The Murderous Freedom Caucus

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After caucus members lobbied the White House, Republican leaders added a provision to eliminate an Obamacare requirement that health insurers cover services such as maternity care, mental health treatment and prescription drugs. But caucus members still didn't think the revisions went far enough in repealing the law.

During a caucus meeting Thursday night, in which Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told lawmakers that the negotiations were over and Trump wanted a vote, members gave a series of emotional speeches about the need to stand together and fight.

Sources: Trump learned a lesson on dealmaking - CNNPolitics.com

Stand and fight, for what? Rob even more people from healthcare insurance and get even stingier policies for those that remain..
Go figure..

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Yea, kick them when they're down, or, according to the 'Freedom' Caucus, let the sick pay more for their healthcare insurance..

The House Freedom Caucus laid out two demands on Thursday for a health care bill its members would support: ending Obamacare’s essential health benefits and its “community rating” provisions. These sound wonky, but make no mistake: Axing these two provisions would decimate Obamacare and its insurance reforms.

Insurers would once again be able to charge sicker people much higher premiums — and pick and choose which health care services they want to cover. Many would likely drop services like maternity care and mental health services, which are required under Obamacare but tend to draw more expensive patients.

The Freedom Caucus’s new health care demand: let insurers charge sick people more - Vox

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Freedom Caucus members, whom Trump has blamed for the implosion of his first healthcare deal, want to see Obamacare's Title I insurance regulations dismantled in the GOP legislation. The Freedom Caucus source said White House officials "could get 216 for the [American Health Care Act] today if they included language to strip out the Title 1 insurance regs."

Title 1 is the heart of Obamacare’s coverage expansion. It runs 374 pages. It includes the requirement that insurers offer coverage to all Americans. It bars insurers from charging higher rates to people who are sicker or to women, a standard practice in the pre-Obamacare market. It outlaws lifetime limits on how much an insurer will pay — before the Affordable Care Act, 55 percent of employer-sponsored plans had a cap on benefits, usually around $1 million or $2 million. It is also the part of the law that requires insurers to cover young adults up to age 26. Title 1 includes the requirement that insurers cover 10 “essential health benefits” including maternity care and mental health services, and a mandate that all insurers cover preventive care without any cost to the patient. Title 1 also says that insurers have to provide consumers with easy-to-understand summaries of what their health plan actually covers. The Freedom Caucus has indicated it wants to target two of these provisions specifically: essential health benefits and “community rating,” which is the requirement that insurers charge sick people the same prices as healthy people.

Freedom Caucus on track to write a health bill less popular than GOP’s last - Vox

Kansas lawmakers on Monday failed to override Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's veto of a bill that would have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The Kansas House voted 81-44 to override Brownback's veto, three votes short of the necessary majority needed. Brownback vetoed a bill last week that proposed expanding Medicaid, the government-run health program that provides insurance primarily to pregnant women, single parents, people with disabilities, and seniors with low incomes.

Kansas governor vetoes Medicaid expansion, vote upheld - Business Insider

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There is a clear connection between health care insurance and mortality..

The connection between having health care and lower mortality rates is well understood. One study looking at states that enacted Medicaid expansions in the early 2000s relative to neighboring ones that didn’t found “a significant decrease in mortality over five years of follow-up.” 

“A subsequently analysis showed the largest decreases were for deaths from ‘health-care-amenable’ conditions such as heart disease, infections, and cancer, which are more plausibly affected by access to medical care,” the New England Journal of Medicine writes.

Another study of “Medicaid’s mortality effects” found “one life saved for every 239 to 316 adults who gained coverage. The health care bill Senate Republicans pulled the plug on would’ve resulted in 15 million Americans losing Medicaid over the next decade.

Fox News host argues stripping coverage from millions is no biggie since ‘we’re all going to die’

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People are starting to realize..

The attempted replacement gives lie to President Donald Trump’s supposed populist credentials. Between the House and Senate health care bills, the broad outlines of Trumpcare are clear. It would be a massive tax cut for the wealthy, paid for with cuts to health care for vulnerable Americans. Trump was right when he called the House bill “mean,” but the same can be said for Trumpcare in all its forms.. 

