Trump And His Uber-Wealthy Administration…
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It’s no secret that Trump, who brags about his immense wealth, has filled his administration with fellow uber-wealthy people. The billionaires include Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose family started a marketing company; Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a venture capitalist who has focused on buying businesses in distress; and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, hedge fund executive and Hollywood financier.
Trump and GOP hypocrisy in a nutshell.
The rest complete with video HERE .
GOP and Health-Care Mandates
“You’re just looking for a handout,” mothers! Photo: Universal Pictures
America’s conservatives and republicans are interested in ideology and selfish interests. Not the he general welfare of the American people. They haven’t been for the last 40 years. It’s just becoming more pronounced.
BTW, selfish interests are NOT the same as rational self-interest.
The single most unifying idea to change Obamacare among conservatives is to eliminate the law’s “essential health benefits.” These burdensome mandates of which treatments insurance has to cover make Obamacare too expensive, conservatives say. Their problem is that the list of required essential health benefits includes actually only, well, essential ones. If the list did include any frivolous treatments, like cosmetic surgery or some goofy alternative-medicine quack scheme, that’s all you’d hear about. But it doesn’t. So the single example conservatives come up with, over and over, is maternity care. Today it appears in Charles Krauthammer’s column:
Even more significant would be stripping out the heavy-handed Obamacare coverage mandate that dictates what specific medical benefits must be included in every insurance policy in the country, regardless of the purchaser’s desires or needs.
Best to mandate nothing. Let the customer decide. A 60-year-old couple doesn’t need maternity coverage. Why should they be forced to pay for it? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need lactation services.
The thing to understand is that mandating covering maternity care doesn’t affect the total cost of insurance. It only changes the distribution of the costs. It’s not like Charles Krauthammer’s insurance forces him to actually go through childbirth. It merely means that his premiums help pay for other people’s maternity care.
If health insurance could sell plans that did not cover childbirth, then young women of childbearing age would be the only people who bought plans that covered it. And having a baby would be extremely expensive. Indeed, in the unregulated market that existed before Obamacare, it was common for women to buy insurance they believed covered their childbirth but in fact did not. In 2009, Sarah Wildman described her not-atypical experience of getting a $20,000 bill from her insurance company for a standard delivery.
And it is true that, if we let Krauthammer buy insurance that didn’t cover maternity care, that change would, on its own, reduce Krauthammer’s premiums. That reform would make sense if you think of having a baby as some kind of yuppie extravagance. This notion was, not long ago, considered so self-evidently absurd that it could be the premise of a Simpsons joke:
Homer Simpson: I can’t fake an interest in this, and I’m an expert at faking an interest in your kooky projects.
Marge Simpson: What kooky projects?
Homer Simpson: You know, the painting class, the first-aid course, the whole Lamaze thing.
Now the entire Republican Party is Homer Simpson.
Truer words have never been spoken.
Continue reading HERE.
Right-Wing Conservative Boilerplate, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.)
We know we shouldn’t have, but, we just couldn’t help responding to Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) opinion piece in THE HILL. A Trump surrogate and highly partisan right-wing conservative his boilerplate made our blood boil. Truth became stranger to republican party years ago and Trump and his surrogates have simply heightened and accelerated the falsehoods.
Below is quoted text followed by our harsh and often sarcastic criticism of his opinions.
I supported the American Health Care Act last Friday because it was the right vote. I didn’t begin as a big fan, but I ended up satisfied that America needed this bill to start a process to repair our healthcare system.
Yes, I’m a conservative. I pal around with those liberty-loving Freedom Caucus guys. I get better grades on conservative scorecards than I ever received in college. And frankly, if you asked the Speaker, I think he’d tell you I’m a bit of a right-wing rabble-rouser.
Well, that is your problem dude, you’re a partisan right-winger that simply happens to believe party and BS rise above what is right for the people of this nation. And, your primary interest, like that of 99.9% of partisan right wingers is to look out for big pharma, big insurance companies, and the very wealthy.
I supported the AHCA, and will continue to support it, because a yes vote is the principled, conservative position.
