No, I think you're mostly correct. I think one of:

1. They strip all mechanisms of forcing the healthy onto the exchanges.
2. They keep the individual mandate.
3. They go nuclear
4. They assert that their new means of forcing healthy people onto the exchanges, whatever it might be, will pass Parliamentarian approval even though it shouldn't, and then hope that the Dems are spineless/powerless enough that they can get away with it without calling it the nuclear option.

Could happen. I mean, it has to be one of those things. And, long term, only 4 is the real disaster.

Sorry, I know this isn't the place for venting, but how can they do this? How can so many elected officials be so lacking in morals? None of these bills help anyone outside of the richest and most secure Americans. Whatever they pass may harm me and will definitely harm friends and loved ones, not to mention tens of millions of Americans I don't know. I am gripped by despair. This country is going to a dark place.

1, 3, and 4 are all real disasters imo. 2 is a smaller scale disaster, but still a disaster, because premiums are expected to exceed ACA under all of their plans iirc.

You are spot on. They do not actually help ANYONE get better and more affordable healthcare. Wealthier people are able to offset the increased health expenses with the personal tax cuts.

Not sure why some of the public are not more concerned they are trying to pass legislation that would make healthcare insurance worse in every conceivable way.

holy hypothetical

have you seen any Republican plan ?

Here's a nice scam, completely nontransparent, from an ER staffing company. Anyone who pretends medical care is some kind of free market is delusional. In fact, practically the whole point of business is to eliminate the influence of the free market to the maximum extent possible, whether through cleverness, IP, obfuscation, marketing, monopolization, or just plain fraud.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/u...oom-bills.html

It seemed to me that some Republicans were proposing a repeal only because that would allow a compromise with Democrats where a bill was passed that was actually an Obamacare fix but, given the repeal, wouldn't be called that. Democrats would vote for it because they wouldn't be voting for "repeal and replace" since it was already repealed. But since Republicans won't take the first step that won't happen.

In other words, I was thinking that a bill that is actually an Obamacare fix could pass Congress as long as Republicans could pretend that it is something else via a new name. But Democrats won't go along unless perhaps Obama himself asks them to.

If it is as bad as you say (and I have no reason to doubt you), the explanation has to be that the majority of people who favor these bills are not competent to evaluate them. Including the lawmakers. It is inconceivable that so many people would choose this option if they agreed with you about its effects.

My group DOES on occasion balance bill - we had a private insurer get a local contract for one of the big casinos by submitting a ridiculous low ball bid, and then tried to make it work by refusing to contract with any of the local hospitals at anything that resembled market rates. Less than awesome all the way around.

Pretty much, corporate medicine (meaning stock market listed) should be illegal - WAY too many evil incentives.

MM MD

This just sounds like cognitive dissonance and all further explanations beyond the priors meritless.

How can so many elected officials be so lacking in morals? None of these bills help anyone outside of the richest and most secure Americans.

OK? Why the default assumption that election officials have morals and have self-interests beyond getting 'secure' Americans their tax money back?

This is the very transparent, very real, very opaque GOP agenda. Why the **** are you guys STILL coming up with convoluted explanations for how they don't understand?

I mean here is the conversation that is happening, pretty much almost playing out just like this...

GOP: people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, tax paying Americans are put upon, we can't afford this, deficits too high, it must stop. Here's a bill to roll back the welfare state and get money back to tax payers
You: Such confusion! Surely a well meaning group of people such as yourselves need an explanation for how this hurts people!
GOP: no we're really just taking the tax money back and we don't think the government should really be in the business of securing people's welfare, perhaps you would like to refer back to 40 years of think tank, talk radio and cable news talking points that are basically explicit about this very thing
You: This will really hurt us!
GOP: We don't really care.
You: How can this be happening?
David Sklasnky: I have no ability to determine what is happening in the empirical world but examining these arguments, I am forced to agree that the Republicans are simply incompetent and do not understand what they are passing.

Seriously, guys, it's sort of like Fly says. I hate to be a dick especially to ATC who is rightfully concerned about his fate. But get a newspaper subscription or something. The people cannot be any clearer about their goals and intentions. STOP. SAYING. THEY. ARE. CONFUSED. OR. INCOMPETENT.

This is what they want. Come to terms with it. It's not healthy to live in denial.

CBO's Secret: 73% Of Coverage Difference Between Obamacare & GOP Bills Driven By Individual Mandate

Quote:

For years, the CBO has been convinced—despite real-world experience to the contrary—that Obamacare’s individual mandate is the biggest reason why that law has increased the number of Americans with health insurance.

