictated what policies would cover (which included pre-care for old men), policies need to be revamped. Subsidies must be removed and replaced with competition across state lines. There is MUCH to do and it has to be done in the least disruptive means possible.
Pre-existing conditions coverage is one of the things that eventually killed Obamacare. That is a wonderful thought, but it needs to be figured out how to cover pre-existing conditions without allowing people to simply wait until they have a condition to buy insurance, which drives up the costs for everyone else. In Obamacare, their solution was to MANDATE everyone bought insurance or pay a penalty. However THEY were too gutless to make the penalty MORE than buying insurance (and that was waived for years), so people still waited until if or when they needed insurance.
And why is health care so expensive? If you remember, THAT was Obama’s original target, but when he started accusing doctors of unnecessary surgeries and treatments, he began to lose their support, so he turned on the insurance companies, whose charges are in direct relation to how much the coverage costs. When Obama then addressed costs by telling doctors, “You charge $100, we’ll pay you $5”, they began dropping out of the Medicare and Medicaid systems.
You never had solutions; you had mandates based on how you wanted reality to be and THAT’S why Obamacare was a massive failure.
@Mully:
They are mad the Republicans won’t share the blame for this disaster. They are mad they don’t have an answer for the fact that every bad thing those who opposed Obamacare predicted would happen actually coming to pass.
@Mully, #15:
They don’t have much bearing on the fact that Obamacare resolved the problem of preexisting conditions for millions of Americans, but republicans are now bringing it back. They don’t actually have much bearing on anything. They’re an invitation to digress away from substantive discussion.
Actually, it did have majority support of the American people, despite a prolonged negative PR campaign that lasted for years that was similar in many respects to their disinformation campaign on climate change. Even now, more Americans approve of the program than disapprove of it. I guarantee that they will not approve of the situation that will follow the GOP’s destruction of some of the ACA’s most popular features.
No doubt. People with cheap plans providing substandard coverage were entirely happy—so long as they had no medical issues that revealed their plan’s fundamental inadequacies by putting them to the test. Many young people fell into that category. Of course, if they had serious accidents there was always Medicaid or bankruptcy, shifting the losses resulting from their cheap policies to the taxpayers, or to people with better coverage in the form of much higher collective medical costs. This was not such a good arrangement for people who took on greater—and more costly—personal responsibility.
Multiple reasons. For one thing, because of a lack of rational cost-control measures, and an inadequate application of preventive measures that could reduce the need for more intensive and expensive care. Another is failure to impose rational ceilings on the costs of many prescription drugs, essentially guaranteeing companies a right to pick the taxpayers’ and policy-holders’ pockets.
@Deplorable Me, #16:
The “disaster” has been largely arranged and promoted by republicans, who had many years of Congressional control when they could have addressed the growing problems themselves, but did nothing. Now they’ve killed the other guy’s effort, rather than working to improve it, claiming that it should be thrown out entirely because they have a much better and cheaper alternative. But they don’t. It won’t take long even for their true believers to figure that out, once the rug has been jerked out from under them. “Obamacare did it!” isn’t going to work.
@Greg:
No, it didn’t, as I pointed out.
As soon as the law was put in effect and replaced the left wing propaganda, support plummeted. As soon as people began losing their plans and doctors, premiums began going up along with deductibles, people who had supported realized they had been taken as the stupid people Jon Gruber regarded them as.
Nope. Wrong. Mine was deemed a “Cadillac plan” and had to be dropped by the company because it was going to be heavily taxed. So, we went to a FSA with higher deductibles.
@Deplorable Me, #19:
As a number of surveys have demonstrated, more people still approve of Obamacare than disapprove, although 8 years of incessant negative PR have brought the margin down.
Then I suppose you wouldn’t have been in the cheap, fundamentally inadequate plan category. Essentially “Cadillac plans” were a form of untaxed employee compensation. The imposition of taxes on such plans was incrementally pushed out to 2020. No companies have actually been hit with such taxes yet.
@Greg:
2009: http://news.gallup.com/poll/121814/more-disapprove-than-approve-obama-healthcare.aspx
2014: http://www.people-press.org/2014/03/20/aca-at-age-4-more-disapproval-than-approval/
2016: http://news.gallup.com/poll/195383/americans-negative-positive-aca.aspx
Well, I guess you’re right, Greg. Never a sign that the majority disapproved of Obamacare.
