Resistance Action Items 3/21/2017
We need all hands on deck to oppose AHCA. All the other stuff is great too, but we're making opposing AHCA the top priority for now. So try to call your three Reps today and oppose AHCA. Here's a short script:


https://twitter.com/jkkowalski/statu...44522681577474

www.contactsenators.com
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Resistance Action Item 3/22/2017

Today is the day people. Call your Representative. Tell them to vote NO on AHCA tomorrow. http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

It's gonna be better tomorrow!

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/845371949022941184

Special election for Tom Price's house seat in Georgia, in the Atlanta suburbs, is coming up in April and most likely runoff in June. It should be a good test for the resistance. Price carried the district easily, Trump carried it but underperformed, and yet D Ossoff is polling in the lead there. GOP super pacs are pumping the money in against him. If he can pull it off, it might be a spark for 2018.

.

i have a bad feeling that health care was a fluke. The resistance had nothing to do with its failure as far as I can tell. It seems like it was mostly extremist tea partiers who demanded even more dead poor people in the streets and didn't get their way.

They could have passed AHCA with the tea party defections, which I believe numbered 20 or so. According to pundits, these Freedom Caucus guys have been something of a constant thorn in the side of the House GOP. So in some sense, their opposition was already baked in. You should give the resistance some credit for creating a situation where the GOP couldn't get it over the finish line without most of that caucus, i.e. where 10+ center right guys folded under pressure.

^this

all the talk about townhalls making an impact is such bull****, they pushed this bill IN SPITE of all those angry olds. the only thing that moved the needle was the ideological split with house GOP and the freedumb caucus/libertarian types, and the cucking of donald trump by the koch bros with their announcement of a special re-election fund for people who vote no

Jesus, and I thought I was a pessimist.

The whole reason the Kochs and the Freedom Caucus killed the bill was because it contained some the coverage the peeps at the town halls demanded. If it had been a bill that the staunchest of conservatives liked it would have had even fewer Rep's supporting it. Those town halls played a huge roll is saving the ACA because people let their elected representatives know that total repeal without a comparable replacement was unacceptable.

this AHCA bill was a comparable replacement? LOL

Can we take this semantic quibbling response as an assent to the broader point he made (which is obviously correct)?

If your contacting you're Congressman, going to town halls, organizing to prepare to get out the vote, then you're not doing nothing. Can quibble about how much any specific thing effects another but it's not doing nothing.

Personally I don't the #TheResistance had much to do on this specific bill but the continuous push is going to move the needle.

Trump and the Republicans WILL sabotage ObamaCare if given the chance. It's time to push for Universal Health Care, like every other civilized country.

Was the problem with AHCA that it was too brutal or not brutal enough? What would a passable version of AHCA looked like?

Both. While the narrative going around is that the Freedom Caucus killed it, by my count it was only 15 Freedom Caucus members that were against it out of 35-40 total Republicans being against it. Republicans could afford about 20 defections, but no more than 22. Republicans tried to change the bill to make it far more cruel at the last minute to please the Freedom Caucus, but in doing so they risked (and likely lost a few votes from) the so-called "moderate" conservatives--people who didn't want to vote to take away Medicaid from a huge portion of their constituencies, putting their seats into peril in 2018.

That's one of the great difficulties of Ryan's job. Anything remotely reasonable is going to piss off the Freedom Caucus, and anything that is extreme enough for the Freedom Caucus is going to have problems with the more human members of the Republican House and Senate. It's going to be very tough going getting anything through especially since Trump is so unpopular and Democrats feel no political pressure to work with him at all.

Now having said all that, this is not the time to sit back and relax. Trump and the Republicans WILL actively work to sabotage ObamaCare, make no mistake about it. We must alert people to this as well as push for Universal Health Care--there's never been a better time to make the case for it. The major problems with ObamaCare were from states that chose not to expand Medicaid, leaving a huge gaping hole in coverage--a hole where working and middle class families ending up suffering bigly. We have to fix that hole and cover those people, and the best long-term way to do that is Universal Health Care.

no, it's not obviously correct. the freedumb caucus and the kochs opposed the bill because of the federal subsidies that it still contained. the town hall olds who were gonna get their premiums jacked up and lose their part D had little to no impact on turning any republicans against it. that this bill qualified as a suitable alternative to ACA is preposterous, and most R's were ready to vote for it anyway

The bill failed for a number of reasons (the main one being that it was just utterly terrible for the American people) but I do believe #TheResistance helped in this fight. By shifting the paradigm early, phone calls and town halls and protests made a straight-up repeal totally unpalatable. This is a big reason why the Freedom Caucus was against the legislation in the end--they wanted a straight-up repeal of ObamaCare with no subsidies or essential benefits. Even with a big majority, there was no sense even very early on that such legislation could pass because too many parts of ACA are very popular when people actually considered losing them. The protection for people with pre-existing conditions, the marketplace exchanges, the subsidies, the essential benefits so you know you're not getting a crap plan and paying $100's a month for it. Letting young people stay on their parents' insurance until 26. I do believe many Representatives didn't want to vote to take Medicaid away from tens of thousands in their districts. It was going to be politically very tough for them--old people do vote. Every major association was against this bill, which made a big difference. The AARP has a lot of political sway in this country.

So at the end of the day there were a number of reasons but I really do believe peoples' voices made a difference. We have to keep applying pressure--we can't back down and believe we are in the clear because technically ObamaCare is still the law of the land. The law continues to face court challenges, and HHS Secretary Tom Price is one of the biggest haters of ObamaCare. He will sabotage the law from the inside, and Trump and prominent Republicans (e.g. Lindsey Graham) have already promised to help him do this.



This is who is our President. A man who would rather collapse the health care system of the country he was elected to lead, to score some political points. Rather than actually working to make the system better (He promised a great system that would insure everybody at an affordable price! He promised never to cut medicaid! He promised health care for all! And he promised those things immediately!)

One of the most effective ways Republicans were able to defeat ObamaCare was by sabotaging it, and they have become incredibly effective at doing so. Now that the court cases are controlled by Trump, he can simply refuse to defend whenever portions of the law are sued in court. Thus negating parts of the law without it even having to be declared unconstitutional by a judge.

https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/...69855167676421


https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/...78265732788224

Will D's cave in if/when R's manage to tank ACA?

Yeah, that Obamacare death spiral is gonna kick in ANY DAY NOW, and when it does we'll all be sorry. Republicans sure done tricked us!

The sabotage of ObamaCare is very real and it has been very effective, even with President Obama in office defending the law vigorously. For example, this key 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowed states to refuse the Medicaid expansion. This was never the original intent of the law, and it left many folks in a "Medicaid blind spot" in these states that refused the expansion.

http://medicaidexpansion.com/medicai...supreme-court/

Medicaid expansion money is also an incentive for states to take it. At the state level the politics are swayed a bit differently than nationally, and grassroots plays a role in this obviously. I think Kansas might take it, and after that every red state running a deficit will be itching go back on their "principles." So from that stand point, the expansion sabotage may be fleeting. But there are other dirty tricks they can do for sure.

ETA: I think they'll probably accept the expansion after rendering the exchanges useless (i.e. driving the last insurer out of the marketplace) and doing some meaningless form of repealing regulations, they'll accept Medicaid expansion, and claim that they covered more people than Obamacare.

https://twitter.com/zuriberry/status/845991296732987392