Month: June 2017

Work the eye
by Tom Sullivan

Anthony Cordero at Muay Thai Championship Boxing Match. Photo by David Maiolo via Creative Commons.

There is safety in numbers, Republicans found yesterday. The Congressional Budget Office assessment late Monday that the GOP Senate’s “Better” Obamacare replacement plan would take coverage from 22 million Americans allowed Republican lawmakers skittish about the bill’s unpopularity to excuse themselves from voting for it. Now it wasn’t only Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Dean Heller (Nevada). More of their colleagues joined them, bringing the “no” count to nine. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell beat a strategic retreat, announcing he would delay any vote until after the July 4th recess.

Despite having run on repealing Obamacare, the New York Times reports President Trump appeared neither to care one way or another nor to understand what is actually in the bill:

Until Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, Mr. Trump had spoken with only a few members of the Senate, according to an administration official. The pace was nothing like the dozens of calls he made to help pass the House’s health bill, aides said.

A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.

Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.

“Obamacare is a total disaster. It’s melting down as we speak,” Trump again told Republican leaders gathered at the White House. Nevertheless, he continued, “This will be great if we get it done. And if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like. And that’s okay, and I understand that very well.”

With that kind of enthusiasm, Trump-the-Closer won’t even win the set of steak knives for his well-done meat.

Everyone continually repeats this idea that GOP base will punish Rs for failing to pass health bill.

But is this really true?— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 28, 2017

But Mitch McConnell is a closer and he’ll be back after the recess. More time “could be good and it could be bad,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) told reporters. Slate’s Jim Newell paints the outlines of a post-recess agreement:

Take the concerns of two moderate holdouts. Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia released a joint statement after the vote was delayed demanding changes. “The Senate draft before us includes some promising changes to reduce premiums in the individual insurance market,” Portman’s statement read, “but I continue to have real concerns about the Medicaid policies in this bill, especially those that impact drug treatment at a time when Ohio is facing an opioid epidemic.” Moore had similar concerns, arguing that the bill “as drafted” does “not ensure access to affordable health care in West Virginia, does not do enough to combat the opioid epidemic that is devastating my state, cuts traditional Medicaid too deeply, and harms rural health care providers.”

If only there was some massive pool of money out there that could alleviate some of their fears. Indeed, there is! The CBO found that the bill would save the government $321 billion—or $188 billion more than budget rules require it to save. One might read Portman and Capito’s statements as asking that all of that money be used to soften the long-term Medicaid cuts and significantly increase the funds available to combat the opioid crisis.

The conservative holdouts, meanwhile, could be granted more of the market reforms they want—like, say, state waivers for the Affordable Care Act’s community rating rules, which bar insurers from charging sicker people more. “We can rewrite our bill to bring down the price working families pay for health insurance—while still protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions,” Sen. Mike Lee said in a statement. In other words: Deregulate, and allow those with pre-existing conditions to take their rightful place in high-risk pools.

There is still plenty of spreading-around money McConnell can and will deploy, and more room in which to wiggle.

The Denver Post reports:

Organizers at numerous “Resistance” groups, chastened by their premature celebrations after the House’s repeal push seemed to stall, said that they’d use the recess to ramp up public pressure on Republicans. CREDO Action, which had organized 45,000 phone calls to Senate offices, planned to increase that number when senators went home. NARAL, Planned Parenthood, MoveOn and Daily Action were organizing their own phone banks, while Indivisible groups were organizing visits – and perhaps sit-ins – at local offices.

All of that would supplement under-the-radar but attention-grabbing TV ad campaigns from AARP, Protect Our Care and other progressive and industry groups. The goal, said activists, is to educate voters and break through to local media, which had not often put the development of the Senate bill on front pages or newscasts.

The Obamacare repeal has been cut over the eye. Don’t let your guard down. Keep punching and work the eye.

THIS is actually fake news. Seriously fake. Totally.

by digby

David Fahrenholdt does it again:

The framed copy of Time Magazine was hung up in at least four of President Trump’s golf clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

But that wasn’t true.

The Time cover is a fake.

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

In fact,the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.

And it has two exclamation points. Time headlines don’t yell.

“I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

Keep in mind that Trump has been so obsessed with some nonsense from well known hoaxster and fraud James O’Keefe and CNN firing three reporters after they retracted a story that his staff didn’t even bother to tell him what they were doing about a Syrian gas attack. His press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke of almost nothing else in today’s press briefing as well.

