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UPDATE II: "The basics of Republican health legislation, which haven’t changed much in different iterations of Trumpcare, are easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money thus saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.
Donald Trump may not get this — reporting by The Times and others, combined with his own tweets, suggests that he has no idea what’s in his party’s legislation. But everyone in Congress understands what it’s all about.
The puzzle — and it is a puzzle, even for those who have long since concluded that something is terribly wrong with the modern G.O.P. — is why the party is pushing this harsh, morally indefensible agenda.
Think about it. Losing health coverage is a nightmare, especially if you’re older, have health problems and/or lack the financial resources to cope if illness strikes. And since Americans with those characteristics are precisely the people this legislation effectively targets, tens of millions would soon find themselves living this nightmare.
Meanwhile, taxes that fall mainly on a tiny, wealthy minority would be reduced or eliminated. These cuts would be big in dollar terms, but because the rich are already so rich, the savings would make very little difference to their lives. . .
Why would anyone want to do this? . .
[O]ne way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — because they are.
Yet that’s surely not the whole story, because Obamacare isn’t the only social insurance program that does great good yet faces incessant right-wing attack. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability benefits all get the same treatment. Why?
As with Obamacare, this story began with a politically convenient lie — the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who don’t want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.
Now, this was never true, and in an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern G.O.P. basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reagan-era stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.
Or to put it another way, Republicans start from a sort of baseline of cruelty toward the less fortunate, of hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe.
In this sense there’s nothing new about their health plan. What it does — punish the poor and working class, cut taxes on the rich — is what every major G.O.P. policy proposal does. The only difference is that this time it’s all out in the open."
Read The New York Times, Understanding Republican Cruelty.
UPDATE: The Donald just wants another party in the Rose Garden.
Read the Washington Post, Trump’s latest idea: Senate could repeal Obamacare now and replace it later.
Who cares if people get sick and die, it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).
"President Trump has said his health-care plan will be 'something terrific' that will 'lower premiums and deductibles' and have 'insurance for everybody' without cutting Medicaid.
Senate Republicans, though, apparently didn't get the memo, given that that their health-care bill would break every one of these promises — not that Trump seems to have noticed.
The big picture is that the Senate plan would, over the next decade, cut nearly $1.2 trillion of health- care spending for the poor and middle class to pay for $700 billion in tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The slightly more detailed one being that $408 billion of these cuts would come out of the Affordable Care Act's health insurance subsidies and $772 billion out of Medicaid. In any case, though, the unsurprising result is that spending $1.2 trillion less on health insurance for people would, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, lead to 22 million fewer people having it in 10 years' time.
But even the people who managed to keep their coverage would in a lot of cases end up paying more to get less of it. . .
Trump, though, seems blissfully unaware of all this. He reportedly didn't realize that this plan would be a big tax cut for the rich when a moderate Republican senator worried about getting attacked for it. And he still doesn't seem to grasp that it would be a massive cut to Medicaid. When he was asked about that on Wednesday, all he had to say was that it would be "great for everybody”— something the 15 million people the CBO says would lose their coverage as a result of these cuts would probably disagree with. Instead, he has insisted that these $772 billion in cuts aren't cuts at all. That taking money out of a future budget isn't really taking it out as long as the budget is still getting bigger. That Medicaid will still grow, just by 36 percent less than it would have. It's not a very convincing argument.
At some point, Trump may realize that he is endorsing a health-care plan that may be even harsher than the House one he said was "mean.” But he may not care. Even though this bill wouldn't keep any of his promises, it would give him an excuse to hold another victory party in the Rose Garden. Which may be enough for him.
Trump is going to win so much, you'll get sick from it.
Read the Washington Post, Trump loves the Senate health-care plan. It would break all of his promises.
But who cares, it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).
Read also:
Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition,
Trump's Big CON: "Making Ignorance Great Again",
Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition, Cont., and
Trump's Big CON: It's Not a Health Care Plan, It's a 'Yuge' Tax Cut for the Wealthy.
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