"The Senate plan, like the Republican, takes its cue
from the central features of Obamacare, which cuts
costs for the government and corporations while
rationing and degrading health care for the vast
majority of Americans."
from the central features of Obamacare, which cuts
costs for the government and corporations while
rationing and degrading health care for the vast
majority of Americans."
US Senate health bill drafted in secrecy: A conspiracy against the
health care of millions
By Kate Randall
16 June 2017
16 June 2017
The US
Senate is moving forward with its drafting of legislation to repeal and replace
the Affordable Care Act (ACA) behind closed doors. Little information has been
revealed about the contents of the bill being drawn up by the Senate’s
13-member “working group,” aside from several leaks to the media.
Senate
Republicans plan to bring the legislation to a floor vote without a single
committee hearing, and without a formal, open drafting session. They hope to
pass the bill by an expedited reconciliation procedure, which requires only a
simple majority and avoids the possibility of a filibuster by Senate Democrats.
Only a small group of senators know what is in the bill. Those
being kept in the dark include not only Democrats, but Republicans who are not
in the working group. An aide to one of those senators in the group told Axios that
no draft would released because “we aren’t stupid,” an apparent allusion to the
draconian features contained within it, including the gutting of Medicaid and
its attack on the health care of millions of poor, older and sick Americans.
The apparent
plan is to send the finalized Senate bill to the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) for scoring before it is then released to the press and the public, with
a goal of a vote on the Senate floor before July 4.
The House
Republicans’ bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), is deeply unpopular.
Recent Public Policy Polling shows that only 24 percent of voters support the
AHCA and 55 percent oppose it. Senate Republicans are well aware that a bill
that bears any resemblance to the AHCA will face similar public opposition.
The secrecy surrounding the bill has been bolstered by a
significant curtailing of on-camera interviews within the Capitol. According to
the Washington Post, the prohibition of televised interviews was
issued Tuesday at the point when senators were reportedly going to be informed
about some of the features of the bill at a luncheon on Capitol Hill. The
prohibition apparently came from the Senate Rules Committee.
At a closed-door
White House lunch Tuesday with 15 Republican senators, President Trump
reportedly referred to the House plan as “mean,” and according to sources said
he wants the Senate version to be “more generous.” This seemingly bizarre
statement by Trump—after praising the AHCA as “a great plan” at a White House
Rose Garden celebration last month—is an indication of the perceived
unpopularity of the Republicans’ planned “repeal and replace” of the bill
popularly known as Obamacare.
The ACHA
builds on the free-market foundations of the ACA, which gives the for-profit
health care industry free rein to charge as they see fit for premiums and to
pull out of markets that they find unprofitable. As a former Medicare
administrator in the Obama administrator admitted recently about the ACA, “We
elected to have a system that is completely market-based so companies get to
make individual decisions.”
The Senate
plan, like the Republican, takes
its cue from the central features of
Obamacare, which cuts costs for the
government and corporations while rationing
and degrading health care for the vast
majority of Americans.
The gutting of Medicaid
The biggest
change in the AHCA is the gutting of Medicaid, the health care program jointly
administered by the federal government and the states. The CBO estimates that
the AHCA would cause 23 million people to lose health insurance by 2026, mainly
because the House bill would effectively end the ACA’s Medicaid expansion for
low-income adults.
The Senate
plan reportedly maintains the AHCA’s per capita cap or block granting of
federal Medicaid funds, which would effectively end Medicaid as a guaranteed
program based on need. It would also put an end to the expansion of Medicaid
under the ACA, but would allow a longer phase-out of the expansion, possibly up
to seven years, i.e., prescribing a slow death as opposed to the House plan’s
quicker demise.
According to
a new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), coverage
losses under the AHCA would affect people of all ages and income levels,
including families with children, seniors, and people with disabilities. It
would also sharply cut government subsidies for individual market coverage, and
allow insurers to charge sharply higher premiums to people with preexisting
conditions.
About 3
million children would lose coverage, CBPP says, increasing the uninsured rate
for children by about 50 percent. Another 6.4 million young adults (age 19-29)
would lose coverage, or about one in eight people in this age group. This runs
counter to claims that the House bill would favor younger, healthy people.
More than 8
million people, age 39-40, would lose coverage, increasing their uninsured rate
by a staggering 84 percent. About one in five of this age group would be
uninsured, compared to one in 10 under current law, according to CBPP.
The
uninsured rate for older adults (age 50-
64) would more than double under the
AHCA,
reflecting the fact that the bill would allow
individual market insurers
to charge older
people premiums five times higher than for
younger people.
While the Senate plan reportedly will offer some additional premium assistance
to this age group, it will be inadequate to make a significant difference.
The majority
of those losing coverage under the AHCA would have low incomes. Some 14.7
million adults with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level (about
$50,000 for a family of four) would become uninsured. But 5.1 million adults
with incomes above 200 percent of the poverty level would also lose coverage.
