Thread: Senate Republicans release their socialist/communist health-care plan

SEE: What’s in the Senate Republican health-care bill


Well, our Republican Party Leadership has been lying all the time. They never intended to repeal Obamacare. In fact, our Republican Party Leadership not only proposes to keep Obamcare alive, but it will continue to use the force of federal taxation to confiscate the earned wages of one group of citizens to finance the health-care needs of another group, not to mention hard working wage earners will also be taxed $BILLIONS which will be transferred into the coffers of the insurance industry.


The Senate Bill proposes to confiscate working people’s earned wages [How else can the Senate Bill be paid for?] which will then be transferred to other groups via subsidies, tax credits and the expansion of Medicaid, even though there is no grant of power in the wording of our federal constitution allowing the federal government to enter the States and meddle in the people’s health-care needs and choices.


The Senate’s proposal will in fact create a number of factious groups who are tax getters, and they will, if the Senate Bill becomes law, forever have a vested financial interest which competes with our nation’s general welfare ___ those matters concerning national security “external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce”. These factious groups’ interest will also be different from those who are taxed to finance the Senate’s desire to meddle in the people’s health-care needs and choices.


To avoid these kinds of political factions on a national scale ___ tax-payers vs tax-getters ___ our wise founders refused to delegate a power to Congress over those “… objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” See, Federalist No. 45


Having violated our Constitution and usurped powers not granted, a number of factious groups have already been created by Congress which now threaten mayhem and destruction should their free government cheese be ended. Have we not witnessed these very groups today protesting around the Capitol complex?


And who are some of the actors included in these type of tax-getter protests? Federally subsidized health-care recipients; federally subsidized food stamp recipients; federally subsidized Section Eight Housing recipients; federally funded unemployment benefit recipients; federally funded student loans and grant recipients; and millions of foreigners who have invaded our borders who are also the recipients of free government cheese.


To those who are sincerely concerned about the direction our country is headed, I strongly suggest you take the time to study FEDERALIST NUMBER 10 which in part deals with controlling the violence of factious groups.


JWK



American citizens are sick and tired of being made into tax-slaves to finance a maternity ward for the poverty stricken populations of other countries who invade America’s borders to give birth.

Have you checked out the new Federalist Party? They want to replace the Republicans.

Website: http://thefederalistparty.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Federalists_USA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Federalists.Party/

mcconnell is a disgrace! To lower healthcarecoverage/payments for disabled children and seniors in nursing homes is APPALLING! Very hard to find doctors willing to take the lower fees now that medicare pays out and this bill wants more cuts for vulnerable populations of Americans. Remove the illegals, send the "refugees" home and let us take care of our seniors and disabled.

Shifting Dollars From Poor to Rich Is a Key Part of the Senate Health Bill

Margot Sanger-Katz @sangerkatz JUNE 22, 2017

The Affordable Care Act gave health insurance to millions of Americans by shifting resources from the wealthy to the poor and by moving oversight from states to the federal government. The Senate bill introduced Thursday pushes back forcefully on both dimensions.

The bill is aligned with long-held Republican values, advancing states’ rights and paring back growing entitlement programs, while freeing individuals from requirements that they have insurance and emphasizing personal responsibility. Obamacare raised taxes on high earners and the health care industry, and essentially redistributed that income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades.

The draft Senate bill, called the Better Care Reconciliation Act, would jettison those taxes while reducing federal funding for the care of low-income Americans. The bill’s largest benefits go to the wealthiest Americans, who have the most comfortable health care arrangements, and its biggest losses fall to poorer Americans who rely on government support. The bill preserves many of the structures of Obamacare, but rejects several of its central goals.

Like a House version of the legislation, the bill would fundamentally change the structure of Medicaid, which provides health insurance to 74 million disabled or poor Americans, including nearly 40 percent of all children. Instead of open-ended payments, the federal government would give states a maximum payment for nearly every individual enrolled in the program. The Senate version of the bill would increase that allotment every year by a formula that is expected to grow substantially more slowly than the average increase in medical costs.

Avik Roy, the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, and a conservative health care analyst, cheered the bill on Twitter, saying, “If it passes, it’ll be the greatest policy achievement by a G.O.P. Congress in my lifetime.” The bill, he explained in an email, provides a mechanism for poor Americans to move from Medicaid coverage into the private market, a goal he has long championed as a way of equalizing insurance coverage across income groups.