The unpopularity of Trumpcare is creating an opening for Democrats. “In a polling memo circulated by the Democratic group Priorities USA,” the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, “Democrats say they have seen a significant shift in the last two months in the number of people that believe the president sides with the wealthy and big corporations over average Americans.

Trump Is Getting Pummeled for His Cruel Health Care Plan | New Republic

A provision in the Senate's bill gives states near-carte blanche to spend health care money on whatever they want...  So, as University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley explains at Vox, a state could submit a plan to take the federal money it gets for health care and instead spend it on something else entirely. “What’s stopping a state from … using Obamacare money to fund public schools or affordable housing?” he muses. Such a request wouldn’t change the amount of government spending, so HHS would have to give it the green light.

Trumpcare Is a Giant Slush Fund | New Republic

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And “conservatives have a very hard time with systemic causation.” The health care bill, Lakoff explained, would set up a system ultimately resulting in death, but wouldn’t dole out death immediately and directly. It wouldn’t be seen as purposefully killing people, in contrast to the old Republican lie that the Affordable Care Act would result in “death panels.” He said, “They were understood as more direct. When you call them ‘death panels,’ the assumption is that the panels would decide who would die.”

Democrats Are Warning That Trumpcare Will Kill People. Is It Convincing? | New Republic

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From Paul Krugman

Takers and Fakers

While we wait to see exactly what’s in the latest version of the Senate health bill, a reminder: throughout the whole campaign against Obamacare, Republicans have been lying about their intentions. Believe it or not, conservatives actually do have a more or less coherent vision of health care. It’s basically pure Ayn Rand: if you’re sick or poor, you’re on your own, and those who are more fortunate have no obligation to help. In fact, it’s immoral to demand that they help.

Specifically:
1.Health care, even the most essential care, is a privilege, not a right. If you can’t get insurance because you have a preexisting condition, because your income isn’t high enough, or both, too bad.
2.People who manage to get insurance through government aid, whether Medicaid, subsidies, or regulation and mandates that force healthy people to buy into a common risk pool, are “takers” exploiting the wealth creators, aka the rich.
3.Even for those who have insurance, it covers too much. Deductibles and copays should be much higher, to give people “skin in the game” and make them cost-conscious (even if they’re, um, unconscious.)
4.All of this applies to seniors as well as younger people. Medicare as we know it should be abolished, replaced with a voucher system that can be used to help pay for private policies – and funding will be steadily cut below currently projected levels, pushing people into high-deductible-and-copay private policies.

This is a coherent doctrine; it’s what conservative health care “experts” say when they aren’t running for public office, or closely connected to anyone who is. I think it’s a terrible doctrine – both cruel and wrong in practice, because buying health care isn’t and can’t be like buying furniture. Still, if Republicans had run on this platform and won, we’d have to admit that the public agrees.

But think of how Republicans have actually run against Obamacare. They’ve lambasted the law for not covering everyone, even though their fundamental philosophy is NOT to cover everyone, or accept any responsibility for the uninsured. They’ve denied that their massive cuts to Medicaid are actually cuts, pretending to care about the people they not-so-privately consider moochers. They’ve denounced Obamacare policies for having excessively high deductibles, when higher deductibles are at the core of their ideas about cost control. And they’ve accused Obamacare of raiding Medicare, a program they’ve been trying to kill since 1995.

In other words, their whole political strategy has been based on lies – not shading the truth, not spinning, but pretending to want exactly the opposite of what they actually want.

And this strategy was wildly successful, right up to the moment when Republicans finally got a chance to put their money – or actually your money – where their mouths were. The trouble they’re having therefore has nothing to do with tactics, or for that matter with Trump. It’s what happens when many years of complete fraudulence come up against reality.

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Republicans eager to justify the severe Medicaid cuts in their Obamacare repeal proposals have offered up a number of arguments. They say Medicaid doesn’t contribute to better health, or that it doesn’t offer value to its beneficiaries. They also say the proposed cuts would affect only able-bodied adults, sparing groups like low-income children that Medicaid has traditionally served.

Those claims don’t hold up well to scrutiny. Relative to people with no health coverage, Medicaid recipients end up more financially secure and have better access to care, according to a body of research that stretches back decades. And while the evidence of Medicaid’s health effects is more ambiguous, most well-respected experts believe it helps and, in the aggregate, may even save thousands of lives a year.

