Tag Archives: GOP

medical news

Trump tries to stampede GOP into replacing the ACA

I think I understand what Donald J. Trump is trying to do to persuade his Republican colleagues in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The president said a vote on Friday is the drop-dead event. If House of Representatives Republicans do not have the votes to enact the GOP alternative, then that’s it.

The Affordable Care Act will stand. President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy initiative will remain. The president will move on. He’s done negotiating.

Don’t you get it?

Trump is now trying to persuade balky Freedom Caucus Republicans to vote for the American Health Care Act, or else face the prospect of failing to deliver on the president’s top-drawer campaign promise.

Will he do it? I have no clue. Whether he goes through with his threat likely depends on whether someone gets his attention long enough to persuade him to keep up the fight.

The AHCA is not an improvement over the ACA. The Congressional Budget Office says the AHCA will throw 24 million Americans off their health care plans. GOP lawmakers have been hearing from their constituents for weeks now about how much they hate the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

Trump throws down the gauntlet

Now it has come down to whether House Republicans actually care enough about health care “reform” to enact an alternative to what’s already on the books. It’s also an open question about whether the president actually cares about health care — at all!

Does he want to enact an actual improvement over the ACA or does he simply want to replace a health care plan promoted and pushed forward by his immediate predecessor? Does he really care about what the alternative contains?

Trump said he is done negotiating with his fellow Republicans. Either pass what’s on the table, he is saying, or we’ll just forget the whole thing.

What a way to lead.

medical news, national news, political news

GOP turns tables on Democrats

John Boehner was a year away from becoming speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, but he stood on the floor of the House to express his intense anger at his Democratic colleagues.

They were rushing the Affordable Care Act into law, the then-House minority leader declared. Democrats were shoving this “down our throats,” he hollered. He bellowed that no one had “read the bill!”

The ACA passed with no Republican votes.

Now the GOP is in charge of Congress. Boehner became speaker in 2011 and served until 2015. Republicans sought to repeal the ACA many times during Boehner’s tenure. They failed.

Now it’s Paul Ryan’s House. Speaker Ryan is working with a Republican president to enact something called the American Health Care Act.

What is the GOP strategy being mapped out by Ryan and Donald Trump. Why, they’re trying to rush this to a vote. They’re trying to “shove this down the throats” of conservative lawmakers who oppose it. They aren’t bothering to persuade Democrats, who are lined up en masse to oppose the AHCA, just as the GOP locked arms against the ACA in 2010.

Is it good enough now for Republicans to do the very thing they accused Democrats — with good reason, candidly — of doing?

Of course it isn’t!

The president declared that repealing and replacing the ACA was his top priority. The House was supposed to vote tonight on the AHCA. Ryan backed away from the vote. It’s now scheduled for Friday.

The president says a Friday vote — up or down — will be the end of his negotiating a replacement for the ACA. He said today he’s going to “move on” to other issues. Whether he does will depend on who gets to him. Trump does have this way of changing his mind.

Has there been sufficient comment and analysis on this Republican alternative to ACA, which was trotted out less than a month ago?

Nope. Not even close.

One difference between now and 2010: You aren’t going to hear the current House minority leader, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, screaming on the House floor about not having enough time to consider this health care insurance replacement. Rep. Pelosi is actually chuckling at what she calls the president’s “rookie mistakes.”

That’s the major difference. The tactics of today’s Republicans certainly resemble those employed by yesterday’s Democrats.

medical news

ACA just might survive GOP in-fighting

The Affordable Care Act has been called as good as dead, a goner, a “miserable failure.”

The Republican majority in Congress fought it tooth and nail for the past seven years. Then a Republican got elected president in 2016 and the GOP became downright giddy at the prospect of repealing the ACA, President Barack Obama’s chief domestic achievement.

Then it happened.

The Republicans cobbled together something called the American Health Care Act. Then they sent it to the Congressional Budget Office for some “scoring.” The CBO then delivered some numbers the GOP didn’t want to hear: 24 million Americans would lose health insurance, the CBO declared.

