D.O.A.

Trump and Ryan decided to pull the plug on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

I have had my criticisms of it because of how expensive insurance is, but it appears all that is needed is to put in cost controls so that the premiums and the deductibles can actually be affordable.

Even many GOPers decided not to support the mess Trump and Ryan were pushing. It was dead for all intents and purposes.

From the article:

As Ryan and his allies scrambled to convince wary colleagues to back their health care plan, they watched as conservative and moderates in their caucus began to declare their opposition. As defections mounted, Ryan traveled to the White House to reveal to Trump his faltering whip count – and to discuss whether to pull the bill. But the administration seemed intent on proceeding as planned.

“We want the vote," a senior administration official said as Ryan made his way up Pennsylvania Avenue. "If they want to go against the president, they should do it on live TV."

Ultimately, though, Ryan prevailed. Moderate Republicans such as Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Ohio Rep. David Joyce disclosed their opposition even as Ryan was meeting with Trump. It became clear early Friday afternoon that the bill was poised for defeat, as members on the fence broke against it.

Most Republican officials know they are toast if they had repealed it.

Easier Said Than Done, GOP

These idiots want to repeal "Obamacare," but it ain't that easy:

It's Health Care Rationing

Whatever "good" Obamacare is, the fact is people who are not rich are being screwed, just as it was intended to do.

People who don't have health insurance through their employers find they can't afford the monthly premiums.

People who can afford monthly premiums and aren't rich find they can't afford the high deductables.

People who are too poor to buy these lousy plans are forced into Medicaid, whose patients few doctors will take.

It's the same old shit as before Obamacare, only corporate America is getting more rich off of other people's misfortune.

Hardest hit were lower to middle-income adults. That's someone who earned from $16,200 to $29,199 last year, or a family of three earning from $27,400 to $49,499. Almost one out of three of these adults said they went without needed medical care because the out-of-pocket cost was too high.

"The key culprit as to why people have been unable to afford medical care despite having year-round coverage is high deductibles," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA.

A deductible is the amount consumers owe for covered health-care services before their insurance plan begins to pay. The report defines high deductibles as $1,500 or more per person.

The only insurance worth a shit is the platinum type, which cost hundreds of dollars a month but are the only plans that rival large company/public employment plans.

Why the ACA is Awful: Estate "Recovery"

Only if you are 55 and older are you subject to this "estate recovery" bullshit that requires you get inferior coverage through Medicaid but it is only a loan with your estate as collateral.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote about this a year ago, excerpting a piece written by somebody in the know about the "fine print" of the ACA. This time the writer expands on the despicable fine print:

The hard sell is on for states to privatize Medicaid, and many who are forced into Medicaid by Obamacare will also be forced into managed care plans as is the case in Massachusetts. This represents yet another noose around the necks of low-income and poor people since the three payments described above are recoverable from estates.

Once the limited estates of poor and low-income Americans have been taken to reimburse Medicaid, the U.S. will be left with a permanently poorer and more desperate population and will be faced with higher Medicaid costs as there will no longer be any private property to confiscate.

A wet dream for the neolibs.

And this:

Is it fair to impose estate recovery on Medicaid enrollees but not on other subsidy recipients? Is it fair if recovery adheres to the basic requirements in federal statute, but, thereafter, is based on state policy which differs from state to state and, thus, is not applied equally across the nation to all Medicaid enrollees at age 55 and up? Is targeting a specific age group fair? Or legal?

Equal protection is in the Constitution, but ever since the Supreme Court surrendered in the 1930s to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, equal protection has been curtailed in the economic arena. The Supreme Court, unwilling to face down a President asserting previously unknown executive power, accepted the violation of the 14th Amendment in economic legislation in order to avoid being packed with FDR yes-men.

Obamacare was not written for the benefit of the poor and uninsured. It was written for the profits of the insurance companies giving them millions of new customers subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. The business of America is business. Private insurance company CEOs receive multi-million dollar pay packages, while under Obamacare low-income earners and the poor have to give up their homes and other assets in order to receive medical care.

Where are the lawsuits against this disparate treatment?

The one good thing here is Oregon did decide to get rid of "estate recovery" for Medicaid patients unless they received long-term care as in nursing home care. The state did this last fall.

