Maverick's World

The Daily Donald 5/5/2017

Yesterday the GOP passed a bill to repeal Obamacare and introduce TrumpCare. The bill was passed in violation of the GOPs own publicly stated house rules. The general public was not allowed to review the text of the bill. The bill passed with a narrow majority of 4 votes. The GOP currently has 25 more seats in the Congress than the Democratic party.

The few details of the bill that were available to the public indicated that TrumpCare is basically a sweetly worded plan to commit genocide. In addition to repealing the bulk of the Obamacare coverage, the TrumpCare package makes substantial cuts to medicaid (something Trump explicitly promised he would not  do during the election). It also leaves room for insurers to deny coverage to people with "pre-existing conditions". Going by past history, insurers have used such denial provisions to come up with innovative reasons to deny coverage.

From the broad spread of measures proposed, the rural poor (the same folks who voted from Trump and the GOP) will be hardest hit. The GOP seems to be clinging to the hope that they will be too stupid to get it or too high on meth to remember that Trump and GOP screwed them over. For all I know the GOP+Trump may be right.

I just don't know how to respond to Kentucky voters who took all the benefits of the ACA, but voted for Trump because he was going to end "Obamacare". There truly is no cure for stupid and GOP/Trump seem to be keen to drain the stupid people of their last drop of blood.

The bill now proceeds to the Senate and then back again to a joint session for resolution of any divergences. I don't know if Trump will follow through on any of those things and actually pass this into law, but my guess is that it is too late to prevent the collapse of ACA/Obamacare.

It is difficult to predict the exact consequences of an ACA/Obamacare collapse. The thing is that Obamacare/ACA was based on the idea that everyone shares the health burden. The GOP/TrumpCare ideology is that you pay for what happens to you and fuck everyone else. This kind of leaves people with higher health expenses in a bad place. My guess is that TrumpCare will hit older people, children and people with chronic health issues. I think this will make the substance abuse issues worse and there will be a drop in life-expectancy if corrective measures are not put into place. This is basically a Nazi healthcare plan.

People seem to think that everything will be fine because they have company sponsored healthcare. I think that works as long as we don't have an economic crash. If there is a massive correction (as I expect there will be), most people will find healthcare unaffordable. This bill already cuts Medicaid extensions that were made during the ACA/Obamacare passage so even people who think they are covered under entitlement programs will take a major hit.

It seems that neither Donald Trump nor the GOP cares about the poor, even the stupid ones. I guess neither group cares about re-election. Probably the RIS is paying them enough right now to not have to worry about future income. The thing is I wonder how these people are going to pay for personal security, once you start cutting off people's healthcare - especially those Second Amendment types - you basically going to end up paying top dollar for personal security.

Given how hastily this was pulled together and passed, I wonder why the GOP violated its own rules. It almost feels like they didn't want to do it and passed a bill that was just enough to make Trump look good. Doesn't make sense to do this unless you know you can offset the political corrosion that will follow in its wake.

Wonder what is coming next week? (Lol - just kidding... already know Sally Yates is up next week).

posted by maverick @ 7:22 AM