States would continue to receive extra funding for Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to more poor adults, but only temporarily. After several years, states wishing to cover that population would be expected to pay a much greater share of the bill, even as they adjust to leaner federal funding for other Medicaid beneficiaries — disabled children, nursing home residents — who are more vulnerable.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, in the Capitol on Thursday. Credit Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images High-income earners would get substantial tax cuts on payroll and investment income. Subsidies for those low-income Americans who buy their own insurance would decline compared with current law. Low-income Americans who currently buy their own insurance would also lose federal help in paying their deductibles and co-payments.

The bill does offer insurance subsidies to poor Americans who live in states that don’t offer them Medicaid coverage, a group without good insurance options under Obamacare. But the high-deductible plans that would become the norm might continue to leave care out of their financial reach even if they do buy insurance.

The battle over resources played into the public debate. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said the bill was needed to “bring help to the families who have been struggling with Obamacare.” In a Facebook post, President Barack Obama, without mentioning the taxes that made his program possible, condemned the Senate bill as “a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America.”
In another expression of Republican principles, the bill would make it much easier for states to set their own rules for insurance regulation, a return to the norm before Obamacare.

Under the bill, states would be able to apply for waivers that would let them eliminate consumer protection regulations, like rules that require all health plans to cover a basic package of benefits or that prevent insurance plans from limiting how much care they will cover in a given year.

States could get rid of the online marketplaces that help consumers compare similar health plans, and make a variety of other changes to the health insurance system. The standards for approval are quite permissive. Not every state would choose to eliminate such rules, of course. But several might.
“You can eliminate all those financial protections,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “That would be huge.”

Americans with pre-existing conditions would continue to enjoy protection from discrimination: In contrast with the House health bill, insurers would not be allowed to charge higher prices to customers with a history of illness, even in states that wish to loosen insurance regulations.
But patients with serious illnesses may still face skimpier, less useful coverage. States may waive benefit requirements and allow insurers to charge customers more. Someone seriously ill who buys a plan that does not cover prescription drugs, for example, may not find it very valuable.


A protester being removed from outside the office of Mitch McConnell on Thursday. Credit Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images There are features that would tend to drive down the sticker price of insurance, a crucial concern of many Republican lawmakers, who have criticized high prices under Obamacare. Plans that cover fewer benefits and come with higher deductibles would cost less than more comprehensive coverage.

But because federal subsidies would also decline, only a fraction of people buying their own insurance would enjoy the benefits of lower prices. Many middle-income Americans would be expected to pay a larger share of their income to purchase health insurance that covers a smaller share of their care.

The bill also includes substantial funds to help protect insurers from losses caused by unusually expensive patients, a measure designed to lure into the market those insurance carriers that have grown skittish by losses in the early years of Obamacare. But it removes a policy dear to the insurance industry — if no one else. Without an individual mandate with penalties for Americans who remain uninsured, healthier customers may choose to opt out of the market until they need medical care, increasing costs for those who stay in.

The reforms are unlikely to drive down out-of-pocket spending, another perennial complaint of the bill’s authors, and a central critique by President Trump of the current system. He often likes to say that Obamacare plans come with deductibles so high that they are unusable. Subsidies under the bill would help middle-income consumers buy insurance that pays 58 percent of the average patient’s medical costs, down from 70 percent under Obamacare; it would also remove a different type of subsidy designed to lower deductibles further for Americans earning less than around $30,000 a year.

Out-of-pocket spending is the top concern of most voters. The insurance they would buy under the bill might seem cheap at first, but it wouldn’t be if they ended up paying more in deductibles.

Mr. McConnell was constrained by political considerations and the peculiar rules of the legislative mechanism that he chose to avoid a Democratic filibuster. Despite those limits, he managed to produce a bill that reflects some bedrock conservative values. But the bill also shows some jagged seams. It may not fix many of Obamacare’s problems — high premiums, high deductibles, declining competition — that he has railed against in promoting the new bill’s passage
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/u...T.nav=top-news

Senate Health Care Bill Includes Deep Cuts to Medicaid

By ROBERT PEAR and THOMAS KAPLANJUNE 22, 2017


Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, after a Republican meeting about the health care bill on Thursday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans, who for seven years have promised a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, took a major step on Thursday toward that goal, unveiling a bill to make deep cuts in Medicaid and end the law’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance.
The 142-page bill would create a new system of federal tax credits to help people buy health insurance, while offering states the ability to drop many of the benefits required by the Affordable Care Act, like maternity care, emergency services and mental health treatment.

But the measure landed in rough seas ahead of a vote that Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, wants next week. Four conservative senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, announced that they would oppose it without changes — more than enough to bring it down.

