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AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
Re: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#26
Today's xkcd banner:

[Image: call-senate.png]
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Re: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#27
The GOP knew that repeal was a bogus claim since 2014

They used it to get elected. But no one in the GOP had a clue on what would replace it.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell
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Re: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#28
I think they went into the repeal ACA thing in the expectation that a Republican president would win, come up with a reasonable replacement plan to push, and sell it to the voters.  Since none of those three things happened, it's almost a miracle it got as far as it did.  Yes, Trump is a RINO.

But there was never a lot of room to maneuver for conservatives.  Had Romney won 4 years ago, a repeal would have been possible.  But once the policies actually took effect, suddenly you're taking away entitlements, and people feel entitled to their entitlements.  Obamacare is the market-based plan, too.  The only real alternatives are less people insured in an unregulated market, or a socialist alternative like Canada's Medicare, or an even more socialist alternative like Britain's NHS.

But that said, last night I felt like I could think clearly for the first time in a long time.  It's like suddenly, I've lost a lot of stress.  And yes, my parents are on the Obamacare individual markets, and I'm on the Obamacare small employer markets, but it's not really that.  It's the fact that we stopped this plan dead, because good people were willing to do something.  That we are not sliding into a new period of illiberalism, where trillion-dollar bills with 15% approval ratings somehow pass because the elites want tax breaks, where the president normalizes close relationships with autocrats, or where we pick fights with transgendered folks just because we can.

Finally, it's like I can breathe again, because I know we can stop the forces of darkness.  At least this time.  It's not like I think all conservatives are evil, or that conservatism is necessarily wrong.  But Trump's people are picking apart the seams of liberal democracy, and we're managing to hold them at bay without shedding blood. 

TL;DR It's been a pretty good week.
-- ∇×V
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#29
(07-28-2017, 03:02 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: It would have been amusing to see what happens in midterms if they had managed to get any of that passed.  :p

Jeeze, this is like a zombie movie. they're doing it again. This time it's wore than the previous versions. the reason: Sept 30 deadline. The GPO does not care what's in it, as long as they can pass anything that scraps the ACA.

I'm already halfway convinced that single payer is the way to go.
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#30
Canadian style single payer would be ideal I think, but something like Germany's system might be more achievable. At any rate, I think Bernie's proposal isn't feasible.
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#31
(09-23-2017, 08:18 PM)Inquisitive Raven Wrote: Canadian style single payer would be ideal I think, but something like Germany's system might be more achievable.  At any rate, I think Bernie's proposal isn't feasible.

Speaking as a Canadian, I'd strongly suggest including prescriptions in that single-payer model. We didn't, and we have no ability to exercise economies of scale when buying drugs.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#32
(09-22-2017, 12:17 PM)ordnance11 Wrote: Jeeze, this is like a zombie movie. they're doing it again. This time it's wore than the previous versions. the reason: Sept 30 deadline. The GPO does not care what's in it, as long as they can pass anything that scraps the ACA.

I'm already halfway convinced that single payer is the way to go.

It's starting to feel like they're pretty much going to try to make it worse and worse each time they go to the table, until they either get to the point of just completely and utterly gutting health care overall, or we stop screaming at them for what they're trying to do and let them actually do it.
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#33
In that case, keep screaming.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#34
Just updating here for non-US news junkies that the bill is dead once again.  It pretty much happened when John McCain came out against his BFF-for-life Lindsay Graham's bill.  McCain said he might actually vote for the bill if it had gone through the full committee process, but basically he's tired of doing legislation outside of regular order.  "Regular order" means a lot of subtle things, but it comes down to "the complete opposite of the process on this bill."  Anyway, congrats to him on trying to hold our institutions together.

They did hold exactly one scheduled hearing on the latest bill, which was just long enough to get a photo op of people in wheelchairs being dragged out and arrested.  The amount of political capital, and just general goodwill that was squandered on this debate, it's just stupid.  Well, maybe I should look at it as a political capital loan -- win elections by making impossible promises, but then lose out when you can't actually meet your goals.

ordnance11 Wrote:I'm already halfway convinced that single payer is the way to go.
Yep.  That's a thing now.  Basically every liberal Senator who is thinking of running for President signed on to cosponsor Bernie's "Medicare for All" bill (which is technically single-payer and not Medicare expansion).  The reason for this: no one wants to be flanked on the left in the next election.  The right has finally gotten the left to agree that Obamacare is terrible.  But, you know, still better than their plan.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#35
I'll be honest, single payer health care isn't perfect. There's a few things that also need to happen to make that work, and I don't know if the USA can do it.

Because one of those things?

Putting price controls on medicine and medical procedures. Comprehensive, national level price controls, that tell very big companies to get with the program or be fined into submission/bankruptcy.
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#36
That's true of any kind of sane universal coverage system, whether single payer a la Bernie's proposal or multipayer like Germany's system.
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#37
Yeah, my anxiety medication just became a little cheaper today, thanks to laws like that down here. I shudder to think what I'd be paying over there.
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#38
Well, Trump got tired of Congress not gutting the ACA and decided to do it himself. The only ting I can say now is prepare for disruption to 1/6th of the economy. If the housing bubble caused the great recession, what would his do?
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#39
Trump's doing his darndest to gut NAFTA, too. (Honestly, slapping a 300% duty on a Canadian jet so that Boeing doesn't have competition in a market segment where it hasn't offered a product in over a decade - what are we supposed to think except "the US wants out of NAFTA"?)

And he's doing his darndest to start a war, too. Iran, North Korea, wherever.

I think I've figured which past president Trump is drawing inspiration from. If Teddy Roosevelt didn't have to fund health care, why should Trump?
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
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RE: AHCA - One More time With Feeling!
#40
The difference being Roosevelt understood the art of speaking softly while carrying a big stick..... not hooting and hollering like a pickup-truck yahoo while waggling your mahoosive stick around in people's faces, trying to see how close you can get it to their nose without drawing blood.

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.
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