When Senator Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he mocked Hillary’s insistence on an individual mandate. “If a mandate was the solution,” he said at the time, “you could try that to solve homelessness by mandating that everybody buy a house. But the reason they don’t have a house is they don’t have the money.”

After Obama became president, the CBO told him not having an individual mandate would mean his health reform plan would cover 16 million fewer people. So Obama relented, and included an individual mandate in what we now call Obamacare.

Proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare from congressional Republicans and right-of-center think tanks disagreed on a number of things, but they were unanimous in repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate. The idea that Americans should be forced by the government to buy a private product, merely for the offense of being alive, is seen by all conservatives as a constitutional injury.

CBO has refused to disclose the impact of mandate repeal on coverage estimates

Arguably the most significant data point in the entire debate about the Senate health care bill has been the CBO’s claim that in 2026, 22 million fewer people would have health insurance under the Senate bill than under Obamacare.

Democrats have seized on this number to stoke fears about the bill’s impact; moderate Republicans, intimidated by the negative headlines, have been reluctant to support the bill.

But buried within the CBO’s reports is a key fact: the vast majority of those coverage “losses” occur because the GOP bills repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate. In its July 20 estimate of the most recent version of the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, or BCRA, CBO says that in 2018, 15 million fewer Americans will have health insurance under the bill, two years before its repeal of Obamacare’s insurance subsidies takes effect.
....

This week, I obtained from a congressional staffer the CBO’s estimates of the coverage impact of repealing the individual mandate, separate from the Senate bill’s other provisions. The estimate was built out of earlier work CBO did to model how repealing the mandate would affect the federal deficit. CBO projected then that repealing the mandate alone would lead to 15 million fewer insured U.S. residents in 2018, and 16 million fewer by 2026, though they did not publish those estimates.

16 million represents nearly three-fourths of the CBO’s estimate of the coverage difference between the GOP bills and Obamacare in 2026. That’s despite the fact that, as I noted in March, even Jonathan Gruber—one of Obamacare’s most famous advocates—believes Obamacare’s individual mandate is having little effect. In a 2016 article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Gruber and two co-authors wrote, “When we assessed the mandate’s detailed provisions, which include income-based penalties for lacking coverage and various specific exemptions from those penalties, we did not find that overall coverage rates responded to these aspects of the law.” (Emphasis added.)

Bold added. The humanity, 16 million people out of 22 million people will lose health insurance because they choose not to have health insurance.

DVaut: You mischaracterized my post. I'm not in denial about the GOP. I have a number of posts itf calling them spineless and/or morally bankrupt. My post is what it says it is: venting despair.

Lol just like I "choose" not to have a ferrari and a private jet.

McCain's dying wish is to make sure that millions needlessly die along with him.

The make a wish people were a bit confused but what can you do?

They are all really bad, but 1, 2 and 3 have at least a straightforward path to being fixed by voters inside of 4 years. If we go down road 4, then we need to replace both parties before anything happens, which will take much longer.

Personally, I missed the "adios pops in, posts a pro right wing link, gets it immediately refuted, and disappears into the ether" portion of the forum.

The only question is how long it will take the process to repeat itself.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Going with my theory that the Republicans repeal some things that cause the healthcare markets to implode and then run on fixing Obamacare in 2018 and 2020.

the way you stand up in defense of republicans despite all evidence to the contrary is pathetic and shameful, and you should be deeply ashamed of your ****ing self

"OH THEY COULDN'T POSSIBLY KNOW HOW BAD IT WOULD BE FOR POOR/OLD/YOUNG/MINORITY PEOPLE WHEN THEY GUT MEDICAID AND RE-INSTALL THE WORST ASPECTS OF THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM THAT OBAMACARE SOUGHT TO IMPROVE- NOT LIKE THE CBO, WHICH THEY'RE ACTIVELY TRYING TO DISMANTLE, HAS SCORED THEIR PROPOSALS ON A BUDGETARY AND PUBLIC HEALTH BASIS"

like seriously dude just stop posting in this forum, you've already lost any and all respect that anybody here ever had for you so why keep going? you're ****ing clueless at best, transparently dishonest at worst.

and then **** it up worse and run on it in 2022 and 24.

This is flat out wrong. I'm baffled that someone could be remotely following the last SEVEN years of republican calls for repeal and possibly deduce that the secret real reason is to give democrats an out on what it is ****ing named. Just no.

So theyre voting to proceed on the 2015 "clean repeal" bill that needs 60 votes. This is top form pandering and political cover.

It might even be long-game brilliant

This thread can un-wad their collective panties

Uh, I think the 2015 "clean repeal" was the one that needed 50.

Is anyone actually covering this? What site/channel are people watching?

Not CSPAN.