The GOP’s response? The CBO doesn’t know what it’s talking about, congressional leaders said.

But isn’t the CBO the gold standard for determining these matters?

Now the TEA Party wing of the GOP is rebelling against the AHCA. It’s “Obamacare Light,” they say. They hate the AHCA. Of course, they hate the ACA even more, which is no surprise, given that a Democratic president happened to be its founding father.

Oh, and Democrats? They’re unified against any effort to repeal the ACA and replace it with something that relies heavily on “tax credits” for Americans to buy insurance; Democrats call it code for “tax relief for the wealthiest Americans.”

Which brings me to this point: If the Republican Party’s congressional elders cannot come up with an alternative to the ACA that all its members can endorse, can this party actually govern?

medical news

Politics, the art of the payback

The game of politics can be called the game of payback.

Consider the process that has produced something called the American Health Care Act, the Republican-sponsored overhaul of the Affordable Care Act, which the GOP faithful says it wants to repeal.

In 2009, Republicans griped themselves hoarse over the way congressional Democrats “shoved the ACA down our throats.” They bitched that Democrats crafted the ACA in the “dead of night” and then, using their then-congressional majority, got it approved without a single Republican vote.

Fast-forward to 2017. Republicans now are in charge. They control Congress and one of their own occupies the White House. What do they do? They produce the AHCA also in the “dead of night” and then they try to cram it down Democrats’ throats without knowing how much it’s going to cost.

You see, the Congressional Budget Office — the non-partisan agency — hasn’t “scored” the AHCA. We don’t know how much impact it will have on the annual federal budget deficit.

Was it wrong for Democrats to flummox Republicans with a health care overhaul? Sure. Is it wrong now for Republicans do essentially the same thing to their “friends” on the other side of the aisle? Absolutely.

This is yet another demonstration of how much of a contact sport politics can become.

As for the CBO “scoring” of the AHCA, how about waiting to see how much it would cost Americans before putting it to a vote?

national news, political news

Congress sees spike in approval rating … what gives?

 

Given my occasional fascination with public opinion polls, I want to share an observation about RealClearPolitics’ average of polls.

It is that public approval of Congress has spiked up about 10 percentage points since Donald J. Trump became president.

Why is that? I think it’s a legitimate question. I might have the answer, although I could be coming at this from deep left field.

It well might be that the public sees the president of the United States as the greater threat to the nation’s stability. RCP’s average of polls puts Congress’s approval rating at more than 22 percent. During the eight years that Barack Obama was president, the RCP poll average usually pegged Congress’s approval in the low teens, occasionally dipping into single digits.

Might it be that the public saw Congress less favorably during President Obama’s time because respondents were concerned about the continual obstruction orchestrated by the Republican Party leadership?

Moreover, might it now be that the RCP polling reflects a public view that Congress can act as a check against the current president’s reckless rhetoric and fickle policy pronouncements?

Just thinking out loud, dear reader.

Your thoughts?

national news, political news

Get ready for more impeachment talk

Impeaching a president of the United States isn’t for the faint of heart. It requires a stout gut among those who bring it, not to mention the target of such a drastic action.

The bar must be high. It must have a solid basis on which to make such a move.

Where am I going with this? I have this sinking feeling that the current president well might find himself in the crosshairs of those who want to bring such an action against him.

We’re hearing a growing — but still muted — rumbling in D.C. about the prospect of Donald J. Trump facing impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives. I’m attaching an item from The Hill in which former Labor Secretary Robert Reich — an acknowledged political liberal — has lined out at least four impeachable offense already committed by the president.

Here it is.

Reich says that Trump’s accusation that Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower offices constitutes an impeachable offense, saying the president has recklessly accused his predecessor of committing a felony. He notes that the Constitution prohibits president from taking money from foreign governments; Trump, Reich alleges, has done so by “steering foreign delegations” to hotels he owns. Reich contends that Trump violates the First Amendment’s provision against establishing a state religion by banning travelers from Muslim countries into the United States. Reich also says the First Amendment bans any abridgment of a free press, but Trump has labeled the media the “enemy of the people.”