“It does not appear this draft as written will accomplish the most important promise that we made to Americans: to repeal Obamacare and lower their health care costs,” the four wrote in a joint statement.

Other Republican senators, like Dean Heller of Nevada and Rob Portman of Ohio, expressed their own qualms, as did AARP, the American Hospital Association, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network and the Association of American Medical Colleges.

“We are extremely disappointed by the Senate bill released today,” the medical school association wrote. “Despite promises to the contrary, it will leave millions of people without health coverage, and others with only bare-bones plans that will be insufficient to properly address their needs.”

How the G.O.P. Health Bill Would Change Medicaid

The reporter Margot Sanger-Katz examines how the Republican health plan aims to roll back a program that insures one in five Americans.

By MARGOT SANGER-KATZ, ROBIN STEIN and SARAH STEIN KERR on Publish Date June 22, 2017.

Once promised as a top-to-bottom revamp of the health bill passed by the House last month, the Senate bill instead maintains its structure, with modest adjustments. The Senate version is, in some respects, more moderate than the House bill, offering more financial assistance to some lower-income people to help them defray the rapidly rising cost of private health insurance.

But the Senate bill would make subsidies less generous than under current law. It would also lower the annual income limit for receiving subsidies to cover insurance premiums to 350 percent of the poverty level, or about $42,000 for an individual, from 400 percent.
Older people could be disproportionately hurt because they pay more for insurance in general. Both chambers’ bills would allow insurers to charge older people five times as much as younger ones; the limit now is three times.
The Senate measure, like the House bill, would phase out the extra money that the federal government has provided to states as an incentive to expand eligibility for Medicaid. And like the House bill, it would put the entire Medicaid program on a budget, ending the open-ended entitlement that now exists.
It would also repeal most of the tax increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act to help pay for expanded coverage, in effect handing a broad tax cut to the affluent in a measure that would also slice billions of dollars from Medicaid, a program that serves one in five Americans, not only the poor but also almost two-thirds of people in nursing homes. A capital-gains tax cut for the most affluent Americans would be retroactive to the beginning of this year.
The bill, drafted in secret, is likely to come to the Senate floor next week, and could come to a vote after 20 hours of debate.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, held a news conference at which he criticized the Republican health care bill on Thursday. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

If it passes, President Trump and the Republican Congress will be on the edge of a major overhaul of the American health care system — about one-sixth of the nation’s economy.
The premise of the bill, repeated almost daily in some form by its chief author, Mr. McConnell, is that “Obamacare is collapsing around us, and the American people are desperately searching for relief.”
Mr. Trump shares that view, and passage of the Senate bill would move the president much closer to being able to boast about the adoption of a marquee piece of legislation, a feat he has so far been unable to accomplish.
Democrats and some insurers say Mr. Trump has sabotaged the Affordable Care Act, in part by threatening to withhold subsidies paid to insurers so they can reduce deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for millions of low-income people.
And President Barack Obama, who has been hesitant to speak up on political issues since leaving office, waded into the debate on Thursday, saying the Senate proposal showed a “fundamental meanness.”
“The Senate bill, unveiled today, is not a health care bill,” Mr. Obama wrote on his Facebook page. “It’s a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America. It hands enormous tax cuts to the rich and to the drug and insurance industries, paid for by cutting health care for everybody else.”

In a message to his supporters, Mr. Obama urged people to demand compromise from their lawmakers before senators vote on the Republican bill next week.
In the Senate, Democrats are determined to defend a law that has provided coverage to 20 million people and is a pillar of Mr. Obama’s legacy. The debate over the repeal bill is shaping up as a titanic political clash, which could have major implications for both parties, affecting their electoral prospects for years to come.
Mr. McConnell faces a great challenge in amassing the votes to win Senate approval of the bill, which Republicans are trying to pass using special budget rules that would allow them to avoid a Democratic filibuster. But with only 52 seats, Mr. McConnell can afford to lose only two Republicans, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking the tie.

Democrats have assailed Republicans for putting the bill together without a single public hearing or bill-drafting session.
And Mr. Trump has been only fitfully helpful. He cheered on passage of the House version, then told senators it was “mean.” On Thursday, a White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, declared, “I don’t believe that the president has specifically weighed in that it’s right to cut Medicaid” — something the Senate bill decidedly does, as does the president’s proposed budget. Later, Mr. Trump tweeted that he was “very supportive” of the Senate bill.
Republican leaders still must contend with internal divisions that will be difficult to overcome. Numerous Republican senators from states that expanded Medicaid are concerned about how a rollback of the program could affect their constituents, and they face pressure from governors back home.