That's good to know.

Obamacare is Junk

People will soon find that out when they can't afford to pay for the "affordable" insurance premiums or when they can't afford the out-of-pocket costs thanks to sky-high deductibles. There are no cost controls, either.

The health insurance industry, one that shouldn't even exist in the first place, wants people to purchase the worthless bronze plans to further increase their obscene profits.

Meanwhile, corporations all over the country will be gutting their health plans entirely for their workers, dumping these people onto the "exchanges" they cannot afford to pay for or to use.

This is nothing more than mass murder as far as I am concerned:

Private insurance companies are charging steep premiums on the Obamacare exchanges—some 30 percent higher than in the present individual market.

The least expensive “bronze” plans carry deductibles as high as $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for families, which must be paid in full before most coverage kicks in.

A large percentage of bronze plans require full payment of the deductible before they cover many doctor visits, including for the flu, childhood illnesses or treatment for injuries.

Co-payments for doctor visits average $41 for bronze plans, compared to $28 in the current individual market.

Many bronze plans require cost sharing of as much as 40 percent of the price of some prescription medications. Many expensive drugs are not covered at all because they are not included in plans’ drug formularies.

Insurers are significantly limiting the choice of doctors and hospitals available on their plans; in many states, only one or two hospitals are included in the Obamacare networks.

It took a "Democrat" to push such horseshit.

This New Year? Same As the Old One. We Are Screwed.

Obamacare has so many things wrong with it, which, to get to the bottom of it, is what happens when you have Wall Street and corporate interests calling the shots, even and especially with alleged "Democrats" like this disaster we have in the White House.

The private system truly doesn't work when it comes to health insurance and even health care. We KNOW it doesn't work when it comes to education, but Obama is a neolib or "economic libertarian," so it shouldn't surprise anybody his policies are shit.

What we now call Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor. The president took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and just improved some of its provisions. In effect, the president was simply trying to put lipstick on the dog in the carrier on top of Mitt Romney’s car. And we knew it.

By 2017, we will be funneling over $100 billion annually to private insurance companies. You can be sure they’ll use some of that to try to privatize Medicare.

Sure, they are going to try and repeal Medicare even when the reason Medicare was created in the first place was because seniors couldn't get affordable health care, let alone insurance, because they happen to have health problems, just like old cars are more likely to have mechanical problems.

When you have too many miles on you, you fall apart, and you need an affordable mechanic to be able to fix you up again.

Privatizing Medicare would be a license to kill. Period.

It's Nothing But Corporate Welfare

But then again I never had high expectations of Obama when he got inaugurated. I knew what he was, but he exceeded my low expectations by being even worse. His education policies made him the shittiest president in American history in my book, so he had no way to go but up.

This guy, who isn't very smart but thinks he is, spent all of his time working on a monstrosity of a health insurance exchange system instead of focusing purely on jobs and the economy. A real Democrat would have done it but not Barack Obama. It was whatever his buddies on Wall Street and the neoliberal think tank policy makers wanted.

Snip:

The fallout over the administration’s misinformation regarding the individual insurance market is only the tip of the iceberg. Beyond this relatively small market are the 170 million Americans who are presently enrolled in health care plans through their employers. The health care overhaul has been devised as a means of dismantling this employer-based system, which for decades provided a basic level of health insurance for tens of millions of workers in the US.

Companies have already shifted their retirees off of company-administered health plans and onto privately run health care exchanges that offer plans with few benefits and large out-of-pocket expenses. City and state governments are also moving to shift their retirees, and in some cases their active employees, off of municipally funded benefits and onto privately run exchanges or directly onto the Obamacare exchanges.

Nobody really puts up a fight on this. This turns out to be health care rationing by default. Nobody says a goddamned word about it.

It's Turning Into OBOMBacare

It's bad enough the website has turned into a colossal mess, but people are starting to get the sticker shock of rising premiums and deductables on inferior policies.

I have said that the ultimate goal of ACA was to encourage corporations to abolish health insurance plans for their employees. It dovetails perfectly with the sociopathic neoliberalism beloved by both political parties.

Five years from now, the only employers who will have health insurance benefits at all for employees will be unionized private employees and those who public employees. It's going to be the same situation as the catastrophe with gutting pensions.

