Tag: ACA

Obamacare as we know is the crown jewel of socialism. It is socialized medicine. The American people spoke soundly and clearly at the ballot box in November and they said to us, Mr. Speaker, in no uncertain terms, repeal this bill. So today, this body will cast a vote to repeal Obamacare and to those across the United States who think this may be a symbolic act, we have a message for them.
[…]
This is not symbolic, this is why we were sent here and we will not stop until we repeal a president and put a president in the position of the White House who will repeal this bill, until we repeal the current Senate, put in a Senate that will listen to the American people and repeal this bill.

Michelle Bachman (R, MN), seemingly pushing yet another Constitutional amendment, this time to “repeal” the Senate. Say what you will about her, but that’s some strict original intent right there.
The sentence containing “president in the position of the White House” is left as an exercise for the student.

Ezra Klein points out what should be obvious, that all the folks screaming about deficit implications and the Affordable Care Act are, in fact, screaming about positive deficit implications (see: PPACA and red column) and, even if we simply take it on costs alone (as separate from any deficit impact), the ACA amounts to a rounding error when compared to the GOP’s tax proposals.

But it is best not speak of any of this. Ever.

Another several of the big lies laid out by a single table. Last I checked, 590+-610=-20. This is something I learned in Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun starring Troy McClure, which did have a decidedly liberal math bias now that I think back…

Full document available if you click. Note to Democrats: print out, laminate, and refer to often.

Is Rahm Still Available?

Bill Daly, potential Obama Chief of Staff: [The Obama administration] miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.
Ezra Klein: The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That’s “left”? And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period — “after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left” — but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-’90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.
Lemkin: Yep, and do we really want anyone who has ever been quoted peddling that particular brand of horseshit running the President’s days in the inevitable “Eliminate ACA or we destroy the economy of the United States of America now and forever through default!” battle that will be coming on in, oh, five or six weeks? I say no, but then I’m less than skilled in multi-dimensional chess…

Death-spiral Escape Hatch

Paul Starr of the American Prospect provides a way to lose the mandate and but also not destroy the private insurance system:

The law could give people a right to opt out of the mandate if they signed a form agreeing that they could not opt in for the following five years. In other words, instead of paying a fine, they would forgo a potential benefit. For five years they would become ineligible for federal subsidies for health insurance and, if they did buy coverage, no insurer would have to cover a pre-existing condition of theirs.

Fine by me. However, I can state categorically that the GOP will be against this, against the mandate (originally their idea anyway), and thus are implicitly for the destruction of the current insurance-based system and its inevitable replacement with single payer. But let’s not talk about that. Shrill.

Death-spiral Escape Hatch

Kevin Drum supplies us with a graph that does more to explain the McDonalds thing than anything else I’ve seen. Red bar is current Mini-Med plan. As you can see, under ACA, the vast majority of McDonalds workers get a better deal; those earning minimum wage get a vastly better deal, in that far more comprehensive healthcare is now free for them.
In fact, only those making more than $12/hr, a tiny minority of McDonalds workers, will pay about what they pay now…and but also get a hell of a lot more useful health insurance.

Indeed: what a failure for the ACA. Yet this failure narrative, unintended consequences, and so forth is precisely what we hear from Our Liberal Media. Again and again.

This is just the sort of graph that needs to be trotted out every time this comes up. Simple and easy to understand. But isn’t. And now even self-identified Democrats are turning against a plan they most likely have no idea about other than what they’ve heard on FOXnews. Because those anchors are at least trying to tell the truth of the story, right?
If you don’t think this is a serious problem you haven’t been paying attention. This is why they fail.