You knew this was going to happen. Ever since the Republican Congresswoman took to Facebook and asked her followers to post their horror stories about Obamacare and getting mostly positive comments in return, Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers went silent, trying to find a way to paint these positive Obamacare stories as anything but positive.
Well, this is the best the Republican congresswoman had when explaining why her followers loved Obamacare so much. According to McMorris, the parts of the law her followers love are the parts Republicans agree with.
“The stories are largely around pre-existing conditions and those that are getting health insurance up to age 26,” she said. “That’s broad, bipartisan support for those provisions.”
The congresswoman has voted multiple times to repeal the health care law in its entirety, most recently in February on a resolution offered by Alabama Republican Bradley Byrne that would eliminate all aspects of the law, including the pre-existing condition and age 26 provisions. The resolution has not been put to a vote by the Senate.
Again, McMorris has voted numerous times to repeal the law in its entirety, including the “bipartisan” parts. I will file this McMorris person under the “total fail” category!
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House GOP conference, apparently thought a good way to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Obamacare would be to ask her Facebook followers to provide her with their horror stories about the law. Things did not work out that way as praises for Obamacare poured in.
She wrote;
This week marks the 5th anniversary of #Obamacare being signed into law. Whether it’s turned your tax filing into a nightmare, you’re facing skyrocketing premiums, or your employer has reduced your work hours, I want to hear about it.
Please share your story with me so that I can better understand the challenges you’re facing.
Here is one of the responses;
This is mostly just an object lesson in social media use. As many brands have discovered, opening yourself up to this kind of dialogue is basically an open invitation to get trolled.
But it also reveals something fundamental about the structure of the Affordable Care Act. Reasonable people can disagree about whether this law is, all things considered, a good idea. But one of the main things it does is raise taxes rather dramatically on a pretty small number of high-income people in order to give subsidized health insurance policies to a substantially larger number of low-income people. Indeed, this is one of the main things Republicans don’t like about it!
But if you do a simple head count, you are almost certainly going to find more people getting discount insurance than people paying extra taxes.
Amazing. He is one of the loudest critics of the new healthcare law, the law that now provides healthcare to millions of Americans, but Cruz now confirms that he will in fact, sign up for Obamacare. It’s the all for me, none for youmentality!
“We will presumably go on the exchange and sign up for health care, and we’re in the process of transitioning over to do that,” Cruz, a Republican and Obamacare hater, told The Des Moines Register.
Cruz, who once depended on his wife for health insurance, will now look to Obamacare to save his sorry ass!
16.4 Million to be exact! This, despite the constant barrage of attacks from the Republicans in Congress and the Republicans sitting in the Supreme Court. And for your information, the healthcare act is still under attack as the Supreme Court ponders whether they will gut the act and drop millions of Americans from receiving coverage!
Yay America!
A whopping 16.4 million people have gained health insurance coverage since Obamacare passed, according to a new government report released Monday.
The breakdown: 14.1 million adults insured since Obamacare’s first open-enrollment period which began in October 2013, and 2.3 million young adults aged 19-25 covered on a parent’s plan since the policy took effect in 2010.
The two-page report by the Department of Health and Human Services provides fresh evidence that the still-unpopular law has sharply reversed the trend of Americans losing their coverage. The uninsured rate fell from 20.3 percent to 13.2 percent as of March 4, 2015, a drop of 35 percent.
The reduction in uninsured is steeper among blacks (9.2 percentage points) and Hispanics (12.3 percentage points) than among whites (5.3 percentage points).
Florida. Another state with a Republican governor who, if he had his way, would repeal Obamacare and leave his constituents without healthcare in a jiffy! Yes, that same Florida registered almost 2 million Americans to receive health insurance benefits from The Affordable Care Act.
Erollment in Affordable Care Act health insurance plans topped 1.6 million in Florida and totaled about 11.4 million nationwide through the Feb. 15 deadline, according to data released Wednesday by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
The figures reflect the number of people who selected a plan during the just-completed three-month open enrollment period or who enrolled during the previous year and were automatically re-enrolled.
Officials said the deadline for people who were unable to complete their enrollments by Feb. 15 would be extended by a week, so the enrollment totals will be revised once those enrollees are counted.
Enrollment totals for metropolitan areas included in Wednesday’s release were:
Federal officials announced Wednesday that 969,461 people in Texas have signed so far up for insurance coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace.
In the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area, 277,015 consumers selected or were automatically enrolled in a 2015 plan, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
The sign-up deadline for this year’s coverage is Feb. 15.
Nearly 7.5 million consumers selected a plan or were automatically re-enrolled through the HealthCare.gov platform as of Jan. 30, 2015.
Wednesday’s Weekly Enrollment Snapshot for the first time also includes people who selected a plan or were automatically re-enrolled within select Metropolitan Statistical Areas. This localized data provides another level of detail to better understand total plan selections within local communities ahead of the Feb. 15 deadline.
As of Jan. 30:
– 256,982 consumers in the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX local area selected or were automatically enrolled in a plan – 89,821 consumers in the San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX local area selected or were automatically enrolled in a plan – 85,116 consumers in the Austin-Round Rock, TX local area selected or were automatically enrolled in a plan – 40,791 consumers in the El Paso, TX local area selected or were automatically enrolled in a plan – 26,17 consumers in the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX local area selected or were automatically enrolled in a plan
They know nothing is going to come of this vote, yet Republicans in Congress apparently have nothing else to do than to vote for the millionth 56th time to repeal Obamacare. And yes, they are getting paid big bucks for doing things like this, a royal waste of millions of tax payer’s dollars!
Welcome to America Ted Cruz. Now you can run for president.
Here is a bit of news that is bound to piss Republicans off – Obamacare is costing much less than the CBO original predicted.
