Tag: Affordable Care Act

GOP Voted to Delay Employer Mandate One Year Ago

Jon Ponder

The infographic above shows how House Republicans voted last July on H.R. 2667, a bill to require Pres. Obama to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate.

Now, just one year later, these same House Republicans are suing Pres. Obama in order to lay the groundwork to impeach him on grounds that he delayed individual mandate.

This is, of course, hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy. The individual mandate, which forms the basis of the Affordable Care Act — and which Republicans now despise — was a Republican invention. It was developed at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that has sponsored Rush Limbaugh’s show, and first implemented by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, in 2006 when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Here is a repost of Romney himself describing how he worked with Heritage to come up with the plan that is the basis for Obamacare:

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Rockefeller Draws GOP Ire for Linking Racism to ACA Opposition

Buck Banks

I think it’s very important to take a long view at what’s going on. I’ll be able to dig up some emails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good–especially from people who made up their mind that they don’t want it to work because they don’t like the president. Maybe he’s of the wrong color, something of that sort. I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true.

— Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), suggesting that President Obama’s race “factored into opposition to the Affordable Care Act, sparking outrage on the part of one of his Republican colleagues,” National Journal reports.

Obamacare Saves Fox Viewer’s Life – ‘I Probably Would Have Ended up Falling over Dead,’ He Says

Jon Ponder

Lumberman Dean Angstadt tells one of the more dramatic stories about the impact of the Affordable Care Act. A loyal Republican and Fox Viewer who once said, “I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” Angstadt found himself self-employed, uninsured and in urgent need of heart-valve replacement surgery. He’d drunk the Fox News Kool-Aid, however, and at first adamantly refused to sign up through the ACA exchange.

Finally a friend convinced him to give it look:

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Republicans Never Saw This Coming: Sen. Kay Hagan Owns Her Support for Obamacare

Trish
Sen. Kay Hagan, D-NC

You know what’s at stake. Only six wins this fall for Republicans leaves them to rule the Senate. If that happens, House-passed bills outlawing contraception and abortion, promoting guns, and cutting food stamps even for children will be the law of the land. And those 50 votes to defund and rescind Obamacare? Done deal.

That’s why states where Democratic senators seem at risk are drowning in dollars from those who profit if Republicans are in charge. Can you blame the Koch brothers for spending millions through their front group, Americans for Prosperity, on ads to tip these races? They’ll earn back billions if their legislation — like a bill to charge people for using solar panels instead of burning the fossil fuels that are heating our planet but lining the Kochs’ pockets — passes.

Pundits, at first stunned by a Democrat not playing by the GOP rules, are realizing the brilliance of Hagan’s move.

North Carolina, where Sen. Kay Hagan (D) is up for re-election, could be drawing the most outside money.

Voters in North Carolina have already been bombarded with 15,000 television political advertisements thanks to the U.S. Senate race…

The cost of those ads is a whopping $6.3 million, and nearly all of them have been paid for by outside groups, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project.

Many of the ads criticize Hagan’s vote for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a strategy chosen by Republican consultant Karl Rove and the Kochs after the healthcare.gov website’s rocky launch last October. But the overall success of Obamacare’s first enrollment period leaves fewer one-issue voters who will go to the polls just to get rid of the ACA’s supporters.

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Blame Obama: Uninsured Rate Sinking Like a Stone

Trish

Since healthcare is one of the few parts of the economy not yet easily outsourced overseas, the numbers mean economic growth across the board

A new Gallup/Healthways survey shows the number of uninsured has fallen to pre-recession levels, before so many Americans lost not only their jobs but their health insurance too.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it wasn’t this way less than a year ago, even though the economy has long been picking up steam and employment continues to increase. Rather, at the end of last summer, the uninsured rate was about 18 percent, compared to 13.4 percent today.

What I’m trying to say is: Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare.

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