This isn’t Trump’s first fake magazine cover controversy. Remember this?

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Donald Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it

He also, you’ll recall, had a couple of fake identities he used to use to call up members of the press and pretend that he was his own press agent.

He’s got a problem. And he’s had it for a long time.

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Lies, lies, lies

by digby

I wrote about the GOP lies about Trumpcare for Salon this morning:

Yesterday, when the CBO dropped its expected bombshell report showing that the Senate version of the bill was even worse in some ways than the House bill, I couldn’t help but think of this:

“But you said it wouldn’t pass the Senate.” pic.twitter.com/Iq56xZgkDS

— Benjamin Siemon (@BenjaminJS) May 4, 2017

We will know soon enough. The target date for a Senate vote remains Thursday of this week and then a quick getaway to hide their heads in shame. As I write this we have a few GOP Senators from the different factions of the party saying they won’t vote for it without changes. It’s either too harsh or not harsh enough or it’s moving to fast or the process was improper. McConnell still has some cards to play and some money to give away so we’ll see how all that unfolds.

This is a ghastly piece of legislation. Indeed, it’s so appalling that some people suspect that Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell planned for it not to pass just so that he could say he tried and then get it off his agenda. (I don’t think that’s true and in fact he probably floated that idea himself just in case this thing blows up.)
He couldn’t have made it any worse if he tried.

That hasn’t stopped the Republicans from defending it. Indeed, a few of them went out over the week-end and appeared on various news programs making the only defense possible: they lied.

Kellyanne Conway is a professional spin artist who has had no trouble transitioning to outright dishonesty in her new job. She was smooth a silk on ABC’s This Week claiming there are absolutely no cuts to Medicaid and that furthermore, if able-bodied people are kicked off the rolls they will just get a job that has employer sponsored health insurance like she has. Of course 80 percent of Medicaid households do have someone who works at a job that doesn’t provide benefits — which Conway would be the first to defend as the God-given right of any employer. And the vast majority of Medicaid patients who aren’t working can’t work, such as the elderly in nursing homes. Sixty four percent of them nationwide are covered by Medicaid.

Her rationale for this insistence that Medicaid wasn’t being cut is that it they aren’t cutting the budget, merely slowing its growth. This explanation was also taken up by President George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer who tiresomely insisted on twitter that you can’t call it a cut when the future budget simply isn’t as much as promised:

Your salary today is $50k. Your boss promises it will be $100k in 10 years. Instead, u get $75k. Did you get a $25k raise or a $25k cut?

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) June 26, 2017

This is fatuous nonsense as the Washington Post explained:

Spending “always goes up” in Washington in part because of this little thing called inflation — as prices go up, government spending has to increase, too, just to keep up.

Fortunately, the CBO’s scorecard of the bill has been released to help clarify the waters that GOP allies are so diligently muddying. That report is crystal clear: Between now and 2026, the GOP Senate health-care plan would carve out “a reduction of $772 billion in federal outlays for Medicaid.”

Senator Susan Collins didn’t try to sugar coat the problem, saying

“I’m very concerned about … the impact of the Medicaid cuts on our state governments, the most vulnerable people in our society, and health care providers such as our rural hospitals and nursing home, most of whom are very dependent on the Medicaid program … given the inflation rate that would be applied in the outer years to the Medicaid program, the Senate bill is going to have more impact on the Medicaid program than even the House bill.”

Conway and Fleischer may actually more honest than Health and Human services secretary Tom Price who declared on CNN, ”We will not have individuals lose coverage.” In a way, he’s right. They won’t lose coverage, it is being taken from them so that Republicans can give tax breaks to their rich friends. To put it another way, the tax cuts that 400 wealthy families get from the Senate bill equals the Medicaid expansion for more than 700,000 people.

Former Club for Growth president and current Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey went  on Face the Nation insisting that “no one will lose coverage” if they’re on Medicaid and Senator Ron Johnson appeared on Meet the Press and compared people with pre-existing conditions to someone with a bad driving record who has to pay more. Evidently, if you don’t have a lot of money you should be very careful that you don’t recklessly go out and get cancer.

