The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Senate Republicans’ repeal of the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of Americans without health coverage by 22 million. That bad CBO score has Republicans jittery and makes passage less likely.
![Give us three more years, and maybe we'll come up with a plan. [Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP]](https://dakotafreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/McConnell-3.jpg)
Every six weeks, Republicans are finding a way to keep another million Americans insured. Keep working, Republicans! At this rate, by January 2020, you should be able to come up with a plan that breaks even with ObamaCare!
The 22 million that the wealthy doom to their early deaths, are not the complete picture. Without them, the rest of the healthcare system will fail. You cannot take those billions of dollars from healthcare and act like it will have zero effect on rural health for one. Thune will not run for reelection, NOem is already out, Rounds will retire as well as this crap sandwich marches along and the pain we see here will become a tsunami. It will be gradual for this year, and then kaboom, 3 to 5 million each year will loose coverage with at least that many more loosing the resources that would have been there had it not been for this act. Healthcare was already on its way out in the form it was in before the ACA/Obamacare, it was saved in 2010. Now get ready for the pain.
We can only hope that (R) Putin steps up and offers us a better way for health coverage. Here is where we are going https://www.internationalstudentinsurance.com/russia-student-insurance/healthcare-in-russia.php
… a million here, a million there; pretty soon ……
I was a Republican until very recently. I was even opposed to Obamacare when the measure was passed but I have changed my mind. This is not just some theoretical argument. Its about real elderly people, kids, and disadvantaged people with real illnesses. And I know some of them. Are we really going to let them sink into inadequate care and add financial ruin to their lives just so we can make life a little more comfortable for some already wealthy folks? Would the possible economic benefits of those tax cuts be worth the damage inflicted on others?
I wish healthcare costs were more reasonable. Technology has given us great advances but can add a good deal of expense to our care as well. The rates now are barely affordable for the upper middle class so it is not remotely affordable for the poor. Today, the poor cannot possibly pay, so there is no “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps”. There may have been a time when that was true, but that would have been a long time ago.
Technology, of course, can also be used to bring down prices. Hopefully that will be the case in the future. But, as for today, the poor and disadvantaged need help to afford even basic services.
Man, that’s a lot of people. 22 million… 22 MILLION!
With the vote on healthcare/Medicaid possible this week the Republican Congress faces it’s defining moment. Why did Noem,Rounds and Thune choose their political vocation?
McCTurtle owes his life to free gubmint healthcare, Who knew?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/before-trumpcare-a-free-clinic-saved-mitch-mcconnells-life
Had a lifesaving triple by-pass he didn’t know he needed. Diagnosis at basically free gubmint clinic operating in Senate building.
McCTurtle-like all other wingnuts ejaculates, I got mine. You don’t.
Cult republicans deliver the Holocaust as a proven working model. Hitler and his cult minions, exterminated at least 6 million beautiful people. Stalin and his cult minions exterminated about double of that, all citizens. Thune/NOem/the little feller and Daugaard will double all of that. All in just a few years. The Russian thistles will blow across the mass graves. Thanks to (R)Putin and these 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse, here is our destiny.
http://tinyurl.com/yd34ckjo
Drumpf’s base finally gets it figured out on healthcare and jobs. Hillary-ous.
from Jobsanger
CBO estimates, like any research, is tied to baselines and working assumptions. Don’t just look at the conclusions: look at the assumptions and the researchers’ own stated limitations in the study.
It’s not unlike polling, where one needs to understand the composition of the survey sample and methodology rather than just the top-line percentages.
Welcome to life as we know it, jimmie james.
Michael Wyland- even if the CBO exaggerated 25-50%, we’re still talking about millions of humans losing insurance after Drumpf promised everyone is covered with cheaper and better insurance.
Paul Ryan: 22 million Americans won’t be ‘pushed off’ insurance — they will ‘choose’ not to buy it
Mr. Weyland, you are correct in how the scoring is done. It will go much further and much sooner than projected on there assumption. The healthcare in this country was decimated before 2010 ACA/Obamacare.
Here in South Dakota, we had just 4 insurance carriers that had complied with Rounds and the Insurance Division new rules regarding the 80% ratio of claims to premiums. When you have so few, there was the end in sight. Premiums were escalating very quickly so as to make the companies go to the maximum of 67% rate increases on many of their plans. They had to continue to offer new plans as the old ones were already in death spiral even with their lifetime limitations.