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Some Republican senators, like Susan Collins of Maine, said they were waiting for an analysis of the bill to be issued soon by the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper on Capitol Hill.
The budget office found that the bill passed by the House would leave 23 million more people without insurance in a decade.
Under the Senate bill, the federal government would continue paying crucial subsidies to health insurance companies through 2019, alleviating the uncertainty caused by litigation and by mixed signals from the Trump administration. Without this money, many insurers have said, they will sharply increase premiums or pull out of the marketplaces in many states.
The Senate bill would also cap overall federal spending on Medicaid: States would receive a per-beneficiary allotment of money. The federal payments would grow more slowly than under the House bill starting in 2025. Alternatively, states could receive an annual lump sum of federal money for Medicaid in the form of a block grant.
State officials and health policy experts predict that many people would be dropped from Medicaid because states would not fill the fiscal hole left by the loss of federal money.
“The Senate bill creates an illusion of being less draconian than the House bill, but is arguably more so” on Medicaid, said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University.
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United States Capitol Police officers removed protesters from outside Mr. McConnell’s office on Thursday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times The Senate bill would make it much easier for states to opt out of insurance standards in the Affordable Care Act, including the requirement for insurers to provide certain “essential benefits.”
Republicans said the bill would still guarantee access to insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. But consumers could be exposed to new medical costs if, for example, insurers did not have to cover certain expensive new drugs or medical procedures.
“An individual with a pre-existing condition could be insured, but the services needed to treat that condition might not be covered because of a waiver,” said Timothy S. Jost, an emeritus professor of health law at Washington and Lee University.
The Senate and House bills would both provide tax credits to help people buy health insurance, but Senate Republicans said they tried to direct more of the assistance to lower-income people. Under the House bill, the tax credits would be based mainly on a person’s age. Under the Senate bill, they would be based on a person’s income and age, as well as local insurance costs.
The Senate bill, like the House bill, would cut off federal Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood for one year. The money reimburses clinics for birth control, cancer screenings and other preventive care. About half of Planned Parenthood patients are on Medicaid.
Also like the House measure, the Senate bill would repeal taxes imposed on high-income people by the Affordable Care Act, including a payroll tax increase that helps finance Medicare.
The bill would delay a tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health insurance — the so-called Cadillac tax — to 2026. It is currently scheduled to take effect in 2020. Employers and labor unions detest the tax and would have nearly a decade to try to kill it.
The Senate bill would provide $50 billion to help stabilize insurance markets and hold down premiums from 2018 through 2021. The money would be distributed by the federal government to insurance companies that apply. The bill would provide $62 billion in grants to states for similar purposes from 2019 to 2026.
In addition, the Senate bill would provide $2 billion next year in federal grants to help states respond to the opioid crisis.
The bill would generally prohibit consumers from using federal tax credits to help buy insurance that includes coverage for abortions. Democrats plan to challenge this provision as a violation of Senate rules being used to speed passage of the repeal bill.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/u...pgtype=article

Originally Posted by JoJ

Have you checked out the new Federalist Party? They want to replace the Republicans.

Website: http://thefederalistparty.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Federalists_USA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Federalists.Party/

Does the Federalist Party support the Fair Share Balanced Budget Amendment?


JWK

Kind of obvious that the insurance lobbyist had a big hand in this bill.

Originally Posted by posylady

Kind of obvious that the insurance lobbyist had a big hand in this bill.

It’s absolutely amazing that a Republican health-care proposal would use the federal government’s taxing authority to confiscate a working person’s earned wages which are then transferred to our nation’s fat cat insurance industry. This is the same kind of money laundering operation Obama engaged in with his green energy crap which was a massive transfer of money taxed away from hard working wage earners which was redistributed to democrat donors! The fact is, 80% of green energy money taxed away from hard working American Citizens WENT TO Obama’s donors!


Now tell me the Republican Party Leadership and Democrat Party Leadership do not work hand in hand to steal the earned wages of labor.


JWK


"To lay with one hand the power of the government on the property of the citizen [a working person’s earned wage] and with the other to bestow upon favored individuals, to aid private enterprises and buildup private fortunes [in the Republican Party’s beloved insurance industry] is none the less a robbery because it is done under forms of law and called taxation."____ Savings and Loan Assc. v.Topeka,(1875).

The Senate needs to pass the House Bill 372 to repeal health insurance from McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945.

What a monumental mess!!!

It will be okay. Just wait for it all to come together.