In further evidence that Senator Mike Rounds is actually undermining America’s chances of remaining an economic powerhouse, South Dakota’s junior Senator is rooting for the chaos that would ensue if the courts overturn the Affordable Care Act:
After a decade of trying to gut Obamacare, Republicans may finally get their wish thanks to a Trump administration-backed lawsuit. Its success would cause chaos not only in the insurance markets but on Capitol Hill. And Republican senators largely welcome it — even if they don’t know what comes next.
“I’m ready for it to succeed,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “I would love to get back in and actually deal with health care again” [Burgess Everett, “Republicans Ready to Dive off a Cliff on Obamacare,” Politico, 2019.07.14].
Rounds really has trouble with that word “again“: he never “actually deal[t] with health care” when his party controlled Congress during the first two Trump years; he certainly doesn’t plan to seriously deal with Speaker Pelosi to implement a rational improvement on the Affordable Care Act if that reasonable and effective legislation is ripped up by judicial activists.
Julie Rovner summarized the major impacts of Rounds’s wish last December:
- Millions lose their health insurance.
- Hospitals shift from focusing on outcomes back to figuring out how to pay for increased numbers of uninsured patients.
- Some Medicare patients lose preventive care and prescription drug benefits.
- Medicaid expansion goes away, taking with it prescription drug rebates that save states money.
- Indian Health Service loses important funding.
- Protection for folks with pre-exsiting conditions goes away, not just in ACA policies, but for folks with employer-based coverage.
Rovner those impacts again on NPR last week:
If the lower court ruling is ultimately upheld, the case, Texas v. United States, has the potential to shake the nation’s entire health care system to its core. First, such a decision would immediately affect the estimated 20 million people who get their health coverage through programs created under the law. But ending the ACA would also create chaos in other parts of the health care system that were directly or indirectly changed under the law’s multitude of provisions — including calorie counts on menus, a pathway for approval of generic copies of expensive biologic drugs and, perhaps most important politically, protections for people who have preexisting conditions.
“Billions of dollars of private and public investment — impacting every corner of the American health system — have been made based on the existence of the ACA,” says a friend-of-the-court brief filed by a bipartisan group of economists and other health policy experts to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Upholding the lower court’s ruling, the scholars add, “would upend all of those settled expectations and throw healthcare markets, and 1/5 of the economy, into chaos” [Julie Rovner, “The Affordable Care Act Is Back in Court: 5 Facts You Need to Know,” NPR: Shots, 2019.07.09].
Senator Rounds has no plan to address that chaos. Democrats, get ready to run someone with real policy vision to challenge Rounds on all the harm he’s promising Americans in 2020.
Happy Days are here again, says Rounds. Dude will make even more millions and more insurance corporate trips, upon the wreckage of the ACA. Question should be is why would Rounds react any differently to this windfall? This beats the hell out of the millions pocketed through the EB5. Joop is wanting in on this deal so he can do some more Egyptian artifacts. The artifacts have gotten spendy and as a bonus, he wouldn’t have to pretend he likes Chinese food.
South Dakota sheep will line up to be sheared by Rounds and company thinking they are pulling the wool over Obama’s eyes, when in fact, they will be sheared again and again. Dummies.
Everyone remembers the medical coverage plans proposed by Smilin’ Mike and Silent John, the last few years, right? Right? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler? Anyone??
The ACA is one of Senator Rounds’ greatest contradictions of his senatorial career.
In November of 2017, he could be seen on MSNBC bragging about how he was working on a bipartisan effort to shore up and appropriately fund the risk pools, which were established under the ACA to keep insurance companies afloat during the transitional years of ObamaCare.
Then, one month later, in December of 2017, he could be seen on FOX bragging about how he had voted for the Trump tax cuts and the removal of the ACA tax, which was key to the enforcement of the overall ACA act, as well as seen as its true constitutionality by Chief Justice Roberts and perhaps the only thing which could make a conservative Supreme Court rule that it is still constitutional and enforceable law.
My only question is: Which Senator Rounds will we see in ’20, the one from MSNBC, or the one from FOX?
Remember that Trump is on record that he will not have his “health care” unveiling until after the 2020 election, assuming he will be re-elected.
In parts of the country Democrat candidates successfully ran on health care in 2018 Democrats need to do that again in 2020
True that Roger, on a sad note, the executive order that trump signed off on for dialysis is predicated on keeping the ACA as law. Everything that Rounds and trump touches, turns to crap.
Congress receives a gold-level Obamacare policy and receive federal subsidies that cover 72 percent of the cost of the premiums. Any taxpayers out there ever received a thank you note from rounds, thune or noem? Anyone out who would like their health care premiums covered 72 percent?
Again it all goes back to Barry Goldwater, 1964. Everyone of SD elected appointed Republicans are bad faith conspirators:
Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, when he won five states in the Deep South. That election provides a telling glimpse at how bad faith generalizes …. Four years later, the problem Richard Nixon and his advisers faced in the South … was that since Alabama Gov. George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, was going to get the hardline white supremacists, “How do we get everybody else?”
Their answer was “law and order,” a “coded language” or bad-faith argument used to lure racist voters without quite saying so.
https://www.salon.com/2019/07/14/party-of-relentless-bad-faith-how-republican-lies-and-hypocrisy-hit-an-all-time-high/
Jean Rounds is battling cancer. You might think the good Senator wants his wife to die, since he wants to take away her protections under the ACA. Of course, the elite, like the Rounds family, will always have health care. You, on the other hand, will end up on the Republican plan: die quickly. I’m sure that Rounds’ taxpayer funded coverage must be good. It’s the 99 percent, not Rounds wife, who need to worry about Mike Rounds’ insurance plan.
By dumping the ACA, we can then see the health plan that GNoem, Rounds and Thune all claim they have shelf ready. trump says that it’s the best and that it will cover much more than Obamacare including pre existing conditions, so Wednesday, Rounds better be ready to stand and deliver on this plan that is 10 years old and just sitting there… waiting.
One thing that the ACA needed to cover first, last and always, but never did, was heart implants for the GOP. Now we can see what happens when they lack one. They merrily let people suffer and die. Nope, not an exaggeration.
Remember the GOP congressman who said at a townhall, “No one ever dies from lack of health insurance?” Yeah, he deserved the massive boos and catcalls he got. He was wrong then and it’s still not true now.
Maybe Scyller Borglum should attack Mike Rounds over EB-5, just like Noem did Marty Jackley. Does Mike know anything about these Northern Beef Packing wire transfers to Ultracare Holdings Ltd.?
I’m thinking that republicans eliminating the ACA will be like when the dog runs and catches the truck after it stops. Then what? This might be the best thing ever to finally get the needed change for all health coverage. You just know that the only folks that can fix healthcare will be the Democrats, just like in 1964 and 2008, they will come and rescue the failed republican ship.
Medicare For All will guarantee Trump a second term. It’s proponents (Sanders and Warren) want it paid for with a wealth tax i.e. taxing money and assets that have already been taxed once by the IRS. Double taxation is a losing issue.
~ Biden’s campaign is unveiling a health insurance plan today that includes a public option. That’s a bare bones policy sold by the government like the government guarantees crop and flood insurance. It won’t be cheap but it will be cheaper than what Round’s boys sell in SD.