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Trump Signs Executive Order That Could Effectively Gut Affordable Care Act's Individual Mandate
President Trump signed an executive order late Friday giving federal agencies broad powers to unwind regulations created under the Affordable Care Act, which might include enforcement of the penalty for people who fail to carry the health insurance that the law requires of most Americans.
The executive order, signed in the Oval Office as one of the new president's first actions, directs agencies to grant relief to all constituencies affected by the sprawling 2010 health-care law: consumers, insurers, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, states and others. It does not describe specific federal rules to be softened or lifted, but it appears to give room for agencies to eliminate an array of ACA taxes and requirements.
[...] Though the new administration's specific intentions are not yet clear, the order's breadth and early timing carry symbolic value for a president who made repealing the ACA — his predecessor's signature domestic achievement — a leading campaign promise.
[Continues...]
Congressional Budget Office: Obamacare Repeal Would Be Catastrophic
U.S. Uncut reports
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its official analysis of the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, and top Republicans hate it.
The CBO based its findings[1] on H.R. 3762 (the Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act), which was the 2015 Affordable Care Act repeal bill that passed the House of Representatives. The nonpartisan budgetary agency determined that within one year of President Obama's signature healthcare reform law being repealed, roughly 18 million people would lose their health insurance. In following years, when the expansion of Medicaid codified into the Affordable Care Act is also eliminated, the number of uninsured Americans would climb to 27 million, then to 32 million.
Additionally, for those remaining Americans who didn't lose their health coverage from the initial repeal process, health insurance premiums would skyrocket by as much as 25 percent immediately after repeal. After Medicaid expansion is taken away, premiums costs would have gone up by roughly 50 percent. The costs continue to climb, with the CBO estimating a 100 percent increase in premium costs by 2026.
CBO analysts particularly focused on H.R. 3762's repeal of the health insurance mandate that requires all Americans to have health insurance, and the bill's elimination of subsidies for low-income families that make health insurance more affordable. The CBO found that pulling out those cornerstones of the Affordable Care Act would "destabilize"[2] the health insurance market, leading to a dramatic increase in premium costs.
[1] PDF Google cache
[2] Duplicate link in TFA.
House majority leader says no set timeline on Obamacare replacement
The republican party still has no plan to put into place as a replacement for the ACA. In fact:
Asked how soon House Republicans could unite behind a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, McCarthy said Friday in a "CBS This Morning" interview, "I'm not going to put a set timeline on it because I want to make sure we get it right."
But McCarthy promised that an ACA substitute will be "one of the first actions we start working on."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday January 21 2017, @07:12PM
You are ascribing stupidity where malice was clearly documented. Original designers (see James Hacker for example) of ObamaCare said, with TV cameras rolling, that ObamaCare was intended to fail. The votes were not there for single payer so the idea was to build a system to extend coverage to damned near everyone under the existing system, knowing it couldn't possibly be paid for, knowing it would stress an already broken system to the point of disaster. At which point the people would cry out to Washington for them to "Fix it!" Removing an entitlement is thought impossible, so the only solution would be.... Hillary's original proposal from her failed attempt: Single Payer. And she was supposed to be President.
Not one Republican voted for ObamaCare. Not one, not even a RINO. What did you people think would happen if Republicans captured the House, Senate and White House? It is going away, and since the system it replaced was also seriously flawed, hopefully to be replaced with something more free market based. Can Trump end employer based healthcare? Not betting on it. Can we get closer to HSA type care for enough people to bring the price mechanism back to the medical industry? Perhaps. Can we get enough deregulation and tort reform to bend the cost curve? Perhaps.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @07:49PM
Original designers (see James Hacker for example) of ObamaCare said, with TV cameras rolling, that ObamaCare was intended to fail.
He (Jacob Hacker) did not say anything like that.
You just make up shit that pleases you.
At best you wholesale misrepresent facts to be the opposite of what you claim.
Its like you think your enemies are all hypocrites and thus you have the moral right to be the biggest damn hypocrite in the building.
Why does anyone ever believe a single damn thing you say anymore?
(Score: 2, Troll) by jmorris on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:57PM
He (Jacob Hacker) did not say anything like that.
Thanks for the correct on the name, now people can quickly Google up the video. "Jacob Hacker trojan horse" will get plenty of hits. Yes he was speaking specifically about the "public option" which didn't exactly (wink wink, nudge, nudge) get into the final bill but the idea is still valid, Obamacare was explicitly designed to collapse into single payer. To get final passage even the public option had to be obscured because too many voters had figured out it was obviously the beginning of single payer. But since anyone who doesn't get anything else gets stuffed onto Medicaid it is basically the public option stand in.
If you have been politically aware for long it isn't exactly a secret that every God damned Democrat / Progressive considers single payer the end goal. It was the goal when FDR wanted it, it was the gpal when Hillary Clinton tried, it was the goal when Obama tried. It is the shining future held forth by every Proggie when problems with Obamacare are discussed. The ones in positions of political leadership also know that saying it is toxic so they lie every single time the public notices and reacts with horror at the prospect of bringing the failed NHS model here and reassures everyone that "of course they aren't proposing Socialized medicine".
