Ideology kills

[stpioc]

As if we needed any more proof that it's the tax cuts for the wealthy that trump everything, including healthcare coverage of millions and the lives of thousands.

Referring to his own enthusiasm for tax reform, Trump explained, “I can’t do it until we do health care, because we have to know what the health care is going to cost and — statutorily — that’s the way it is. So for those people who say, ‘oh, gee, I wish we could do the tax first,’ it just doesn’t work that way. I would like to do the tax first.” 

Trump is wrong about this. There is no statutory requirement for him to do health care before he works on tax reform. What’s at issue is simply Paul Ryan’s legislative strategy. 

Ryan wants to pass a tax reform plan with a party-line vote, which means he needs to use the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Senate filibuster. You can’t write a reconciliation bill that increases the deficit over the long term. So Ryan’s plan is to repeal the Affordable Care Act — which, among other things, would sharply reduce taxes on the rich, but would avoid increasing the deficit since the cuts will be offset by spending less on insurance for the poor and middle class. Then, having locked that tax cut into place, Republicans could move on to a revenue-neutral tax reform using the lower revenue number as the baseline.

Trump says “nobody knew that health care could be so complicated” - Vox

[stpioc]

Keeping American's 'safe'..

Nearly 36,000 people could die every year, year after year, if the incoming president signs legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act. This figure is based on new data from the Urban Institute examining how many people will become uninsured if the law is repealed, as well as a study of mortality rates both before and after the state of Massachusetts enacted health reforms similar to Obamacare.

Here’s how many people could die every year if Obamacare is repealed

[stpioc]

There are so many ways in which the new health law redistributes from the poor and the sick to the rich and the healthy..

There's a sweet deal for insurers buried in the GOP's new Obamacare bill. Health insurance companies could realize a $1 billion or more windfall over the next decade — and end up paying their CEOs even more money — because of a simple tweak in the GOP's proposal to replace Obamacare. That tweak, buried in cryptic language on page 67 of the bill, would end the $500,000 cap that health insurers currently have under the Affordable Care Act on deducting the cost of executives' compensation as business expenses on their taxes.

The Republican proposal to eliminate that cap means that insurers would be able to deduct nearly the full value of their CEOs' compensation, and not pay taxes on it. For a company such as Aetna, whose CEO Mark Bertolini earns more than $17 million annually, ending the cap would add to its bottom line, and encourage insurers to pay executives more money, critics say.

Health insurers billion dollar windfall GOP Obamacare replacement

The health secretary claims to be unaware of this.. LOL

Throughout the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump blasted the Affordable Cart Act as a law that really only helped insurers. “You know who makes the money with Obamacare? I don’t know if you know. The insurance companies.” But weeks after meeting with top health insurance CEOs, President Trump announced on Tuesday a replacement proposal that includes a massive tax cut for insurance companies that pay their CEOs more than $500,000 a year.

Asked to defend this provision of the bill on Tuesday — technically a sunset of a provision in the tax code — his Secretary of Health and Human Services did not do so. A reporter asked how a tax break for insurance executives making more than $500,000 a year was important to the legislation’s stated aim of controlling costs for patients. Secretary Tom Price responded, “I’m not aware of that. I’ll look into that.”

Trump team feigns ignorance of massive tax giveaway to CEOs in their health care bill

[stpioc]

President Donald Trump told conservative groups that if the GOP leadership's American Health Care Act did not pass, he would allow Obamacare to collapse and blame its failure on Democrats.

Trump revealed his strategy during a meeting with the conservative groups FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party Patriots at the White House on Wednesday. His comments were first reported by CNN's Jim Acosta and were confirmed to Business Insider by a source with knowledge of the meeting.

Trump's Obamacare repeal backup plan blame Democrats for collapse - Business Insider

This is pretty stunning:

• Yes, you heard that right, the President of the United States is willing to let more than 20 million people loose healthcare, and quite a number of these their health and even their life as a consequence, just to score political points. How about that for "keeping Americans safe"
  
• Obamacare won't collapse on itself unless policy helps it collapsing, for instance by generating so much uncertainty about future policy that insurers withdraw from the exchanges. There are other ways policy can nudge this outcome closer, see earlier entries in this thread.
  
• And this to appease the ideologues who want a "free market" solution for healthcare (that doesn't exist) and are against any entitlement: 
  

David McIntosh of the Club for Growth said the president "listened" to the groups' concerns. "The president wants to get something done, and he urged us to stay supportive," a statement from McIntosh said. "We laid out our major concerns about the lack of free-market reforms in this bill, the continuation of the Medicaid expansion, and the refundable tax credits."

Trump's Obamacare repeal backup plan blame Democrats for collapse - Business Insider

These ideologues have no problem with 20-30 million people losing their healthcare insurance simply because the solutions don't fit their fixed ideological schemes (market failures do not exist, entitlements are bad, government is always the problem, etc.).

So ideology kills again, and now with the help of the President.

[stpioc]

Paul Ryan's wet dreams... cutting Medicaid. Unbelievable.