Johnson, at least, has the excuse that he just really doesn’t understand anything. Majority whip John Cornyn of Texas understands very well what he’s doing. He tweeted this yesterday:

28 million uninsured under Obamacare

— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 26, 2017

This one’s not a lie. It’s true that in 2026 under Obamacare it’s projected that 28 million will still be uninsured. He just leaves out the punchline — the same projections say that if this Senate plan were to take effect, the number of uninsured would be almost 50 million people. 

The leading defenders of this grotesque bill are willing to dissemble, obfuscate and blatantly lie to the public about what is in it. They have no choice. It’s indefensible on the merits. But I have to say, the fact that there are only a small handful of Republican Senators even prepared to make some phony noises against it says everything you need to know about the moral rot at the heart of this Republican majority.

Graham on Healthcare
“Here’s what I would tell any senator, if you’re counting on the President to have your back, you need to watch it.”

— Lauren Fox (@FoxReports) June 26, 2017

Joan Walsh

Ari Fleischer

What a morning

by digby

It was a wild ride but they delayed the Senate Trumpcare vote until after the July 4th recess. I hope every one of us finds a way to get out there and get in their faces about this.  They should go back to Washington knowing in no uncertain terms that they will be labeled monsters forever if they do this thing.

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Health care is a human right

by digby

If you’re feeling freaked out by this health care mess, watch this video and listen to the voice of John Lewis:

This was an unusual event, haunting and intimate and very effective. I don’t know if we’ll win this one but these politicians should be applauded for making the case for decency and humanity.

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Hated superpower. What could go wrong?

by digby

Yeah, he’s really made the world respect us:

“Although he has only been in office a few months, Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations. According to a new Pew Research Center survey spanning 37 nations, a median of just 22% has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs.”

“This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64% expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.”

The sharp decline in how much global publics trust the U.S. president on the world stage is especially pronounced among some of America’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Canada. Across the 37 nations polled, Trump gets higher marks than Obama in only two countries: Russia and Israel.

In countries where confidence in the U.S. president fell most, America’s overall image has also tended to suffer more. In the closing years of the Obama presidency, a median of 64% had a positive view of the U.S. Today, just 49% are favorably inclined toward America. Again, some of the steepest declines in U.S. image are found among long-standing allies.

Since 2002, when Pew Research Center first asked about America’s image abroad, favorable opinion of the U.S. has frequently tracked with confidence in the country’s president. Prior to this spring, one of the biggest shifts in attitudes toward the U.S. occurred with the change from George W. Bush’s administration to Obama’s. At that time, positive views of the U.S. climbed in Europe and other regions, as did trust in how the new president would handle world affairs.

The rest of the world is worried, as it should be:

Confidence in President Trump is influenced by reactions to both his policies and his character. With regard to the former, some of his signature policy initiatives are widely opposed around the globe.

His plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, is opposed by a median of 76% across the 37 countries surveyed. Opposition is especially intense in Mexico, where more than nine-in-ten (94%) oppose the U.S. government erecting a wall.

Similar levels of global opposition greet Trump’s policy stances on withdrawing from international trade agreements and climate change accords. And most across the nations surveyed also disapprove of the new administration’s efforts to restrict entry into the U.S. by people from certain Muslim-majority nations.

Trump’s intention to back away from the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran meets less opposition than his other policy initiatives, but even here publics around the world disapprove of such an action by a wide margin.

Trump’s character is also a factor in how he is viewed abroad. In the eyes of most people surveyed around the world, the White House’s new occupant is arrogant, intolerant and even dangerous. Among the positive characteristics tested, his highest rating is for being a strong leader. Fewer believe he is charismatic, well-qualified or cares about ordinary people.

They’ll soon realize he’s not a “strong leader” either. He couldn’t lead Barron’s boy scout troop. But because he bellows like Mussolini they think “strong.” In truth the only thing anyone takes seriously about him is that he’s dangerous — like a toddler sitting next to a gas can playing with matches.

The world doesn’t hate all of us quite as much, but if we keep these lunatics in power that won’t last:

While the new U.S. president is viewed with doubt and apprehension in many countries, America’s overall image benefits from a substantial reservoir of goodwill. The American people, for instance, continue to be well-regarded – across the 37 nations polled, a median of 58% say they have a favorable opinion of Americans. U.S. popular culture, likewise, has maintained appeal abroad, and many people overseas still believe Washington respects the personal freedoms of its people.

That remains to be seen.

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Cruel and senseless
by Tom Sullivan

Story link here.