Its like you think your enemies are all hypocrites
No. I think Progressives are liars because they lie without regret. Because they do not consider lying to be wrong if it advances the cause of Progressives. If one actually reads their writings, the stuff intended for their own use in developing proper Progressives, they freely admit this. There is a word for their moral philosophy: Evil. Which is why they also teach that good and evil are outdated concepts, we should adopt moral relativism and other sophistry of Cultural Marxism to conceal the fact they are Evil. No. They are Evil. There can be no compromise, no bipartisanship, no middle path. Good must destroy evil or allow itself to be corrupted and itself destroyed.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @10:09PM
Obamacare was explicitly designed to collapse into single payer.
Man you are adept and restating the facts to say the complete opposite of their meaning.
The idea IN THE VIDEO [youtube.com] is that single-payer is better for patients and that people would naturally migrate there if they had the choice because its better for them. There is absolutely nothing in it about intending for obamacare to "collapse." Only that people who had a choice would choose single-payer over a long period of adjustment as they saw the results.
Since single payer did not make it into the obamacare all of that is moot anyway.
No. I think Progressives are liars because they lie without regret. Because they do not consider lying to be wrong if it advances the cause of Progressives. If one actually reads their writings, the stuff intended for their own use in developing proper Progressives, they freely admit this. There is a word for their moral philosophy: Evil. Which is why they also teach that good and evil are outdated concepts, we should adopt moral relativism and other sophistry of Cultural Marxism to conceal the fact they are Evil. No. They are Evil. There can be no compromise, no bipartisanship, no middle path. Good must destroy evil or allow itself to be corrupted and itself destroyed.
I don' know why you started off saying "No," you just agreed 100% with my characterization of your beliefs.
And all of that justifies you lying your ass off.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:39PM
This sounds like a contradiction to me. First you say that the Dems all want single-payer, have wanted it for a long time, and promote it at every opportunity. Then you say that it's a dirty secret which they dare not admit in public. Which is it?
I'm also not sure why you imply that the public is overwhelmingly against this. If Dems are for it, Reps are against it, insurance companies are against it, and sick poor people are for it, I'd expect the polls to show a 50-50 or 60-40 split like they do for other partisan shouting matches.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday January 22 2017, @12:16AM
You have to listen to Progs when they are talking among themselves. They even write their plans down, in boring books they don't expect the masses to read. They will even do it on C-SPAN since they know nobody but political junkies are watching. It isn't exactly a State secret that Progs are Socialists with the one difference of opinion being they believe the Sunny Uplands can be reached without rivers of blood through slow "Progress" vs a Revolution. When they are addressing a general audience they are never honest. They are only now realizing that the Internet is changing the rules, that what they say at Netroots or a university conference among like the minded can and will be used against them. Before their control of the media kept their private thoughts safely private, no more.
The establishment Republicans aren't guiltless, they too have policy preferences they speak of when they don't think their base is listening. They are in total agreement with the typical Davos Man of the left on many issues. Which is why we just got Trump, the Republican base finally got smart to the game and kicked over the table.
The difference is the left must conceal their policy goals from the middle and the right and the Republican Party has to conceal their actual beliefs from their own base. This is what "No Enemies to the Left" is all about. Now we have adopted a mirror policy on the Alt-Right of "No Enemies to the Right." We shall see if this is actually workable, whether it scales and what results from it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:07AM
Ya the cons don't ever do anything like that... You are one bad day away from being a nutjob in a tower trying to kill people...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @12:37AM
> Which is it?
Its the same logic he uses to say that Obama was both a feckless incompetent and a ruthlessly efficient dictator.
Long ago jmorris traded in all of his logic for righteous sanctimony
The guy just admitted to believing he's warrior at battle with pure evil. He's obviously more a few marbles short.
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:10PM
A textbook application of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. Too bad for the Dems that the voters rejected it by rejecting them in most elections since 2010.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @04:11AM
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Voters rejected Hillary for who she is, and the dems for betraying the people by shifting so much to the right, they became essentially Reaganites. The strategy, if any, may well still pan out. Assuming that ACA was indeed passed with the intention of torpedoing the republican party, it may still work, if the repealing of the ACA produces the clusterfuck predicted by the congressional budget office. I am assuming, of course, that no (fiscally sane) replacement will be worked out by the republican lawmakers, since a workable replacement would look a helluva lot like non-profit single-payer insurance for absolutely everyone. In a way, republicans are getting baited into codifying an actual regression in terms of individual rights and effecting a mass suffering, and they won't be able to shift any blame for anything that happens in the next 2 years.
I also disagree with jmorris when he/she calls this intention (if there was any intention) malicious. Looking at the cost, quality, and subjective satisfaction metrics worldwide, it is impossible to argue against single-payer insurance over what US has right now or had before ACA. If this was the only political way to put single-payer on the table, then what exactly is the evil? It's not like these 20 or so million of people who are about to lose insurance had it before ACA. It's not like costs weren't rising anyway. And it's not like more than half of people about to lose ACA didn't vote themselves out of insurance. If anything, this seems like a hack a bit too clever for the dems :)
~ Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Saturday January 21 2017, @08:10PM
Texas tried tort reform. It didn't fix a damned thing. Part of the problem is that medical mistakes can easily result in astronomical expenses (particularly when medical costs are so overpriced in the first place) and their consequences can leave people unable to earn a living.
There too is the root of temptation to sue even when it is not really the doctor's fault. It's their one last chance to avoid a life at the poverty line. It's an act of desperation by an often sympathetic plaintiff.
Naturally, there are also greedy out and out scammers. Their numbers tend to be exaggerated by people calling for tort reform.