Tag: Affordable Care Act
McConnell Refuses to Say How Republicans will Replace Obamacare and Provide Universal Coverage
That is not the issue.
– Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, on Fox, of all places, refusing to answer for the third time Chris Wallace’s question, “What specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?”
Uptick in Support for Affordable Care Act after SOTUS Ruling
48%
Percentage of registered voters in a Rueters/Ispsos online survey who said they support the Affordable Care Act after it was upheld by the Supreme Court on Thursday. Support had previously been at 43 percent. Opposition fell by 5 percentage points, from 57 percent to 52 percent.
Six Years Ago, Mitt Romney Loved the Individual Mandate
But back then, it was Romneycare.
Congressional Republicans Go Squishy on Liberal Elements of Obamacare
The purpose of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is to expand the number of the insured in order to increase the revenue to the giant insurance corporations in order to offset the loss of revenue caused by the more progressive elements of the law, particularly the end of denials coverage due to preexisting conditions and allowing parents to cover children up to the age of 26.
All of this chicanery could be avoided if the insurance corporations would do what Republicans claim that only businesses can do: Solve the insurance crisis themselves by creating plans that are affordable to everyone.
The individual mandate was a right-wing invention. It was created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. But now Republicans in Congress are looking at polls showing that while voters still don’t like the right-wing individual mandate — which has been vilified in the conservative media for three years now — but do like the liberal provisions in the law, like ending denial of coverage and extending coverage to young-adult children.
Therefore, the GOP leadership in the House and Senate is signalling that, if the Republicans on the Supreme Court overturn the Affordable Care Act, as they are expected to do next month, congressional Republicans will propose new laws to reinstate the popular but revenue-draining aspects of the law but without any provision to replace the mandate as a vehicle to recoup the insurance corporations’ lost revenue:
Founding Fathers in the Washington and Adams Administrations Passed Laws Mandating the Purchase of Health Insurance
How can imposing mandates on the citizenry to buy stuff, including health insurance and guns, be jackbooted authoritarian “socialism” if the Founding Fathers did it?
Pres. George Washington had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandateIn making the legal case against Obamacare’s individual mandate, challengers have argued that the framers of our Constitution would certainly have found such a measure to be unconstitutional. Never mind that nothing in the text or history of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause indicates that Congress cannot mandate commercial purchases. The framers, challengers have claimed, thought a constitutional ban on purchase mandates was too “obvious” to mention. Their core basis for this claim is that purchase mandates are unprecedented, which they say would not be the case if it was understood this power existed.
Big Component of ‘Obamacare’ Comes Online – Insurers Now Required to Spend 80% of Premiums on Medical Care
On Friday, the federal government launched an element of the Affordable Care Act that is likely to have far-reaching consequences on the cost of health care in the United States in the form of new regulatory controls on how private health insurance companies spend the money they collect in premiums. Rick Ungar,a left-leaning specialist on health care policy who writes for the corporatist site, Forbes.com, explains:
That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80 percent of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85 percent for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.
This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. […]
Gingrich on Individual Mandate in 2005: ‘I’m in Favor of 300 Million-Payer System’
“I am very opposed to a single-payer system,” Newt Gingrich says in the video above, “but I’m actually in favor of a 300 million payer system.” The “300 million payer system” he referred to then has come to be known now as the “individual mandate,” or, alternately, “Obamacare’s Kenyan socialist boot on the neck of freedom.”
Gingrich continues, “Because one of my conclusions in the last six years, and founding the Center for Health Transformation, and looking at the whole system is, unless you have a hundred percent coverage, you can’t have the right preventive care, and you can’t have a rational system, because the cost-shifts are so irrational, and create second-order problems.”
Gingrich made these remarks in 2005 at the annual “Health Care Ceasefire,” on a panel with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and the moderator, former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux (DINO).
It should be pointed out that the individual mandate was developed by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thimk tank, as an alternative to a single-payer, Medicare-for-everyone system, which would virtually put the health insurance industry — a key source of funding for the Republican Party — out of business.
Like Mitt Romney, Gingrich supported the individual mandate until the Democrats incorporated it into the Affordable Care Act.
Partial transcript:
Rick Scott, Famous Fighter of ‘Obamacare,’ Enrolls Himself and His Wife in Taxpayer-Paid Health Care
Florida’s tea party Republican Gov. Rick Scott has made a point to flaunt the wealth that landed him in office (instead of jail).
One of his first, likely illegal, moves was to sell the state plane that transported his predecessors while on state business. Why? Because Scott didn’t need the taxpayers’ jet, he has his own helicopter and access to his friends’ Lear Jets.
Equally played up was Scott’s decision not to accept a salary. After all, he made so many millions out of defrauding the government on padded Medicare billing in his businesses that he doesn’t need the piddly $130,000 that me and my fellow residents could provide him. Heck, Scott spent $76 million of his “own” money just to buy the office.
But there are some things that even Rick Scott needs help with. Scott, who focused his campaign and every FOX News appearance he’s ever made, on getting rid of the Affordable Healthcare Act which would provide health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans – and Floridians – is accepting our help to pay for his health insurance.
