I agree with your assessment. But sometimes a guy appears to be making strategic moves when he's really just trying to put out the fires of the moment, at every moment. GOPs healthcare strategy is a lot like Bernie Madoff's investment strategy or Trump's business strategy--solve today's problem today. Their longer term conservative healthcare strategy was called Romneycare, aka Obamacare. In other words, there is no plan, no game theory, Trump still doesn't know the difference between medicade and Medicare. He's just a dude pretending to have a hostage while holding a gun to his head.

because "**** obama", that's why

They've just spent 8 years drilling lies into the heads of their base that obamacare is a giveaway to feckless minorities that should be "repealed on day one" - trump 2016 and half of them are high on their own supply and think that a complete repeal will not just work but be better for all (white people).

Then there's the inconvenient reality that old whites acutally quite like their subsidised/free healthcare tyvm even as they demand ocare is repealed. Couple that with the fact that it's quite difficult to pass a law that takes healthcare away from one race only (subject to change see supreme court makeup) and you get this total cluster****.

Lying constantly and promising mutually contradictory things clearly works well in opposition but its not a great foundation for governance.

He could always cross the floor and run as a Dem...

The CBO pointed out that Republicans wanted to lower the actuarial value (the percentage, on average, that the person pays vs the insurer) of their baseline plan down to 58%, meaning people would pay more, but because of the adverse selection and the statutory out of pocket caps, the only people who would be able buy insurance would actually have higher effective actuarial values because you'd only have sick people who cost a lot but whose expenses would run up against the out of pocket caps.

assuming the GOP is short of 50 votes on the MTP, can someone explain why it would be more beneficial to dems to vote no on the MTP than it would be to vote yes?

-you force uncomfortable votes
-you waste time
-if the MTP was going to fail, nothing is going to pass anyway, and the reconciliation process is torpedoed (GOP would have to start anew)

You burn the zombie, you don't resurrect it hoping that it eats your opponents.

All the Hail Mary plans the Republicans are thinking up to replace Obamacare cost more than Obamacare for less

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/wrap...e-repeal-costs

So unfair that they've had to rush into this unprepared, imagine how stupid they'd look if they had 7 years to figure something out and just jerked each other off the entire time.

If in fact it is true that Obamacare is, in its present form, in some kind of "death spiral" and if in fact it is true that the Republicans will not try to help fix that, then I think the one man who could end this stalemate could possibly be Barack Obama. By giving his blessing to the removal of his name from a compromise that could garner 50, if not 60, votes.

The CBO indicated the markets were stable. The Trump administration is intentionally doing everything to sabotage it in order to gain leverage. Obama isn't going to sign off on something that's going to actively make more people's lives worse than his plan. That's just silly.

You think:
- The only problem with Obamacare is that it is legally called Obamacare (it's not)
- Republicans would be perfectly fine with the substance of Obamacare if only the name were changed (they wouldn't)
and
- The one thing stopping Republicans from changing the name is that they don't have Obama's blessing (it's not)

jagsfan.gif

Parliamentarian rules against multiple things

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...re-bill-240820

Bernie Sanders Medicare-For-All Would Increase Deficit By $18 Trillion Over Next 10 Years

Looks like a non-starter.

Pretty amazing that the Planned Parenthood issue is being described as the real reason for the death, not nixing the 6 month ban.

Federal contractor for an HHS website is told to remove all references to the ACA.

From the article:
"... I'm a federal contractor. We've been told to go back and remove all references to the ACA on an HHS website I work on - including blog posts for years. Obviously I'm posting under a pseudonym, but I think people need to know that we are living in the novel 1984. They are actively trying to destroy the historical record."

http://acasignups.net/17/07/21/hcgov...se-under-trump

More ACA sabotage by the Trump administration. Cutting funding to call centers. 800 jobs gone in Waco.

http://www.wacotrib.com/news/busines...2df0b1b63.html

Apparently, he also thinks Obama/Democrats named the ACA after Obama.

Adios at least read the first two paragraphs of links you post.

Stop trolling.

LOL at this BS. But please allow me to correct the record here.

Obamacare is great. Single payer is the best. Medicare proves that. Sorry I got out of line.

How is it BS to point out that the title to your link doesn't reflect the content of the link.

Lol you posted a link implying single payer would cost 18 trillion dollars over 10 years. It’s not even a little bit accurate. But I know you appreciate being a disingenuous twit.

Actual single payer health care would likely reduce the overall percent of GDP we spend on healthcare by a sizable amount. This has been discussed a lot in this thread.

But good job by trying to imply the total estimated federal costs of Bernie Sanders entire plan, including FREE COLLEGE FOR EVERYONE, is actually the total increased costs for single payer. You are horribly disingenuous, horribly ignorant or both.

The reality is the ACA is not perfect but it was a substantial improvement over what existed before. It is certainly better than the ridiculous AHCA and BCRA proposals. Congress can be adults and work to improve the existing best option or we can move to the long term best option of single payer.

In 2015 we spent a total of 3.2 trillion dollars on healthcare. So if we just take your pretend number of 1.8 trillion a year we would be in excellent shape. Heck we even get to throw in free college.

The reality is single payer is complicated and will involve massive amounts of cost shifting so even if federal spending increased by your not real number of 1.8 trillion a year, outlay in other places would drop by even more. We absolutely can have IMPROVED healthcare and spend less money for it than we do now.

You not being able to read does not change any of that.

Of course if your real point was “Look guis we can have single payer, free college for all and much much more for less money” than my apologies. Your communication abilities fell flat if that was your objective.

I’m pretty confident you know nothing about Medicare, so yeah Medicare is pretty good. It is better run and has better cost controls than the private insurance industry and it is not really close. The only real issues with Medicare mostly have to do with idiotic additions made mostly by republican legislation. Like Plan D. Plan D is about as poorly constructed legislation (well current gop healthcare bills aside) on healthcare as one could have.

However the foundation of Medicare absolutely could easily be updated and tweaked to be a very effective single payer model for all. This includes increasing reimbursement for some providers and services while also getting control of prescription medicine costs and medical device costs.

I am not familiar with your perceived best case scenario for healthcare in America so feel free to share it with us all. Or just be an anti-plan, obstructionist which is the current model for GOP flag bearers (and twoplustwo RealLiberals™ and twoplustwo Liberterians™).

I guess I have to make myself clearer. I was merely saying that if there exists a plan that 50 or more Republicans and Democrats agree is good enough to vote for, except that Democrats insist that it be called an ACA fix rather than a new name, Obama should put out a statement that they need not feel obligated to do that (partially for him) but should instead give in on the name. That might swing several Democratic votes.