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Kill #Obamacare? Trump voters won’t care. But we will — in 2020
Posted on April 2, 2019 Leave a Comment
No doubt you’ve heard about Donald Trump’s latest move in his series of vindictive acts against President Obama — a new attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Seemingly out of the blue, and against the advice of his own attorney general and Health and Human Services secretary, the Trump administration now says it will […]
We need one final push to bury Trumpcare 4.0
Posted on September 21, 2017 Leave a Comment
Just like the zombies tromping out of the graveyard in Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Senate Republicans have returned in a last-ditch effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The big difference is that Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy, et al don’t dance as well as the undead. But the Graham-Cassidy bill could leave just […]
The Obamacare repeal attempt that just won’t die
Posted on August 7, 2017 Leave a Comment
Just when you thought your health insurance was safe. The Senate failed to pass a plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act—their attempts at “replacements” were too pathetic to even qualify as such. Many Republican senators have seemingly thrown in the towel. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declared that it’s time to move on from […]
How to improve Obamacare: If Republicans were smart, they’d listen
Posted on July 3, 2017 Leave a Comment
Imagine an alternate universe in which members of both parties work together to develop changes to the Affordable Care Act to make the law work more efficiently, cover more Americans, and cost the government less. I know it’s ludicrous to even propose this in these embattled times, especially with Republican lawmakers’ heads stuck firmly in […]
Obamacare kept people out of bankruptcy. Trumpcare wouldn’t.
Posted on May 3, 2017 Leave a Comment
As House Republicans continue to scramble for votes to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, new findings from Consumer Reports show one of the little-heralded but important outcomes of the law — a lot fewer people went bankrupt because they couldn’t pay medical bills. Fifty percent fewer, in fact. Because the ACA removed lifetime […]
Trumpcare is dead. Now let’s start fixing Obamacare (UPDATE)
Posted on March 25, 2017 Leave a Comment
In a failure as epic as Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan lost soundly on a central part of Trump’s 2016 campaign and an issue in Republican campaigns for the past seven years — repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. You might even say they got “shellacked.” In the […]
What will happen to Trumpcare? Leave it for the vultures
Posted on March 13, 2017 Leave a Comment
House Speaker Paul Ryan has introduced a real vulture of a bill to replace Obamacare. I was going to say “turkey” of a bill, but that’s not fair to turkeys, which many of us enjoy at Thanksgiving. This bill is more like a scavenger that wants to loom over and starve the Affordable Care Act […]
Why Democrats need to speak with one voice on Obamacare
Posted on January 9, 2017 2 Comments
You can say all you want about Republican obstructionism, or the fact that getting Democrats to agree is like herding cats. The point is, when one side speaks in unison, the point coming from that side is solidified. When comments from the other side are scattershot, they get lost. Which side has been speaking with […]
Is GOP finally abandoning Obamacare repeal?
Posted on April 18, 2015 Leave a Comment
Either some form of sanity or the acceptance of political reality apparently has taken hold in at least some members of the Republican Party. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, GOP congressional leaders are dropping their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and instead are turning their focus to issues like […]
Obamacare working well five years later
Posted on March 23, 2015 Leave a Comment
On the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the health care law is meeting many of its goals. Millions more people have health insurance. The health care spending curve is bending, meaning costs are not going up as fast as they used to. Insurance premiums are being held in check. Jobs […]