How perfectly Republican: a health care “reform” plan that reduces costs by reducing care, keeps hated pre-existing condition gotcha traps firmly in place, and tells people who need medical insurance to go start a savings account.
The Congressional Budget Office looked into the Republicans’ handiwork and found it shifts costs to the elderly and the sick — Republicans’ predictable Robin-Hood-in-reverse play.
And in the end, this GOP joke in bad taste
will add how many Americans to the ranks of the insured?
“The pool of people without health insurance would end up being less healthy, on average, than under current law,” the CBO says.
The GOP plan would add 3 million people to the insurance rolls by 2019, but the overall percentage of uninsured would stay the same.
Wow, a whole 3 million people in 10 years. If the number of Americans losing their medical insurance because they can no longer afford it continues at about the same rate as in recent years, the GOP plan will leave the country with upwards of 60 million uninsured in a decade, by our reckoning.
In a well done editorial that essentially reduces the Republican plan to burnt toast, the New York Times notes:
Part of the premium reduction was attributed to savings in the cost of medical services. But much was attributed to shrinking the services covered. The Democrats plan to set minimum benefit requirements to protect people from skimpy policies that leave them without adequate protection when they need it.
The budget office is planning to estimate how the far more complex Democratic bills would affect premiums. Americans need to know that so they can make a full comparison. But there should be no illusions here. The “affordable” Republican health care reform isn’t health care reform.
The plan isn’t health care reform because the Party of No is not interested in helping people get health care insurance or medical care itself. Republicans aren’t about public service. They have no concept of providing the greatest good for the greatest number.
What Republicans are about is advancing their own political and personal fortunes. They’re truly dedicated to bestowing advantages on the wealthy, well-connected few who fill their campaign coffers. They are also devoted to a discredited, backward ideology whose main contribution has been boom-and-bust cycles, elevation of greed to the status of virtue, and inviting waste, fraud, abuse of power and rampant corruption in and out of government.
Folks, don’t look to the Taliban for enlightenment. Don’t hold your breath until the Chinese open their markets to American-produced goods and services on anything like an even footing.
Most of all, don’t expect Republicans to ever give us suckers an even break. They wouldn’t know how even if they wanted to. Rarely a day goes by without the whole sorry lot of them proving they don’t want to.
I just heard Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry want to do a health care plan based on a Texas model. Come to find out Texas has 24% uninsured.
TEXAS??? That place is one of the most backassed locations on the planet!
SW – excellent post. This repube “plan” is basically the repube “budget.” And that idiot Boehner has had an op-ed piece in at least 8 different major daily newspapers this past week touting how the dems plan will cost us the sun and moon. Funny, think he’d be touting his own “plan”. <snark>
I’m afraid I’m going to have to side with the likes of Rush and Co. on this. None of these go far enough with cutting costs and preexisting conditions. Shouldn’t life itself be a preexisting condition? You need that cancer removed, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do it yourself, rugged individualist!
We Dems are gonna get healthcare reform passed and the country’s going to realize what a huge improvement it is and the Republicans will go down in history as the party of destructive, obstructionist lameasses.
I’m an optimist, but Jim Marquis is a super-optimist, I like it. We get disappointed most of the time, well all of the time, but there has got to be a first time, right.
I agree with Jim. Once the bill is passed we’ll wonder how we got by without it.
But the rethug idea of “I’ve got mine the hell with you” just irritates me.They’re all against public health care until the government had to step in and save their sorry asses on the steps of the capitol. A couple of teabaggers had heart attacks at the tea bag “press conference”.
I tend to be over-optimistic, so I agree with Jim. Someday everybody will look back on this HMO/Sicko era the same way we now look back on the days when the fire department would let your house burn if you hadn’t paid your annual premiums.
I just hope that day will come soon enough to keep the Republicans out during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
Demeur, even with all we know about Republicans, a Texas-grade nationwide health care plan is a frightening prospect. How low can they go?
Bee, I suspect Boehner’s staff, GOP HQ or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote his op eds. I’m about of the opinion the man couldn’t write an eighth-grade English composition assignment worth more than a “C.”
Randal, indeed, life itself can be considered a disease — one that always ends in fatality — so to the conservative mind your position probably has merit. However, I think Rep. Grayson nailed it about their attitude: “Don’t get sick, but if you do, die quickly.”
jim, Holte, Bee and Demeur, I agree about people in time wondering how we ever got along without the reforms Dems are likely, by the hardest, to get through. It was that way with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. How maddening and how wrong that so many Americans forget or never knew those huge improvements were achieved in spite of Republicans, not with their support. That ignorance lies behind the too-often heard meme from independents and Libertarians, “those in the two major parties are all alike — not a dime’s worth of difference between them.” Like hell, there’s no difference between them.
Tom, your worry about the timing is well founded.
S.W., your point about the “both parties are just alike” meme can’t be stressed too strongly. I had a couple of friends who voted for Nader in 2000 because of that attitude and I really let them have it later on.