And THAT was to goal of Obamacare. Not health care, but tapping into a $350 billion unexploited source of tax revenue. Too bad I wasn’t a union member so I could get an exemption from that, huh?
June 19, 2018 — Trump administration puts skimpy health insurance plans in place
Yes, that exactly what this will do—to everyone carrying health insurance that meets the basic standards everyone should have. If you can’t figure that out, you don’t have a clue about the economics of the health insurance industry.
@Greg: You mean I could CHOOSE to pay for insurance that does not provide me with pre-natal and maternity? Those BASTARDS!!
Driving up premiums and deductibles by allowing the healthy to sit it out until they actually NEED insurance is exactly what the Obamacare disaster did.
@Deplorable Bill: Skimpy? Would this health insurance have an affordable deducible ? Would it pay a portion of the bill if I was sick before 5 to 7 thousand dollars?Would it pay for retests? Cause after the “freebie” was underpaid the doctors always need another retest, guys wouldnt know that if something shows up on a mammogram they want another on your dime. Oh dont go to PP the womens “heath care” clinics subsidized by tax payers you cant get a mammogram there.
I remember employer health insurance a 500 dollar a year family deductible and 30 dollar co-pay They took 80 bucks a paycheck for this skimpy stuff, it paid for surgeries, maternity care, and most tests follow up care of anything the doctor found wrong.
This only covers employers what about the rest of us early retirees ect.
@kitt:
Me, too, but we were told those were “inferior” and, though promised otherwise, they were eliminated. Now, if purchased outright, it’s $2900 a month for two and a $30,000 deductible. Progressive progress!
@Deplorable Bill: Its just another liberal created crisis or pile of oozing muck that they created but do not want fixed. Only the rich can afford to buy their own health insurance, why do they falsely claim to be for the poor or working class, and morons believe them.
@Deplorable Bill, #23:
Exactly. You—and more importantly, employers—will be free to choose cheapo insurance that doesn’t actually provide much of anything other than an illusion of coverage. Or to choose to carry no insurance at all, which republicans have already thoughtfully arranged for by killing off the mandate.
In which case, the taxpayers and those who do carry adequate insurance will be forced to pick up the tab for your uncovered medical costs, in the form of higher medical costs, higher taxes, and higher premiums.
You will be free to become a freeloader, while pretending to be a responsible citizen.
@Greg: The illusion is Obamanocare at its high premiums is health insurance, national average 18,000 dollars before any coverage begins except a few diagnosic tests, who do you think you are kidding? All so those not responsible enough to take care of themselves get coverage too? But to give even crappy affordable catastrophic coverage to a few employer subsidized would be unthinkable, you are cruel, or retarded.
January 23, 2018 — Under Obamacare, Out-Of-Pocket Costs Dropped But Premiums Rose, Study Finds
I should be noted that the program could have become much better, had republicans spent 7 years working to improve it rather than doing everything in their power to sabotage it.
They’ve got absolutely nothing to address any of the problems that the Affordable Care Act set out to remedy. The real-world consequences of that will soon become evident. Millions of voters will understand better what Obamacare was after it and its provisions are gone.
@Greg:
Obamacare IS the illusion of coverage. The high deductibles prevents anyone from using it.
Well, I am old enough to remember that the original focus of Obama’s health care initiative WAS costs because that is what makes health care so expensive. However, after accusing doctors performing unnecessary surgeries. When he started losing the support of the doctors whose support he needed, he turned on the insurance companies.
No, it couldn’t have become better because socialism doesn’t work. The only way to improve it is to get rid of it.
Do you think cheap health insurance has no deductibles? If it didn’t, how could it be so cheap? There would be no profit in selling it.
At some point soon, all of the republican b.s. is going to run headlong into undeniable reality.
@Greg: I know one thing; until I had to buy my own, I NEVER saw a $30,000 deductible while paying $1900 a month (for two people). Now, if I had $30k on hand for medical expenses, I wouldn’t really need insurance.
There is no “profit” to selling insurance. The companies make money by investing the premiums and making money on that. Obamacare allowed the sick to get insurance while the healthy could wait until they were sick to get it, which dried up the investments and drove premiums and deductibles up.