Preexisting conditions
While Trump
has claimed that people with preexisting conditions would be “taken care of”
under any final Republican health care bill, this is not the case. The Senate
bill, unlike the AHCA, would not allow states to obtain waivers to deny
coverage to people with preexisting conditions. However, it would maintain the
AHCA provision allowing states to waive coverage of essential health benefits.
Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the Center for
American Progress, writes in the Washington Post that
maintaining the waivers for essential benefits will have the effect of denying
coverage for people with preexisting conditions.
Allowing
states to ditch coverage of essential services such as hospitalization, and
emergency care, maternity care, substance abuse treatment, mental health care
and prescriptions drugs would also allow waivers of the ACA’s ban on lifetime
and annual limits on coverage related to the essential health benefits.
Also, Spiro
notes, if insurers cannot markup premiums for people with preexisting
conditions, they could alter their benefits packages to screen out sick people
by excluding the benefits they need. The list of possible benefits they could
drop from coverage is vast, including treatments for cancer, diabetes and heart
conditions. Simply being a woman puts a person at a disadvantage, as prenatal
and maternity care, contraception and abortion services could be excluded.
According to
the CBO, about 19 million people are enrolled in the individual market
nationwide, and about half of them live in states that would seek essential
benefits waivers. As about 55 percent of individual market enrollees have a
preexisting condition, this means about 5.3 million people with preexisting
conditions could see their coverage severely deteriorate and their premiums
skyrocket.
While
Congressional Democrats have made some noise about the secrecy surrounding the
Senate deliberations on the health care bill, there has been virtually no
comment on the reactionary content of the legislation.
As their
attention is focused on the Trump-Russia connection and investigation of the
president on obstruction of justice, there is general disinterest by
politicians of both big business parties in legislation that will eviscerate
Medicaid and leave 23 million more people uninsured and at the mercy of the
health care giants and their profits, leading to unnecessary suffering and
increased deaths.
Jacob Leibenluft of CBPP commented in an interview in the Post on
the lack of congressional hearings and coverage in the media on the Senate
bill, “I hate to think that looking back on this period, we’ll realize that the
most regressive piece of social legislation in modern American history was
passed, and no one was paying attention.”
HEROIN: are you addicted
yet? 1 in 7 Legals are!
Mexico’s Gift to
Occupied Aztlan America!
The LA RAZA drug cartels
haul back $40 - $60 BILLION from heroin sales.
TRUMP VOWS
TO BLUDGEON MEDICAID AND SOCIAL SECURITY
TO OFFSET TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH
…. AND THE “WALL” WITH
NARCOMEX…. WILL ONLY BE A
“NO TRESPASSING” SIGN
POSTED EVERY 100 OR SO MILES.
CUT MEDICAID AND SOCIAL SECURITY TO FINANCE TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERnomics: America’s Road to REVOLUTION
….. but will they finish off the
American middle-class first???
“The Tax Policy Center finds
that for the top 0.1 percent of
income earners—those making more than $3.75 million
annually—repealing this investment tax would amount to an
average tax cut of $165,090.”
income earners—those making more than $3.75 million
annually—repealing this investment tax would amount to an
average tax cut of $165,090.”
….. the American Middle-Class at death’s door and knocking ….
Have you notice Democrat Party politicians always keep their fat mouths
closed tight on the topic of the Mexican drug cartels operating across
America???
THE DEATH OF AMERICA: MEXICO SERVES
UP THE HEROIN.
The death toll translates into an
average of one fatal overdose every 12 hours in the state of West Virginia.
THE DEATH of WHITE AMERICA
“Whites had the highest rate of
overdose deaths of any ethnicity, more than double the combined death rate for
blacks and Latinos.”
MEDICAID SLASHED!
TRUMPERNOMICS: IMPLEMENTING SEVERE
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH!
“The Republican proposal builds on the
core features of Obamacare, designed to boost the profits of the private
insurers and slash health care costs for the government and big business.”
“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare
benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty
would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert
Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart
News.”
THE LEGACY OF
BARACK OBAMA:
Final Death of the American White Middle Class
Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level.
Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts
of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the Brookings
Institution.
THE OBAMA BOOK DEAL: Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5
million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made
to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s
geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the wages,
benefits and living standards of the working class.
Plenty of money for ILLEGALS……AMERICA’S
OPEN BORDERS
HOMELESS ELDERLY
in AMERICA UNDER MEX OCCUPATION
A Nation dies young, poor, addicted
and homeless…. It’s the American dream as the rich get super rich!
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the number
of elderly persons who are homeless in the US will have doubled by 2050.
America’s Super-rich Live 15 Years Longer!
………….. America’s Bludgeoned Middle-Class Dies Young, Addicted and Poor!
WE ARE MEXICO'S WELFARE SYSTEM …. is it yet time we started
helping our own???
.... A Glimpse...
$640,000 and breeding anchor babies like bunnies
MURDER, RAPE, LOOT and VOTE DEM FOR MORE!
EACH ILLEGAL WILL COST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
$640,000 and then they go breed anchor babies for more!
$640,000 and then they go breed anchor babies for more!
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