There’s a fifth potential cause, which Reich has asserted. It involves the possibility that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian government officials to swing the election in the president’s favor. Reich said such activity, if proven, constitutes “treason.”

Will any of this come to pass? I have no clue.

Think of the politics of it. Trump is a Republican; both congressional chambers are controlled by the GOP. Will the Republican House majority bring articles of impeachment to a vote, no matter how seriousness of whatever charges are considered?

The collusion matter strikes me as the most serious and the most likely to align Republicans along with Democrats in considering whether to impeach the president. I am not suggesting there is, indeed, proof of such collusion.

Remember as well that the GOP-led House managed to impeach a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in 1998 on three counts relating to his seedy relationship with that White House intern. Conviction in the Senate, though, required a super majority of senators; the GOP fell far short on all three counts. Thus, the president was acquitted.

They based that impeachment on the president’s failure to tell the truth under oath to a federal grand jury that questioned him about the affair. He broke the law, Republicans said. There was your “impeachable offense,” they argued.

My major concern about the Clinton impeachment was whether the president’s offense had a direct impact on his office. It did not. Any of the issues that Secretary Reich lists, however, certainly do have a direct impact on the president’s ability to perform his duties.

The bar for whatever might occur with the current president is set even higher than it was for President Clinton, given that the president and the congressional majorities are of the same party.

You might not believe this, but I do not prefer an impeachment to occur. I do, though, want the unvarnished truth to be revealed about what the president thinks he can do with — and to — the exalted office he occupies.

If the truth is as ugly as some of us fear, then Congress should know how to repair the damage.

medical news

AHCA may be DOA in U.S. Senate

Hey! Wait a second!

Didn’t the Republican majority in Congress promise to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act? Didn’t they assure us they would produce a plan that would provide health insurance for Americans at a cost they can afford?

Wasn’t that their solemn pledge? Didn’t they all but guarantee it once they won the presidency and retained control of both chambers of Congress?

Hah! Guess again. It seems that the American Health Care Act that the GOP rolled out this week doesn’t go far enough, according to the TEA Party wing of the Republican Party. They might launch a big intraparty fight to derail the AHCA.

These right-wingers are making GOP moderates look better all the time.

House Speaker Paul Ryan assures us that he’ll get 218 votes to approve the AHCA. The problem appears to be in the Senate, which has a very small margin for error among GOP senators. Only three of them need to bolt to drive the whole health care overhaul into the ditch.

There appears to be a rebellion building.

As I look at the proposed legislation, it seems to resemble the Affordable Care Act at some level. It does do away with the “mandate” provision that would penalize Americans who fail to have health insurance. It emphasizes tax credits for Americans seeking to buy insurance.

Some Senate GOP moderates don’t like it, either. There also are the conservatives who want the ACA to be repealed fully and that the AHCA doesn’t wipe the ACA off the face of the planet.

I am one who won’t be disappointed if this GOP overhaul doesn’t work. While I understand that the ACA needs tinkering, some fine-tuning, I would say only that we should simply tinker and fine-tune what we have on the books.

Oh, man … the great Winston Churchill had it right when he declared that democracy was the “worst form of government” ever devised — but was better than anything else.

If only he were around today to watch the U.S. Congress tie itself in knots over this health care insurance matter.

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AHCA to replace ACA … at what cost?

Finally, the Republicans who run the legislative branch of government have produced a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act.

I will need some time to digest all of it. It’s a complicated issue, one that requires a lot more brain wattage that I can generate at the moment.

It’s called the American Health Care Act. It’s supposed to be better than the ACA — and no, I won’t refer to the ACA by its colloquial name that attaches it to the name of the 44th president of the United States.

Complications abound with AHCA.

It removes the government mandates that require citizens to have health insurance; it relies heavily on tax credits to enable Americans to purchase insurance; it doesn’t monkey around with pre-existing conditions; it allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans.

The big question? Its cost.

How will Congress pay for this new program? We haven’t yet heard that explanation.