But for a more poignant demonstration of why repeal advocates are wrong about Medicaid, it helps to see the impact Medicaid can have on a community ― the different ways it supports vulnerable groups, especially children, and just how much those groups would suffer if Republican legislation were to pass. One of those communities is Flint.

Most people know about the contamination of the city’s drinking water, which attracted national attention in the late summer and early fall of 2015. Few people know about the role Medicaid played in exposing it.

Residents began complaining about foul-looking and tasting drinking water shortly after state officials, who had taken charge of the city’s finances, decided to take water directly from the Flint River rather than from Lake Huron. But even after an outside researcher at Virginia Tech found evidence that the river water lacked critical anti-corrosive additives to prevent lead from leaching from the pipes, officials continued to insist the water was safe to drink. 

That’s when Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician and public health researcher at the city’s Hurley Medical Center, started pulling blood testing data from the hospital’s electronic medical records. Those records showed that the number of children with above-average lead levels had risen by more than 100 percent since Flint switched its water source, with particularly high increases in certain zip codes.

The data existed because of Medicaid ― specifically, because of the program’s Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment, or EPSDT initiative, which requires and finances extra medical testing for low-income children. Congress added EPSDT to Medicaid in the late 1960s, shortly after the program’s creation, because both Head Start programs and Vietnam draft boards were reporting high incidences of health problems that had gone undetected and untreated.

Think Obamacare Repeal Won't Affect Kids? Think Again. | HuffPost

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The Ted Cruz amendment and other Republican lies, and the CBO credibility what's new..

Ted Cruz’s Giant Leap Into the Known

When it comes to health care, there are lies, damned lies, and CBO-bashing. Republicans are deploying all three strategies, with Mike Pence’s vile lie about the disabled – the utterly false claim that Medicaid expansion has actually hurt those most in need of help – drawing lots of justified outrage. But the really big push over the next couple of days will be the attempt to trash CBO estimates that are almost sure to show massive losses, even if the CBO is somehow prevented from considering the Cruz amendment.

One answer to this stuff is to notice that everyone, and I mean everyone, who knows something about insurance markets is declaring the same thing: that this proposed bill would be a disaster. We’ve got the insurance industry declaring it “simply unworkable”; the American Academy of Actuaries saying effectively the same thing; AARP up in arms; the Urban Institute forecasting disaster; and more.

But, say the usual suspects, CBO got the effects of the ACA all wrong. Actually, it didn’t. Yes, it overestimated the number of people who would sign up for the exchanges. But this was largely because it overestimated the number of employers who would drop coverage and send their workers to the exchanges. Overall, its estimates of coverage gains and premiums weren’t that far off, especially when you consider that this was a big leap into the unknown: aside from limited experience in Massachusetts, we didn’t have very good evidence on how an ACA-type system would work.

Which brings me to a point I haven’t seen emphasized: whereas the creation of the ACA was a leap into the unknown, Trumpcare – or maybe we should call it Cruzcare – is a leap into the known. Before the ACA, most states allowed insurers to discriminate based on medical history. Many also restricted access to Medicaid as much as they could. So we have a very good idea what health care in America would look like if the BCRA passes: it would look like health care in unregulated, low-aid states pre-ACA.

Or to not put too fine a point on it, it would look like health care in Texas circa 2010, with 26 percent of the nonelderly population uninsured. So the burden of proof should lie completely with anyone who claims that this bill would NOT cause drastic coverage losses. It would establish a system very much like that which existed in those parts of America in which vast numbers of people lacked coverage in the past; why would this time be different?

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President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for the full, clean repeal of Obamacare in late-night statements Monday. The statements were released after four Republican senators backed away from the repeal-and-replace bill, leaving it unable to pass a vote to bring it to the floor. (RELATED: Senate Obamacare Repeal Bill Dead In Current Form))

Trump, McConnell, Call For Clean Repeal | The Daily Caller

Yea, like the old system was so wonderful, where people could be routinely denied coverage if they had pre-existing conditions or their expenses reached a maximum. 

This is going to kill a lot of Americans and leave others very distressed.