May 24, 2017 — Profits are booming at health insurance companies
November 12, 2017 — Rising Insurer Profits Boost Obamacare’s Long-Term Prospects
@Greg: That was the plan when Obama summoned them to the Whitehouse…duh
@Greg: What was the profit? Just because their financial condition upgraded from “terrible” is not an indication of success.
Let’s see… We’ll get rid of their health insurance, then we’ll cut their food stamps and their kids’ school lunch program. Got to do it, you know, owing to boosted military spending—which includes the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons—and those permanent tax cuts for corporate America and the wealthiest. Especially if we’re going to spend $21.6 billion on a border wall. (Wall supporters apparently need to be informed of the existence of ladders.)
House narrowly approves farm bill that could cut food stamps to millions of low-income Americans
@Greg:
Who is proposing getting rid of health insurance?
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/07/politics/wsj-aca-risk-adjustment/index.html
Remember, voters: the Affordable Care Act isn’t dying because it was doomed to fail from the start. It’s dying because republicans in Congress and the evil fat man in the White House are murdering it. How many times have the bastards stabbed it so far?
How do you like Trump’s trade war? How about his North Korea denuclearization farce? Do you really believe 7 GOP senators just attended a secret meeting in Moscow to scold the Russians about election meddling when Trumpy is about to cozy up with Vlad? Are you really as stupid as you seem?
@James D:
It was cratering long before Trump was elected. If Republican support meant the difference between success or failure, the Democrats should have included them and some of their recommendations instead of shutting them out totally, then expecting them to vote for it.
Just another mess left for Trump to clean up. Like Obama, you believe the United States should be taken advantage of on a regular basis. Trump believes otherwise.
You don’t believe in trying every diplomatic avenue to avoid war? Oh, that’s right… you probably support the “dump pallets of cash on them and hope for the best” method of diplomacy. What we are seeing is a rift between N. Korean leadership and the military. Don’t wish too hard for failure and war; you just might get it.
When has Trump “cozied up” with Putin? Has he promised to give him everything he wants (be “more flexible) after his next election? Did he give Putin free rein to have influence in Syria? Your problem is you can’t recognize leadership when you see it; you’ve been told by your corrupt liberal media that failure is success so much you almost believe it.
@Deplorable Me: A simple yes would have been sufficient.
@James D: A simple answer to my simple question would have been better. How has Trump cozied up to Putin?
Another big step back to the good ol’ days…
August 1, 2018 — Trump Has Brought Back the Kind of Junk Health Insurance That Obamacare Was Meant to Ban
What republicans are doing is incrementally returning the nation to pre-ACA status, without ever bothering to legislate an alternative. All of the original problems that the ACA was designed to remedy will be coming back. Nor will any of this do a thing to control rising healthcare costs. Once again, we’ll have more and more people with no insurance or junk insurance looking to the taxpayers and driving up the premiums of those who are fully insured.
Republicans never have had any actual alternatives that were cheaper, or better, or available to everyone. That was all b.s. Their only real objective has always been to kill the ACA.
@Greg: “Junk policies” is and always was a leftist lie. Those policies covered what the purchasers WANTED them to cover.
What if you are a male or elderly and don’t need mental health or prescription coverage? Why pay for that? Those “one size fits all” policies was a bone thrown at insurance companies, along with promise of ongoing subsidies, to get them to go along with the upcoming disaster that would probably cost them dearly.
HELLO?!? Pre-existing conditions, anyone? There is NO REASON to force people who have no need for certain coverages to PAY for them.
There never WAS incentive. The penalty, to be politically acceptable, was far less than the cost of the insurance. So, far too many opted to pay the penalty than pay $25-30,000 a year for something they didn’t want and, depending on the package they bought, had such an outrageous deductible that they cannot ever even use.
Pre-Obamacare IS the solution. Obamacare essentially RUINED health care. It drove the cost of health care up and it drove the cost of health care insurance up.
Um… you know why? BECAUSE THAT IS NOT THE JOB OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN THE NON-SOCIALIST UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
It needed to be sentenced to death, for crimes against humanity.
We’ll see how the public feels about that when the ACA marketplace is gone, when their coverage can once again be dropped for a variety of arbitrary reasons, when their preexisting conditions once again bar them from getting insurance, when they run up against lifetime coverage limits in the middle of chemotherapy, when they discover that their home states are becoming increasingly restrictive about granting Medicaid coverage, etc.