22 million is a benchmark that will be achieved in much less time than 2026 and then it will rise dramatically.
When a child can go past a million bucks in claims before age 6, you know why they want to put limits on what the insurance company will pay out. Before ACA/Obamacare, the limit could be put at 1 million or 2 million lifetime. Thanks to President Obama and the Democrats, that rule was eliminated to give life long treatments for our citizens both young and old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k3yTsb4rCE
Anyone ever read CATCH-22?
Under the ACA (Obamacare), a typical 64-year-old with an annual income of $26,500 (with subsidies) paid premiums of $1,700; under the AHCA, that same person would pay $6,500, for insurance. “And the insurance would cover less of the consumer’s medical costs. And for a 64-year old with an annual income of $56,800, the premium in 2026 would average $20,500 a year, or three times the amount expected under the Affordable Care Act.”
I can’t think of a single 64 year old who could afford to pay one-third of their income for insurance, nor could find a job / extra job that would pay the salary that would cover it. So, the 64 year old would lose their insurance, and then – and here’s the REALLY sneaky bit – “earlier Monday afternoon, Senate Republican leaders altered their bill to penalize people who go without health insurance by requiring them to wait six months before their coverage would begin. Insurers would generally be required to impose the waiting period on people who lacked coverage for more than about two months in the previous year.” (See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/upshot/a-few-bright-spots-for-republicans-the-rest-could-be-scored-as-grim.html?emc=edit_nn_20170627&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=20183245&te=1)
So you lose your insurance because you can’t afford it, and then, if you try to get insurance because something comes up… you can’t have it. Catch-22.
Also thanks to Mitt Romney for putting this all into place to show it would work in a bastion of liberalism called Massachusetts.
For more on this, see my article published by The Nonprofit Quarterly this morning: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2017/06/27/cbo-scores-senate-gop-health-plan-gop-measures-prospects/
McConnell Postpones Vote … I’m tellin’ ‘ya … Republicans have piecemealed Obamacare apart to make it fail and now it’s become “their” curse. It hasn’t even been Obamacare since L’il Marco removed the risk corridors. It’s now just the turd that Repubs can’t flush.
Porter’s right! Unable to reach 50 votes, McConnell has given us all the chance to have a serious sit-down with John, Mike, and Kristi over the July 4 holiday to remind them that Il Duce promised us “insurance for everybody… much less expensive and much better,” and that no plan John, Mike, or Kristi has pitched moves us closer to that promise.
Let’s see, if they work another two weeks, John and Mike might find a way to keep another third of a million people insured….
The CBO, consisting of 230 employees, has an annual cost of $203,347.82/employee and you wonder why their “guesses” have never been accurate?
– 2013, the CBO predicted 201 million Americans would have health insurance as a result of Obamacare. By 2016, only 177 million did. This is a shortfall of 24 million. In 2017 the number is 9.2 million.
– The CBO estimated the cost to enroll someone in Obamacare would be $27,000. It has turned out to be almost $80,000 per enrollee.
“It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.” ~ Daniel Dennett
Hmm… so the CBO overestimates the number of Americans who will have health insurance. Without further evidence (and OldSarg provides none here), logic directs us to assume that they are overestimating the insured in this case as well, which means the Republican plan would knock even more than 22 million people off their current coverage.
A NPR/PBS/Marist survey, consisting of 1,205 adults making little if any money to analyze complicated policy problems, says by a margin of 55% to 17% that the GOP Senate plan stinks. Feel free to tell me if those folks are more accurate in their policy assessment than the CBO.
Correct Cory, 22 million is the low bar between 24 million at least in 10 years. OldSarg also does not indicate the fact that 15 million would loose coverage in the first year. Thinking Republicans rejected the plan for now. Thanks to everyone turning the light on them. Of course, our boys in Washington are to busy supporting that and also making our water less safe for human consumption. Thune and Rounds are the two that for practice in hurting and killing people, they tend to take the wings off flies and microwave other insects. What children of the corn.
Who should we let live? Who should we let die? How can we kill more people to ease the insurance burden on the rest of us?
Right now, Republicans are playing God – they are the biggest baddest death panel around.
Turns out: Republicans liked the idea of death panels all along.
Remember when they loved Sarah Palin for her whining about the Obama and Dems expanding insurance to more people – because the “death panels” would blah blah freaking blah? And now look at them. Just look at these hypocritical butt holes proposing that we let thousands of Americans get sick and die just do the top 1% can get bigger tax breaks.