Health care is personal, intensely personal, I wrote two weeks ago. I have several friends fighting cancer. If you don’t, you will. Two of them made their stories public in the last 24 hours.

Laura Packard, 41, is in chemotherapy. Self-employed, single, and an Obamacare patient, Packard found out she had stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma just months ago. Even at that stage it has a 90 percent cure rate, her oncologist tells her. That is, if Republicans in Congress don’t take away her insurance. She writes at U.S. News & World Report:

The various versions of health care reform being discussed in Washington D.C. terrify me and my new cancer friends. (Cancer is the shittiest fraternity, with the best members; everyone that I have met over the past couple months has been unbelievably kind.)

Getting rid of lifetime and/or annual limits? That means many of us will die when we hit those caps and can no longer afford treatment. Getting rid of pre-existing condition protections? Many of us will die, because we won’t be insurable anymore. Allowing insurers to remove essential health benefits (such as chemotherapy, or hospitalization, or many of the drugs we need to stay alive) means many of us will die, because our insurance won’t cover our treatment anymore.

This is not an academic question for me, because I am undergoing chemotherapy right now. I may need radiation after, or if this fails, immunotherapy. Will I be able to get affordable insurance next year, or will I die?

Joel Silberman, 68, can fight his stage 2 pancreatic cancer because, thanks to Medicare and marriage equality, his spouse’s Government Employee Health Association group plan provides secondary insurance that will allow him to fight his illness without wiping out their savings. He writes:

A Congressional Budget Office report released today reveals just how lucky I am to be covered by my husband’s plan; 22 million more Americans could go uninsured should the Republican-backed American Health Care Act pass.

Many, many, people were responsible for equality that saved my life. And now we all must come together again and save the lives of many more from healthcare bill that will truly bankrupt or kill people.

But Joel can tell you that himself:

The unbelievable kindness Packard found is in short supply in an America possessed by fear. An America raised on bulletproof heroes in action films and John Wayne westerns (Wayne died of stomach cancer) is shaken to its bones by its own vulnerability. By the September 11 attacks. By the Great Recession. By shifting demographics and globalization. By a collapsing middle class and income inequality. By fear of the stranger, the foreigner, the Other. But mostly by fear of losing power, both personal and political.

In our fear, we have replaced “We the People” and e pluribus unum with travel bans and “I’m all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.”

Humans do a lot of cruel, senseless things when they are afraid. Like trampling each other to death in a mindless rush to escape danger. A conservative movement funded by billionaire ideologues and media magnates created a populist uprising it hoped would sustain Republicans’ and their own power in this changing world. Republicans gerrymandered districts across the country and erected barriers to voting to lock in that power by locking out democracy. They promised the faithful, as did their party’s self-absorbed leader, to undo all the works of the Kenyan Usurper. Chief among them is the Affordable Care Act, a flawed program, but one that saves lives and protects millions of others.

But these uprisings have a way of getting out of control. Now Republicans in the House and Senate fear the wrath of the very movement they birthed. In their fear, they are close to acceding to the demands of supporters to “Let them die.” Them would be any sick American who is not Us. Speaking of cruel and senseless.

“Fear is the mind-killer,” Frank Herbert wrote in his famous novel. Republicans in the United States House and Senate would do well to meditate on that as well as the red letters from the King James New Testament before doing any more that is cruel and senseless.

What kind of country is this?

by digby

Congressman Joe Kennedy tries to summon American pride. I’m not sure it works in the era of Trump, but it’s a nice speech:

‘The America I know would never turn it’s back on a friend or a stranger in need. Trumpcare does.’ pic.twitter.com/xtpDhddFvZ

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 23, 2017

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Death by a thousand cuts

by digby

Health Insurance expert Andy Slavitt:

New estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) paint by numbers the impact of the Senate healthcare bill. It’s a bill not about repealing “ObamaCare,” but about capping federal health spending and cutting taxes for the richest Americans and corporations.

The scope of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is broad. It expands Medicaid, prioritizes value-based care in Medicare and invests in public health. But Republicans’ criticisms have focused narrowly on the individual market — people purchasing health insurance on their own. Virtually every one of President Trump’s claims that “ObamaCare is dead” is about premiums, deductibles and choices among the ACA’s Health Insurance Marketplace plans.