In January 2010, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal health spending would total a bit more than $11 trillion between 2011 and 2020.
Today, the Congressional Budget Office thinks it made a mistake. Costs are coming in lower-than-expected, and the CBO’s newest projections suggest the federal government will spend $600 billion less on health care than they predicted back in 2010.
So far, so good: projections are always wrong by at least a bit, and it’s nice to have the extra $600 billion in America’s pocket.
But here’s the incredible thing: as Paul Van de Water, a health care expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, points out, the January 2010 projection didn’t include any of the spending associated with Obamacare. The latest projections include all of the spending associated with Obamacare.
Donald Trump went on David Letterman last night and spewed some lies about Obamacare. So much lies were told, that David Letterman actually had to interject at one point, saying “I don’t believe that is true.” At another point when Trump continued complaining about Obamacare, he accused the system of containing “fraud and abuse,” to which Letterman asked for documented proof of said “fraud and abuse.”
But in all the lies, Trump spoke about a friend of his who suffered a serious medical condition while visiting in Scotland. According to Trump, his friend was only supposed to be there for four days when he got sick, and was taken to a hospital where he was treated by some very “great doctors” giving him “great care.” According to Trump, when his friend asked “where do I pay,” he was told, “there are no charge.”
This of course is because Scotland has a single payer type system, and in comparing the American system to that in Scotland, Trump said, “we can have a great system in this country…” before he was cut off by Letterman. But following his line of reasoning one can easily conclude that Trump prefers the Scotland system than the system here in America.
#ThanksObama! How dare you implement policies that actually help people!
The uninsured rate dropped to 12.9 percent for 2014’s fourth quarter, a Gallup poll released Tuesday showed. This figure — the lowest since Gallup began measuring daily in 2008 — is down from the 13.4 percent rate in the third quarter in 2014 and down from 17.1 percent in 2013’s fourth quarter.
While the figure has decreased across all demographics, the pollster notes that the sharpest decline in uninsured has been among African-American and low-income Americans. The number of uninsured Hispanics has decreased as well, but they remain the highest uninsured demographic in the country, with 32.4 percent without coverage.
The poll showed a sharp decrease of uninsured U.S. adults from the end of 2013 to the end of 2014 as a growing number of Americans signed up for coverage through state and federal exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. The 2015 enrollment period opened on Nov. 15 and will close on Feb. 15.
The Gallup poll was conducted Oct. 1 to Dec. 30, 2014, and is based on 43,000 interviews with U.S. adults.
It took about 35 years, but the Republican Party is just where it wants to be. They have a Congressional majority and are flush with the optimism of a political movement that they believe has broad popular support. They are looking forward to perhaps winning the presidency in 2016 and finally being able to implement the agenda that Ronald Reagan gave voice to in 1980. Democrats are supposed to be on the run. President Obama is spent.
It’s a nice tale, this one. The problem is that it’s full of inaccurate assumptions and leaves out the fact that the Republican Party is split and the far right has so far given no indication that they are in any mood to compromise. They will pass bills and send them to the president, and he will veto most of them. Obama will propose legislation that the Congress will not consider. In many ways, the gridlock will continue.
But there is cause for optimism on both sides. The GOP knows that they will be burnt toast in 2016 if they can’t pass some kind of immigration bill that allows people to stay in this country with their families. They also know that they are on the wrong side of history when it comes to marriage equality and that very soon most southern states will be forced to recognize all marriages performed in other states. After all, this is the party that wants government out of people’s lives and wants United States citizens to be free to follow the lives that they choose to live.
On health care, the Republicans will vote one more time, probably within a week or so, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Then they will need to get serious about how they would implement health care without taking it away from the approximately 10 million people who’ve bought it on the exchanges or qualified for it under the expanded Medicaid program. It is true that the party could wait until the Supreme Court rules in June on whether people who bought policies on the federal exchange qualify for subsidies, but I believe that they will be disappointed. Supreme Court justices read the news and they know that denying people subsidies would cause a mammoth disruption in the lives of millions of people. John Roberts will once again come to President Obama’s rescue and provide the fifth vote to uphold the law.
Democrats have essentially lost the fracking debate because not enough people are having their tap water catch fire to offset the millions of people who are now paying $2.00 for unleaded gasoline. Yes, Governor Cuomo outlawed fracking in New York State last year, but that will mean that upstate will remain an economic wasteland for years to come, but at least will have casinos so people with little money can lose it on their own rather than having to pay higher taxes.
The low gas prices will also make the XL Pipeline a moot point. There is little need now to push for more oil when oil producing states will be experiencing budget crises over the next year or so. If anything, many Republican lawmakers will need to hope that gas prices moderate a bit so they can pay for the services their constituents sorely need. That was a joke, by the way. In the end, though, low gas prices will provide a nice boost to the economy and another boost to American foreign policy, which will see much more pain for Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
What the GOP cannot argue, thought, is that much of this optimism and hope will greatly help President Obama. The economy is already improving and having people spend less on gas will help it more. Does the right believe that people will give the president no credit? If Russia and Iran have to pull back their dastardly initiatives because of falling revenue, does the GOP believe that they will get credit for that? Of course not. The president gets the blame when things go wrong and the credit when things go right, and an expanding economy is the number one issue on most Americans’ minds.
Perhaps this is the moment when both parties realize that they do need to work together if they want to achieve anything, and activists on both sides will need to recognize that they will have to give something up in order for legislation to move forward. I can confidently say that there will be no broad tax cut this year, nor will an immigration bill contain a path to citizenship. There will be no carbon tax or an increase in the gasoline tax. The Common Core is not going away. Neither is Social Security or Medicare.
Our country was born of compromise. It’s the only way we will move forward.
If all this positive change happened in just the last year, imagine how much better off we as a society will be 5 years down the road.
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