I spit on today’s Republican politics, and everyone else should too.
Say, Jimmy James, thanks for changing your mind and being practical.
I agree, Jimmy, that we need to do something to reduce the cost of health care for everybody. Unfortunately, the Republican plans so far appear to have completely avoided cost control at the hospital. If anything, by leaving millions more Americans uninsured, the GOP plans increase the amount of uncompensated care, which hospitals must recoup by increasing the prices the rest of us pay for services.
Also hurting costs: remove the individual mandate, and lots of young healthy people drop their policies. To make up the difference, insurers will have to raise rates on remaining policyholders.
There’s another reason single-payer or Medicare as public option makes sense: put more people in the pool, and premiums go down for everyone.
Back to the CBO: they weren’t that far off!
And part of the problem with CBO’s estimate was that it assumed Medicaid expansion would happen in every state. When the Supreme Court made that part of the ACA optional, the CBO’s estimate was thrown off.
We don’t get to wish away the data and projections that don’t fit our worldviews. We have to have good reasons to question the experts. As it stands, CBO is the best scorer we have available. And is there any other reliable scorer out there saying the GOP Senate plan rocks?
All I was saying is for all of us to be careful of CBO “projected” numbers. They have proven to be highly inaccurate.
And I’m saying and other sources I’ve linked are saying that CBO numbers have not been proven to be “highly inaccurate.” In terms of policy projections, they are the best numbers on the table, and you’ve offered no better source.
The Commonwealth Fund said in 2015 that the CBO beat other prominent forecasters.
I don’t engage in wishful thinking. I go get evidence to back up what I’m saying. I invite all discussants to do the same.
Here’s some data:
Right now, Republicans are determining who should live and die in this country, and they are actually proposing that we all take a lower quality of life and shorter lifespan so that they can have an ideological political victory.
Republicans treat people’s lives’ like it’s a damn video game. Conservatives-voters have just about as much integrity and decency as Trump himself. Anyone see his tweet today? :(
The CBO was pretty accurate considering they had no clue the Scotus would allow states not to expand Medicaid or that wingnut pols would scurry around the country advising younger people not to sign up.
mike from iowa, don’t post anything without a link. You’re not entitled. Only Cory can do that.
Links are “proof”. You can’t question links. Irrefutable, proven, fact. . . without question.
Forgive me, OldSarg, but you just posted w/o a link.
Links from dead Breitbart, Info Wars, O’Keefe and Fake Noize, etc are worse than worthless.
https://www.vox.com/2017/6/29/15895366/medicaid-bcra
A very large portion of those cuts will be in the first year. Clap louder OldSarg, clap louder.
Sorry, here is a link for the old OldSarg, http://time.com/money/4837828/what-would-happen-to-seniors-in-nursing-homes-under-the-republican-health-care-bill/
Me Republican; me no trust any numbers but my own. Me use CBO projections only when it’s convenient, and me just want people to have the freedom to die without health coverage.
Trump was bleeding from his ear and nose this morning; the press wanted some questions answered; he said “no!” [apparently, that’d be an awesome tweet].
OldSarg, I don’t claim that the presence of a link establishes beyond a shadow of doubt that a claim is right and that opposing claims are wrong. I am making the point that while you have offered a mere assertion, I have offered a logical response backed with evidence from multiple sources. In any fair setting, my substantiated claim will be judged as more reliable than your assertion.
Besides, your general observation about the uncertainty inherent in every claim does not indict the accuracy of the information I actually offered. I didn’t just put up an empty hyperlink; click on each one, and you find information from reliable, checkable sources. To refute the substance of what I said, you need to address the specifics, not just wave these Trumpy generalizations around hoping you can wish away facts.
CBO is pretty good at policy projections. No one here has shown me a better source, and no one has shown me evidence to support Trump’s wishful claim that CBO was wildly off-base in its ACA projections in any way that indicts its scoring of the GOP plan.
OldSarg- here is why Info Whores links have no credibility (in case you are unaware)
On Thursday’s program, the InfoWars host welcomed guest Robert David Steele onto The Alex Jones Show, which airs on 118 radio stations nationwide, to talk about kidnapped children he said have been sent on a two-decade mission to space.
“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” said Steele. “So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”
Jones echoed Steele, saying “clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening” because “every time probes go over they turn them off.”
dead Breitbart, Fake Noize and O’Keefe are just as bad.