But the Senate Republican plan does not repeal this part of ObamaCare. Republicans could fully repeal the ACA’s Marketplace financial assistance and have enough to fund every tax cut envisioned in their bill. CBO’s January 2017 baseline assumes $781 billion in Marketplace assistance from 2018 to 2026, compared to the Senate bill’s $701 billion in tax cuts over the same period.

While the Senate bill does not repeal ObamaCare, it does not improve it either. The Senate bill would maintain the ACA’s health insurance tax credits, but at reduced levels, leaving consumers to spend more to get less. Marketplace spending under the bill would be about 60 percent of what is projected with no change according to CBO.

It takes the misguided approach of linking premium tax credits to lower value and higher deductible plans while eliminating financial assistance that reduces cost sharing for consumers. The Senate Republican bill also zeroes out the individual mandate fee, which CBO and insurers suggest will increase premiums by about 20 percent next year. And it lowers the “failsafe” or overall cap on Marketplace financial assistance, potentially rationing Marketplace subsidies like it rations Medicaid.

What’s more, CBO makes clear that Republicans prioritize cutting $772 billion in federal Medicaid spending, an amount that is nearly the same as every dollar spent on Marketplace financial assistance. Medicaid savings include rolling back the ACA’s coverage expansion and capping on federal Medicaid spending for the first time in the program’s history. In fact, over half of the pages in the Senate bill are devoted to Medicaid changes unrelated to the ACA.

In short, the CBO estimates suggest that the Senate bill neither repeals nor repairs ObamaCare. But it does cap federal health spending in order to cut taxes for corporations and high-income individuals. As Senators prepare to vote on this bill, they should be clear-eyed on its consequences.

Obviously the vast majority are fine with it. There might be a few on either end of the spectrum who think it’s too cruel or not cruel enough. But the mainstream of GOP elected aren’t balking.

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Ivanka’s tax cuts FTW!

by digby

Here you go with the new CBO score:

The Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of people without health insurance by 22 million by 2026, a figure that is only slightly lower than the 23 million more uninsured that the House version would create, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday.

Next year, 15 million more people would be uninsured compared with current law, the budget office said.

The legislation would decrease federal deficits by a total of $321 billion over a decade, the budget office said.

The release of the budget office’s analysis comes as a number of reluctant Republican senators weigh whether to support the health bill, which the majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, wants approved before a planned recess for the Fourth of July.

Mr. McConnell already faced a host of reservations from across the ideological spectrum in his conference. Five Republican senators have said they cannot support the version of the bill that was released last week, and Mr. McConnell can afford to lose only two.

Before the budget office released its report on Monday, the American Medical Association officially announced its opposition to the bill, and the National Governors Association urged the Senate to slow down.

Now, the budget office’s findings will give fodder to Democrats who were already assailing the bill as cruel. It could give pause to some Republican senators who have been mulling whether to support the bill — or it could give them an additional reason to come out against the bill altogether.

It is still unclear whether the new budget office projections will be judged against the House’s version, or against the Affordable Care Act’s coverage figures. Beyond the number of Americans without health insurance, the Senate bill’s $321 billion in deficit reduction is larger than the $119 billion total that the budget office found for the bill that passed the House.

Earlier Monday afternoon, Senate Republican leaders altered their health bill to penalize people who go without health insurance by requiring them to wait six months before their coverage would begin. Insurers would generally be required to impose the waiting period on people who lacked coverage for more than about two months in the prior year.

The waiting-period proposal is meant to address a conspicuous omission in the Senate’s bill: The measure would end the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that nearly all Americans have health insurance, but it also would require insurers to accept anyone who applies. The waiting period is supposed to prevent people from waiting until they get sick to purchase a health plan. Insurers need large numbers of healthy people to help pay for those who are sick.

Under one of the most unpopular provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the government can impose tax penalties on people who go without health coverage. Republicans have denounced this as government coercion.

The repeal bill passed by the House last month has a different kind of incentive. It would impose a 30 percent surcharge on premiums for people who have gone without insurance. But the Congressional Budget Office said this provision could backfire. As a result of the surcharge, it said, two million fewer people would enroll, and the people most likely to be deterred would be those who are healthy

They will, of course, say the CBO is lying. And it could be wrong. But that could mean this mutant atrocity of a “health care” bill will actually be worse. In fact, it probably will trigger a death spiral in the whole insurance sector.

But whatevs. They knew it was going to be bad when they did it. They don’t care. They want tax cuts for Ivanka and that’s all there is to it.

They have all become monsters.

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