Among the lies that Senator Thune, Senator Rounds, and now Governor Daugaard are using to sell the latest Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act is that Cassidy-Graham empowers states to make their own health care decisions.
Sure, states are empowered… if you think “empowered” means being limited to a narrow menu of Republican policy options and forbidden from using federal money to offer your citizens a public option or single-payer system.
Section 106 of Cassidy-Graham lists the only seven policy options states may pursue with the block grants they would receive from repurposed ACA taxes. Most require working through private insurers. None allow single-payer. Senators Cassidy and Graham have said as much.
The translation: dictating health insurance policy to states is unacceptable when Democrats do it, but its great reform and liberty when Republicans do it.
Of course, SD could be trusted to provide excellent health care with a federal lump sum. Perhaps we could get Joop Bolen to administer the program!
http://www.themudflats.net/archives/48444
State of Alaska has it figured out how to use the ACA and lower healthcare costs and premiums.
Capital idea, Loren! Let’s hire Bollen back to place all the Cassidy-Graham block grants in loan pools, use them to subsidize dairies, beef plants, casinos, and other business projects, then use the profits to fund health care (after Bollen takes his well-earned cut, of course)!
Republicans are big fat liers, and racists and that is how they hang onto power. They tell massive lies. They have no moral, ethical substance.
1. Their attack on the ACA and Obama himself started in 2009, on his administration and his accomplishments, and Democrats. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of times, Republicans, their elected officials and their wholly owned news organizations like Fox and Limbaugh, and in SD, KOTA and Rapid City Journal editors have acted as propaganda agents, spreading the false notion that Democrats excluded Republicans from the year and one half debate and legislation of the ACA, which they dubbed “Obamacare” as a part of their eight (8) year attack on President Barack Obama. Our 1st black president.
Republican legislators unquestionably walked out of legislative participation on the ACA. Google it. They also submitted some 900 amendments to the legislation. Then none of them voted for it. It passed without them. Google it.
2. Now, 2017, the big fat lying continues. Thousands, millions of lies. They are sabotaging the entire health care industry to get their way. This is a criminal conspiracy IMO. They say the ACA is in a “death spiral”. This is not true. Google it. That the health care markets are “collapsing”. That is not true. Google it. That health insurance premiums are ‘skyrocketing”. That is not true. Google it.
My South Dakota premiums have not risen in the last two years.
3. Sen Mike Rounds said in a letter to me dated in August, 2017 that: “There is no question Obamacare [Rounds calls it ‘commonly known as’, via the Republicans’ rhetoric trick played on the American people] is failing.”
“…millions lost health insurance they enjoyed.”
“…carriers are leaving the markets in droves”. “…premiums have risen 124 percent…in South Dakota alone.”
This sloppy rhetoric is only defensible by more lying and is beneath the dignity of Rounds senatorial office. (My emphasis)
4. Finally, “putting it all together ( the new president, and a lying Republican party) and you have “malignant narcissism,” which includes antisocial behavior, paranoid traits, even sadism. “Mr. Trump’s sociopathic characteristics are undeniable,” retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes concludes. “They create a profound danger for America’s democracy and safety. Over time these characteristics will only become worse, either because Mr. Trump will succeed in gaining more power and more grandiosity with less grasp on reality, or because he will engender more criticism producing more paranoia, more lies, and more enraged destruction.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/09/22/is-trump-mentally-ill-or-is-america-psychiatrists-weigh-in/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.67bf1519390a
“We can’t expect to change Trump, but we must work to undo the societal delusions that created him.” And those delusions, Kurt Andersen contends in “Fantasyland,” have been around for a long time. “People tend to regard the Trump moment — this post-truth, alternative facts moment — as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon.”
Susan Collins of Maine sez no way Jose to Graham/Drumpfcare bill. That is at least 2 wingnut noes.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said earlier today she won’t be bought off. That means game, set and match goes to America.