President Obama has said he’d welcome changes to the ACA that improve it. Yes, we now have a replacement idea on the table. It took Republicans eight years to come up with this alternative. They yapped and yammered during the two terms of the president’s tenure about how “terrible” the ACA was for health care, while pledging to repeal it once they got one of their own into the White House.

Here we are.

The debate will go forward now on whether the AHCA is better than the ACA.

The bottom line — for me, at least — is whether the 20 million or so Americans who now have insurance will be able to keep it at a cost they can afford.

national news, political news

George W. Bush gets back into the game

Welcome back to the political arena, Mr. President … even if you remain on the edges of it.

George W. Bush, who maintained stone-cold silence during Barack Obama’s presidency, has now decided to weigh in on some of the issues dogging the current occupant of the White House.

He is being a gentleman about it, but one cannot help but believe that his genteel approach to criticism masks an attitude with a bit more bite.

NBC’s “Today” host Matt Lauer interviewed the 43rd president this morning. Bush made quite clear that he disagrees with Donald J. Trump’s view that the media are “the enemy of the people” and that the war against terrorists isn’t a war against Islam.

The former president had made a pact that he wouldn’t criticize President Obama. He said the job of being president is difficult enough without former presidents weighing in with their own view of how to run the country. If Obama wanted his help, Bush said he could pick up the phone, call and ask for it.

As National Public Radio reported: “Lauer noted that President Bush — who took the country to war in Iraq and who presided over an economic crisis — faced plenty of criticism from the media while in office. Lauer asked Bush, ‘Did you ever consider the media to be the enemy of the American people?’

“Bush chuckled and then answered: ‘I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy. We need an independent media to hold people like me to account. Power can be very addictive. And it can be corrosive. And it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power, whether it be here or elsewhere.'”

As for Trump’s assertion that the enemy are “radical Islamic terrorists,” Bush said: “You see, I understood right off the bat, Matt, that this is an ideological conflict, and people who murder the innocent are not religious people. They want to advance an ideology, and we have faced those kinds of ideologues in the past.”

I cannot get past the personal aspect of what the former president might think of the current president. It was Trump, you’ll recall, who called the Iraq War a “disaster.” He also launched intensely personal insults at the ex-president’s brother, Jeb, who was one of 15 Republican Party primary opponents that Trump vanquished on his way to the GOP nomination.

Bush didn’t attend the GOP convention; neither did Jeb, nor did the men’s father, former President George H.W. Bush.

Blood, as they say, is thicker than, well, almost any other substance.

No one should expect George W. Bush to throttle up his return to politics into a full-time endeavor. Still, I happen to one who welcomes his world view while the current president struggles to get past serious questions about national security and whether the Russians helped him get elected.

national news, political news

What a difference a year makes for CPAC

It’s been said that a “week is a lifetime in politics.”

So is a month, or perhaps an hour.

If any of those time measurements amount to a lifetime, how does a year compute?

I pose the question because of what transpired this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where Donald J. Trump took the place by storm, prompting rousing applause and cheers, declaring that CPAC finally had one of their own as president.

Do you recall what CPAC speakers were saying a year ago to equally rousing cheers and applause? They were calling Trump a phony conservative. You had the likes of U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz talking trash about Trump. The crowd ate it up, swallowed it whole.

Trump then went on to vanquish those two, and a host of other Republicans to take command of the GOP and ultimately to become elected president of the United States.

What gives? How fickle are these CPACers? I believe they’re quite fickle. You see, the president is still the same guy who got the raspberry a year ago.

Trump was supposed to speak to CPAC a year ago. Then he backed out, fearing his immigration policies would provoke disturbances at the conference … or so he said.

CPAC conservatives used to embrace free trade. They used to consider Russia to be a mortal enemy of the United States. They frowned on politicians who led less-than-upstanding personal lives.

Trump — the thrice-married admitted philanderer, free trade foe and supposed pal of Vladimir Putin — gets elected and then stands before CPAC to soak up all the cheers that once went to other Republicans.

What on this ever-lovin’ Earth am I missing?