It's all about corporate welfare for Obama and Congress. Neither gives a shit whether people can afford health insurance anymore.

The Unaffordable Care Act

Millions upon millions of poor people will fall through the cracks and remain uninsured thanks to some states not expanding Medicaid.

If you're over 55 it's nothing but a loan anyway, for it has to be paid back at least in part when you die.

More is here:

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”

It isn't ironical--these states don't want to pay for it.

Tens of millions more won't be able to be insured anyway thanks to the "exchanges" being outrageously expensive and laughably inferior to company-paid plans, plans that are likely to be a thing of the past when corporations get done with strongarming Congress to put in loopholes. Right now companies with 50 or more employees HAVE to provide health insurance, but you know that will change.

PPACA = Corporate Welfare

Of course Democrats will suffer as a result of this catastrophe called "health care reform," which is anything but. The GOP secretly supports it, too, since it enriches the health insurance industry further and the whole idea was far right to begin with, but they know a good political football when they see it.

The income limits, with no real sliding scale, are pathetically low for the "exchanges," so nobody will be able to afford to buy or use it. If you are forced on Medicaid, you won't be able to find a primary physician because doctors won't treat Medicaid patients, plus you can forget your heirs ever getting anything from your estate if you use Medicaid and are over 55. Those who can't get either will be forced into unaffordable private plans or pay the tax penalty.

As I have said, there will be pressure on our worthless public officials to create loopholes so corporations will get out of providing group coverage, by far the cheapest insurance for Americans. In absence of single-payer, this would be a complete and total disaster. There will be pressure to destroy Medicare and force seniors into these "exchanges" or Medicaid, thus more deaths will result from no medical care.

This ACA will be such a monumental failure, the chances this country EVER sees single payer will be virtually nil.

Frontline discussed the corrupt backroom deals on this legislation a couple of years ago.

ACA ISN'T "Government Takeover" of Health Care but Health Insurance Companies Calling the Shots

From nearly a year ago is this article which states just how terrible the ACA is going to be for those forced into it but great for Wall Street and the health insurance industry.

Somebody WILL benefit after all--it just won't be us peons.

Obamacare merely shuffles the chairs on this Titanic of a health care system.

While it is positive that the PPACA requires coverage of people with pre-existing conditions and prohibits lifetime caps, it can’t control what people pay for insurance, because it doesn’t limit actual premiums, which have risen 13% on average since the Act was passed.

The medical cost ratio limitation the PPACA instills; that 80% of premiums must be used for medical care in the case of individuals and small groups, and 85% in the case of large groups) to supposedly ensure companies operate on a more efficient premium in vs. premium out basis, is a joke. Its punch line is accounting manipulation. Call everything a medical cost; even buying another company, and the ratio is meaningless.

"Affordable" is the last thing this act is.

It's a Mess

Take a look at this piece from February by Paul Craig Roberts, who wrote about the details of Obamacare, and it ain't pretty.

Bottom line is you will get nothing regardless of where you end up unless you have Medicare or employer-paid insurance, both of which are endangered by this scam.

Is the ACA a fair law if it helps only one small segment of the population but hurts and exploits a larger number to do so? The way this law works is fundamentally unfair and will not bring medical care to the many, but, instead will progress to greater personal debt for individuals and families who can’t afford the “affordable” insurance as well as those who must keep an eye on their income to avoid the many traps and false ends this law creates. At their expense, the forced purchase of health insurance will bring increased revenue to the industry, not to mention more kickbacks to Congress, and in the very near future, the health insurance industry will be “too big to fail.”

The ACA is most definitely a “uniquely American solution” which has little to do with reforming this country’s barbaric health care system. It merely controls peoples’ finances and choices while leaving insurance companies in charge and does virtually nothing to end their abuses. It will leave many millions of Americans uninsured and millions more underinsured at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

Politicians, health care policy wonks and vested interests will brush aside the ACA’s adverse effects. You’ll hear that some have fallen through the cracks of health care reform but the problems can be easily tweaked. You will also witness the usual dog-and-pony show on Capitol Hill in which the two parties play the blame game. The bought-and-paid-for mainstream media will regurgitate whatever Washington feeds it, and TV talking heads will chime in, inviting their “experts” to analyze the situation while real people in the real world struggle to get by under this law or fall by the wayside.