This will all likely have the same effect on republican popularity as the coming discovery that a good portion of their “tax cut” resulted from an automatic elimination of excess withholding they had at some point imposed upon themselves so as not to owe money at the end of the tax year, or the realization that after a few years their taxes will become even higher than they were before “tax reform.” High income people will continue to benefit, of course, because their cuts were permanent.
Do you think Congress is going to extend cuts for average Americans when the current arrangement will give us trillion-dollar-per-year deficits? I don’t. But I don’t live in a Trump supporter’s fantasy land.
@Greg: Fixing the utter catastrophic failure that was Obamacare will be neither easy nor painless, but the alternative was government run health care (see the VA) or the collapse of the health care system altogether. If you don’t like the solutions, you should be rethinking and reevaluating your support for the Obamacare disaster in the first place.
You can’t say we didn’t warn you. A LOT.
They’re not going to “fix” anything.
If the ACA was doomed to failure on its own, why have the Trump administration and the republican congressional majority had to keep doing their damnedest to kick it to pieces?
These would be the same lying weasels who repeatedly told their gullible supporters that they had something better, cheaper, and available to everybody ready to roll out the moment they had the power to do so.
The real game plan was to kill the ACA and allow things become so screwed up that people would settle for whatever “solution” they eventually came up with. All the while, they could blame Obama. Had they not killed the ACA, they wouldn’t have been able to get away with the deficit-financed cash grab that will now go on until the cookie jar is empty and the government’s borrowing power is permanently exhausted.
@Greg:
All they are doing is stopping the constant flow of subsidies propping the failure of Obamacare up and keeping it on artificial life support. Obamacare will not be costing the American taxpayer $2 trillion dollars to leave 30 million STILL uninsured and with higher insurance and medical costs for everyone else.
You DO know that what we had BEFORE Obamacare was “something better, cheaper, and available to everybody”, don’t you?
It’s kind of funny you put that that way, because that was EXACTLY the purpose Jonathan Gruber, Obama’s adviser (who regards people like you as too stupid to figure this out… yeah, he actually said that) said Obamacare was to serve. It would eliminate the non-taxed health care expense workers enjoyed AND pave the way for single payer when its collapse required a replacement. Isn’t that funny?
@Deplorable Me, #47:
Maybe you did, but 47 million Americans—18 percent of the population—had nothing at all.
By 2016 the number of uninsured Americans had fallen to 27.3 million—8.6 percent of the population. That was the lowest percentage of Americans without health insurance at any time in history. Not only that, but they had good insurance that met ACA standards—not the sort of junk insurance that the Trump administration has just decided should be available to bring down the rapidly rising percentage of uninsured Americans.
You might not have heard, but the number of uninsured Americans has been rapidly climbing again since republicans took charge. The percentage without insurance had jumped from a record low of 8.6 percent to 11.3 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2017. We’re now up to 44 million without insurance. By next year, we could easily surpass the previous 47 million mark.
Remember the republican horse manure about ACA death panels? The reality is that the GOP is effectively going to be killing off people by denying them timely access to health care services.
@Greg:
Was it 47 million? Or was it 30? Or was it 40? Or was it 35? With all the lies the left was circulating about health care, the number kept wandering around. In the end, it was 30 million… the same number that would be without insurance after 10 years and $2 trillion of Obamacare.
But, health care is available to all, through one means or another. However, under Obamacare, people are FORCED to buy insurance that while the premiums were higher than they were before, the DEDUCTIBLES were out of sight. So, in essence, under Obamacare, they are the ones without insurance because they can’t afford to USE it.
That “standard” puts the costs well out of the reach of most Americans. I personally looked into Obamacare to replace the Cobra insurance I was carrying between retirement and turning 65. The cheapest bronze plan for my wife and I was $1900 a month (I was paying $1200 for Blue Cross of Alabama) and a $30,000 deductible (I had $1200 deductible). Gosh, what a bargain. What a golden gift to the American people! I’m glad it’s dying.
But, it is simply one of the many gigantic messes Obama simply made and walked away from.
It depends on what point in time we’re talking about. The Census Bureau’s 2011 Current Population Survey calculated that 49.9 million Americans had had no health insurance in 2010. Such surveys are conducted yearly. 47 million would have been a low estimate.