The repeal of ObamaCare stands as one of Republicans’ greatest, most enduring promises to the nation, the fulfilment of which matters to our livelihood and our country’s future. As ObamaCare continues its death spiral, families across the nation face unaffordable premiums and deductibles and severely limited healthcare choices.
Yup, number one reason you mention is because it is a conservative position. The mention that it is principled is simply right-wing boilerplate BS.
Since 2010, individual premiums have gone up 27 percent and deductibles have soared. Every day, my office fields calls from families who can’t afford to pay their $12,000 deductible, effectively making them uninsured. Meanwhile, several counties in my district only have one remaining insurer in the ObamaCare marketplace.
Much agreement that this is legal highway robbery. Something the republicans give a wink and a nod to. Between big pharma and insurers American’s are getting raped. And the bill you support does NOTHING to correct that. However, 24 million will be thrown off of the insurance they now have under the ACA. But, again, conservative really don’t give a damn.
Our mandate, our duty to the people, is to improve upon the current mess. And the American Health Care Act is an improvement, one that came with three parts.
The first part, a promising reform of the Medicaid program, should be cheered by all Republicans. The bill’s per capita allotment would force spending restraint and reform within the Medicaid system.
The next part was the actual repeal of ObamaCare, those strangling regulations of the insurance market that only help some of the people they’re supposed to help — another policy win for the conservative cause.
The final part of the AHCA was a replacement for ObamaCare, and it’s with this third part that Republicans disagreed.
Yada, yada, yada. Has anyone yet seen a credible source document showing that the bill you support is an improvement for the American people in any way shape or form? If there is one why not cite and link to it? We suspect it’s because it doesn’t exist.
You talk about mandate, well dude, there is NO MANDATE. You then mention a win for CONSERVATIVES, winning is the only damn thing you folks care about. Whether or not it is right and good for the people of America is really of no concern to you or the republican party.
I’ll be clear: I criticized the process we followed to arrive at this bill. We went too fast. We held hearings, but they were not recent and failed to create a consensus in this country. We left out important provisions.
But ultimately, this bill was worth supporting.
The president has been good to conservatives. In fact, much of his first several weeks in office have been a boon for the conservative cause: from a strong set of Cabinet picks to a rock star Supreme Court pick to a set of executive orders and regulatory repeals that undo the most dangerous parts of President Obama’s pen-and-phone legacy.
So, it’s about a “rock star” conservative SCOTUS pick, interesting choice of words, a strong set of cabinet picks, some like DeVos who are highly unqualified, and being good to conservatives, Dude, you’re simply a right-wing partisan signing onto a horribly flawed effort because of, Party Loyalty and Raw Ideology.
BTW, President Obama, as flawed as he may or may not have been stand heads and shoulders above your party’s leader and pretend POTUS.
Moreover, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has been good to conservatives. He negotiated in good faith and offered real, conservative changes to the bill. We won provisions that allowed states to impose a work requirement for Medicaid and choose optional block grant funding for the program. We added a roll-back of mandated essential health benefits.
Yup, all you point to above are items that will impact and hurt those least equipped to absorb the hit. Again, republicans, especially the most right-wing conservative ones modus operandi.
The president has earned our support. Our party leaders deserve our faith. The AHCA vote in the House would have been the first part of a three-pronged approach to repeal and replace ObamaCare, the first stop on a long journey towards a better, more conservative healthcare system. I trust President Trump to orchestrate a conservative final outcome.
LMAO! On what rational grounds can anyone make the above statements and keep a straight face? NONE is the answer. There is nothing rational or true about what you said above.
In fact, we have to trust the president and party leaders, because the law requires a meandering path through Senate rules and administrative action before we can arrive at a better system.
Why yes Rep Buck, republicans must have blind faith in the most arguably dishonest man and accomplished con artist to ever have run for the presidency and won. That and a republican majority that is even less trusted than our pretend POTUS.
We can’t take anymore of Buck’s boilerplate. Find the closing of the article HERE.