TrumpCare: What it Is and How it Passed

By paulgibson51 on May 6, 2017 • ( 0 )

First a Tax Plan Wealth Grab and now a Health Plan that will throw 24-27M Americans out of care, 54M by 2025. A Quinnipiac poll showed that only 17% of Americans supported the first TrumpCare, so they went and made it much, much worse and the House passed it without even seeing the Congressional Budget Office analysis. SNL policy development. Read on.

TrumpCare: A Travesty

Just how bad is this bill? At the end of this post, the 3-minute video of Massachusetts Democratic Congressman McGovern shreds the bill and the process nicely, Bernie Sanders does so in a couple sentences, and a new poll underscores just how thin the ice is for the GOP as their votes will be remembered during the mid-terms. The take-away for all of us here in NM is it is incumbent upon all of us to stay active and more importantly to engage others, organize and prepare for 2018. How? Organize locally, engage, educate, and activate. And become part of the growing grassroots movement. It just may be time to demand justice and go get it. On June 10th from 1pm-6pm, Retake Our Democracy will launch Justice Santa Fe, an ongoing outreach, engagement and organizing effort. We’ll have more details on this campaign next week. But for now, a brief tour of TrumpCare. Read on:

Nothing brings a smile of satisfaction to your face like consigning thousands to death and tens of millions to health insecurity

The Process: From a Truthout article, The GOP Declares War on Sick People: The Moral Depravity of Trumpcare’s Passage: “The biggest victims of this recklessness are the people who can least afford it: those who are sick and those who are poor. The hastily passed law, which wasn’t scored by the Congressional Budget Office and was barely read by members of Congress, calls for $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, allows for discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions and is projected to result in 24 million Americans losing their insurance.” And what did the GOP do upon gutting coverage for 24 million Americans? Also from Truthout: “After the House passed the bill, they threw a party to celebrate. President Trump canceled a trip to New York City to host. Americans were at home worrying about the future. Many took to Twitter with heart-breaking stories about various illnesses using the trending hashtag #IAmaPreExistingCondition. Meanwhile, the people who created this sense of dread were bused to the Rose Garden to exchange hugs and high-fives, pose for selfies and drink beer.”

The Bill: Bernie Sanders summed up the problems with the bill this way, “The bill that Republicans passed today is an absolute disaster. It really has nothing to do with health care. It has everything to do with an enormous shift of wealth from working people to the richest Americans. This bill would:

throw 24 million people off of health insurance – including thousands of Vermonters;
cut Medicaid by $880 billion;
defund Planned Parenthood;
substantially increase premiums on older Americans; and
provide a $300 billion tax break to the top 2 percent and hundreds of billions more to the big drug and insurance companies that are ripping off the American people.”

One of the most shameful elements of the bill is the creation of an $8B ‘risk pool’ purportedly to provide coverage for those with pre-existing conditions. But the amount is entirely inadequate and puts states in the position of putting those with pre-existing conditions in separate pools of coverage that draw on this figure. How will states deal with a woefully inadequate funding for the risk pool? From Truthout again. “In Texas, for example, a patient with hemophilia would have to pay premiums for an entire year before the high-risk pool would begin to cover his treatment,” explains Sarah Kliff at Vox. “That’s a big deal: Hemophilia is an expensive condition to treat, with medical bills upward of $150,000 annually.” The Truthout article is extraordinary. It presents the human side of this issue, both in terms of laying bare the incredibly inhumane elements of the bill and its supporters and in terms of those who would suffer should it pass the Senate. Click here to read the full article.

White House Analysts See It Differently. But certainly the White House analysts see this differently. And indeed they do: Their conclusion is that even more people would be thrown out of coverage. An internal White House analysis concluded that House Republicans’ Obamacare replacement bill, called the American Health Care Act, will cause up to 26 million people to lose their insurance coverage over the next decade, White House analysts also found that coverage losses would include “17 million for Medicaid, six million in the individual market and three million in employer-based plans.” The analysis also concluded that a total of 54 million people would be uninsured by 2026, roughly twice as many people currently uninsured under the Affordable Care Act. click here for the full report.

The Polls. A Quinnipiac poll from February found that only 17% of Americans favored the “better” version of Trumpcare. A new McClatchy-Marist Poll has found that 67% of Americans are opposed to a full repeal of Obamacare as is being pushed by Republicans in Congress and President Trump. According to the McClatchy-Marist Poll, some of the primary findings include:

“67% of Americans do not think Congress should completely repeal the Affordable Care Act….Wh
21% of U.S. residents want Congress to let Obamacare stand in its current form,
39% think the law should be changed so that it can do more. Only
7% want the law changed so that it does less.
29% believe Obamacare should be repealed completely. Four percent are unsure….
76% of Americans want the component which allows children to remain on their parents’ health insurance policy until the age of 26 to remain a law.
72% would like the government to keep in place the provision which provides federal subsidies to lower income people to pay for health insurance,
69% also support prohibiting insurance companies from denying health coverage because of pre-existing conditions.”

Click here for the full results.

Not to worry, Senate Republicans are already pronouncing the House version of the bill dead on arrival. The Senate version of the legislation will have to be more moderate, but once the Senate changes the House bill, it will require 60 votes to pass. In other words: DOA. But this post will be archived and reprised as we move toward 2018.

In closing, if you want a laugh, no actually another laugh as this healthnon-care bill is laughable, check out the Colbert monolog that hilariously shreds Trump, with the last minute being spectacular….and being the piece that led to an online effort to get him fired. Below that is a video of US Democratic Representative McGovern shredding the TrumpCare bill and the non-process used to get it through the House. If you only have time for one, watch McGovern as it is very substantive.

In solidarity,

Paul & Roxanne