It's gonna be worse than we thought.

"Affordable" Care Act: It's All About the Profits, NOT People

I have never thought unlike many people Obamacare would be a step in the right direction toward a system of single-payer health insurance. In fact, the likely effect will be the eventual elimination of ALL employer-paid health insurance when the business lobbyists get through with the Washington politicians they own to provide loopholes so they can get rid of their plans.

Neoliberals like Obama don't believe companies should pay for ANYTHING on behalf of their workers, whether it is pensions, health insurance, Social Security taxes, or unemployment insurance, as all of those benefits/taxes "interfere" with businesses' right to make even more money.

The sticker shock over Obamacare is going to be something when the thing finally kicks in:

In reality, many uninsured people who begin to shop for health care coverage on the exchanges will be in for a rude shock. The preponderance of “affordable” coverage will consist of cut-rate plans that leave the insured responsible for a considerable proportion of the costs.

Premiums will vary widely from state to state and many plans with lower premiums will significantly limit the choice of doctors and hospitals. With few exceptions, individuals and families that do not receive insurance through an employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid will be required to obtain insurance or pay a fine.

Consumers shopping on the exchanges will be presented with a confusing selection of plans to choose from. All of the coverage is offered by private insurance companies that have tailored policies to suit their profit interests. They are banking on a substantial number of young, healthy people signing up for coverage to offset costs associated with requirements that sicker individuals or those with pre-existing conditions not be charged higher premiums or turned away. If adequate numbers of young and relatively healthy people do not sign up, premiums are sure to rise.

Of course. This is what happens when medical care is seen as a privilege and not a right. There should be NO profit involved.

Unfortunately, other non-profit sectors are being pressured into for-profit models (example: public education). It is far more likely Medicare will be done away with and seniors dumped into this godawful "exchange" system than we EVER get the profit motive out of health care, let alone single-payer health insurance.

If you are single and without dependents and don't have employer-paid health insurance, you get the shaft the very worst of all. You have to buy insurance outside of these "exchanges" if you make over a middling amount of money, something like over 40k, which is NOT "big money" at all but barely enough to survive with a tiny bit of money left over unless you live in the deep South or in the Midwest. You will have to go without since private health insurance is scandalously overpriced. If you make between the very low poverty level and the low 40s, you are forced to buy from these "exchanges" in plans you can't afford despite those "subsidies." If you are below the poverty line, there is Medicaid, but it is little more than a loan that must be paid back in "estate recovery" as noted here and where many doctors refuse Medicaid patients.

ACA, like Obama's education policies, is a fucking disaster waiting to happen.

ObamaDon'tCare is a good name for it.

You Know Good and Well What Will Happen When Obamacare Takes Hold

It's pretty obvious, and I am sure it is the reason why Obamacare was pushed in the first place, and that is there will be no more company-paid insurance plans, just as companies ditched pension plans in favor of garbage 401(k)s because of federal government loopholes.

In five years, company-paid health plans will go the way of the dodo bird, except for government employment and a few unionized companies in the private sector.

It's all according to plan. Keep on shifting the costs and risks onto workers and line those pockets of the top 1 percent or, more accurately, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Robert Reich Called It Right

He said the USSC would uphold the "individual mandate" of Obama's "Affordable" Care Act, and that is exactly what happened.

Strangely enough, Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the majority. The vote was 5-4.

The mandate’s advocates said it was necessary to ensure that not only sick people but also healthy individuals would sign up for coverage, keeping insurance premiums more affordable. The law offers subsidies to poorer and middle-class households, varying with their incomes. It also provides subsidies to some businesses for insuring their workers.

The law requires states to expand Medicaid coverage for poor and nearly poor households. In all, tens of millions of people are expected to gain insurance from the law, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as part of a march toward universal coverage, a goal that has eluded legislators and presidents – including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton – for generations.

The decision came on the last day of the term, which the justices extended by three days to deal with the crush of major issues. On Monday, the court delivered a mixed ruling on an Arizona law intended to crack down on illegal immigrants, which the Obama administration opposed.

Here is the decision in case people care to read it.