Speaking to National Review editor Rich Lowry at an event hosted by the conservative magazine, House Speaker Paul Ryan made the case for the American Health Care Act by presenting it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cut Medicaid spending. “We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around,” Ryan says, before interrupting himself to clarify exactly how big of an opportunity this is, “since you and I were drinking out of kegs.”

AHCA’s Medicaid rollbacks would cost 14 million people their health insurance coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But those 14 million people are people who only got Medicaid coverage relatively recently. Ryan’s youthful dream refers to provisions of the law that will cap per capita spending for the millions of other lower-income Americans who get Medicaid coverage.

Paul Ryan says he’s been “dreaming” of Medicaid cuts since he was “drinking out of kegs” - Vox

[stpioc]

The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the GOP’s American Health Care Act is one of the most singularly devastating documents I’ve seen in American politics. For a thorough explanation of the findings, read Sarah Kliff’s explainer. But here is the one-sentence summary: Under the GOP’s bill, the more help you need, the less you get.

The AHCA would increase the uninsured population by about 24 million people — which is more people than live in New York state. But the raw numbers obscure the cruelty of the choices. The policy is particularly bad for the old, the sick, and the poor. It is particularly good for the rich, the young, and the healthy.

Here, in short, is what the AHCA does. The bill guts Medicaid, halves the value of Obamacare’s insurance subsidies, and allows insurers to charge older Americans 500 percent more than they charge young Americans. Then it takes the subsidies that are left and reworks them to be worth less to the poor and the old, takes the insurers that are left and lets them change their plans to cover fewer medical expenses for the sick, and rewrites the tax code to offer hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich. As Dylan Matthews writes, it is an act of class warfare by the rich against the poor.

The perverse reality of the Republican health care bill - Vox

[stpioc]

It is just staggering how heartless these people really are:

While it was easy for the conservatives in Congress to pass straight-up Obamacare repeal legislation when they knew Mr Obama would veto it, crafting legislation that the party has to stand behind - and explain to voters in coming elections - is much trickier. During a Wednesday night televised town hall forum on healthcare there was a telling moment when Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price listened to a cancer patient lament that he would lose his medical coverage under the Republican plan. Mr Price's response was to criticise past Democratic promises on healthcare.

Have Republicans forgotten how to govern? - BBC News

[stpioc]

First lady Michelle Obama has fought fiercely to improve nutrition and curb the obesity epidemic — both symbolically and through legislation. Now her work is in peril under the forthcoming Trump administration. The House Freedom Caucus wants to repeal some of the key rules Obama championed to improve school nutrition and transparency in the food industry. In particular, the caucus wants to claw back the school breakfast and lunch nutrition standards in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, and remove the new Nutrition Facts Panel requirements, which were scheduled to go into effect in July 2018.

House conservatives' sweeping plan for Trump's first 100 days, explained - Vox

Yea, why not, let them get back on a diet of coke and burgers, and then these guys complain about healthcare insurance cost and 'liberate' healthcare as well by cutting it from the poorest and sickest, and giving insurance companies free reign to offer whatever skimpy policies they see fit and to deny coverage to people they deem too risky.

[stpioc]

This must be a really hard choice..

By Friday, President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency will have to make a momentous decision: whether to protect kids from a widely used pesticide that's known to harm their brains—or protect the interests of the chemical's maker, Dow AgroSciences.

The pesticide in question, chlorpyrifos, is a nasty piece of work. It's an organophosphate, a class of bug killers that work by "interrupting the electrochemical processes that nerves use to communicate with muscles and other nerves," as the Pesticide Encyclopedia puts it. Chlorpyrifos is also an endocrine disrupter, meaning it can cause "adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects," according to the National Institutes of Health.

Major studies from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the University of California-Davis, and Columbia University have found strong evidence that low doses of chlorpyrifos inhibits kids' brain development, including when exposure occurs in the womb, with effects ranging from lower IQ to higher rates of autism. Several studies—examples here, here, and here—have found it in the urine of kids who live near treated fields. In 2000, the EPA banned most home uses of the chemical, citing risks to children.

Will Trump's EPA Greenlight a Pesticide Known to Damage Kids' Brains? | Mother Jones

[stpioc]

Yes, stop all the cleaning up work, this is all a waste of money..

At the EPA, the administration has  ordered that "all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately," ProPublica writers Andrew Revkin and Jesse Eisinger report, quoting an internal EPA email they obtained. Myron Ebell, the climate change denier who led the Trump team's EPA transition and directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, confirmed the suspension, Revkin and Eisenger report.

If you can prevent public agencies from conducting vital functions, "you can say they don't do anything, and justify cutting their funding." That's potentially a massive blow to the agency's core functions, says Patty Lovera, assistant director of the environmental watchdog group Food & Water Watch.

"The EPA's not necessarily out there running a bulldozer to clean up a toxic site," she says. Superfund, an EPA program responsible for cleaning up the nation's most contaminated land, is executed through contracts, she said. 

The EPA turns to contractors for "tons of water stuff, too"—from monitoring water quality downstream from polluters to helping municipalities update water infrastructure to avoid toxins. "It's one thing to put a pause on new contracts so they can be reviewed, but to reach back and stop existing ones is a whole other can of worms," Lovera said.

Trump Just Ordered Government Scientists to Hide Facts From the Public | Mother Jones