Ideology kills

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From Conservatives themselves:

Marc Thiessen, the George W. Bush speechwriter who now writes a column for the Washington Post op-ed page, is aghast at the Senate GOP’s health care bill. “Paying for a massive tax cut for the wealthy with cuts to health care for the most vulnerable Americans is morally reprehensible,” he says. “If Republicans want to confirm every liberal caricature of conservatism in a single piece of legislation, they could do no better than vote on the GOP bill in its current form.” 

But at what point do we admit that this isn’t the liberal caricature of conservatism? It’s just ... conservatism..

It turns out the liberal caricature of conservatism is correct - Vox

And make no mistake, people will die as a result of Obamacare repeal, commensurate with the number of people losing insurance:

On substance, Democrats are on firm footing. The Center for American Progress and Harvard researchers estimated that the Senate bill could cause between 18,100 and 27,700 additional deaths in 2026. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reported that it’s “hard to pin down” exactly how many people would lose their lives, but acknowledged, “The available evidence suggests that there will be a human toll from an increase in the number of uninsured.... In broad strokes, Sanders’s assessment that thousands more would die annually appears to be supported by the data.” PolitiFact similarly “found ample evidence in the academic literature to suggest that legislation on the scale of the House bill would produce ‘thousands’ of additional deaths.” It’s also just simple logic that being uninsured imperils one’s health, which can lead to death (an obvious example being someone discovered to have late-stage cancer, which could have been caught earlier through a routine medical checkup)..

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

A real life experiment came when Romney introduced Romneycare in Massachusetts, which increased coverage and mortality declined.

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Terrific article how they block the bad news out..

But given that every analysis of the Republicans’ bills comes to the same broad conclusion—that it will result in millions of Americans losing coverage, won’t reduce premiums for anyone but young, healthy people, and will bestow a massive tax cut skewed toward those who don’t need the extra cash—one has to wonder what those 30-40 percent who approve of the legislation are thinking.

The simplest explanation is that they’re not. Most of us rely heavily on partisan cues to form a position on policy issues, especially when they’re complicated. Influencers—pundits, wonks, and politicians you like—play an important role.

On Twitter, I pointed out that a meta-analysis of high-quality, peer-reviewed studies by Harvard researchers published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that stripping coverage from millions of Americans would indeed lead to “excess mortality” over the baseline established by the ACA. In plain language, that means the claim that passing the Republican bill would “kill people” is the judgment of the medical establishment, not a talking point conjured up by Democrats.

Pollak’s response: The New England Journal of Medicine has a liberal bias and it’s all fake news

Dispatches From the Conservative Bubble: GOP Health-Care Edition

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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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This is why we call them the Nasty Party. Because they don't care..

Shortly before the Senate narrowly rejected the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare early Friday morning, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) delivered a powerful speech late in the evening urging her colleagues to save the health care law. The senator from Hawaii, who is battling stage four kidney cancer, asked lawmakers to vote with the same compassion they showed her when she announced her diagnosis in May. 

“I am fighting kidney cancer and I’m just so grateful that I have health insurance so I can concentrate on the care that I needed,” Hirono said from Senate floor, instead of worrying about “how the heck I was going to afford the care that was going to probably save my life.”

“You showed me your care, you showed me your compassion, where is that tonight?” she continued. “I can’t believe that a single senator in this body has not faced an illness or whose family member or a loved one has not faced illness where they were so grateful they had health care.”

Senator Battling Stage Four Kidney Cancer Shames Republicans Trying to End Obamacare – Mother Jones

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The Nasty Party's agenda is so unpopular most of it has to be executed in secret, like dismantling the EPA which lets industry poison the environment

The New York Times had a big story on Friday about EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s propensity to operate in secret. It offers a detailed and damning review of the evidence, but it stops short of drawing the broader conclusion: namely, that the approach of serving industry under cover of secrecy is not idiosyncratic to Pruitt, nor is it distinctively Trumpian. Rather, it is the standard approach of today’s GOP, as reflected in such recent initiatives as the failed health care bill. It is, in fact, the only approach possible to advance an agenda that is unpopular and intellectually indefensible. Before painting that bigger picture, though, let’s look more closely at Pruitt’s brief but memorable stint at the EPA so far.

Scott Pruitt is dismantling EPA in secret for the same reason the GOP health care bill was secret - Vox

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And if you want to depress yourself, here is some of the Nasty Party members blaming the riots in Charlotsville on... Barack Obama

Several Alabama voters blame President Barack Obama for the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville this weekend because, they say, he sowed division in American politics. Attendees at a rally for Rep. Mo Brooks, a conservative House Republican running for Senate, in Decatur on Monday said they were confident that philanthropist George Soros was bankrolling both sides of this weekend's violent clashes. And on conservative Alabama talk radio, Black Lives Matter activists quickly emerged as a top culprit in the bloodshed. Callers, citing Facebook posts, claimed that BLM protesters had thrown bricks at the car before it hit and killed Heather Heyer. 

I think Barack Obama is to blame. I think this country is more divided than it ever has been. I think almost all racism in world history can be tied back to liberalism, socialism, the idea everyone's supposed to have an equal outcome as opposed to equal opportunity — those are liberal ideas that have been propagated over the past eight years through the administration, with just terrible things going on and the rhetoric we had coming out of the White House during that time.

“Barack Obama is to blame”: 13 Alabama conservatives on Charlottesville - Vox

Amazing stuff..

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One of Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)’s last major votes before retirement could be a death sentence for tens of thousands of Americans. One of them is Ady Barkan, a 33-year-old California father living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), who, during a Thursday night flight from Washington D.C. to Phoenix, Arizona, asked Flake to cast a vote to save his life.

“I was healthy a year ago. I was running on the beach,” Barkan told Flake on the flight, according to video footage of the exchange. “I’m 33, I have an 18-month-old son, and out of nowhere I was diagnosed with ALS, which has a life expectancy of three to four years, no treatment, no cure.” Due to his ALS, Barkan will probably need the assistance of a ventilator to stay alive long enough to see his son grow up. But the Republican tax bill, which recently passed the Senate, could result in major cuts to disability funding that will be necessary for Barkan to afford the medical assistance he’ll need as the disease progresses.

That’s because the GOP tax bill could potentially result in $150 billion a year in automatic cuts to safety net programs, including Medicare, student loans, farm subsidies, and support services for crime victims. These cuts may be triggered by the congressional “pay-as-you-go” (PAYGO) rule, which requires Congress to offset the cost of any legislation or trigger cuts to federal programs. If those cuts — including a $25 billion per year cut to Medicaid — go into effect, Barkan says he would not be able to afford a ventilator.

“Mick Mulvaney of the Office of Management and Budget is individually responsible for choosing and implementing those cuts,” Barkan said during his conversation with Flake. “He thinks people on disability are just slackers, so what happens? What should I tell my son or what should you tell my son if you pass this bill and he cuts funding for disability and I can’t get a ventilator?””

Man with Lou Gehrig’s disease makes emotional plea to Jeff Flake to vote down Trump’s tax plan – ThinkProgress

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In addition to the PAYGO rule, the GOP plan also repeals the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates could leave an additional 13 million people without health insurance.

Even the most conservative analyses estimate that, for every 1,000 people who loses their insurance, one of them will die. That conservative estimate concludes that 10,000 people will die every year because of the GOP tax plan. (The most liberal estimate assumes that the number is closer to one in 176 people will die due to losing their access to health coverage.)

Man with Lou Gehrig’s disease makes emotional plea to Jeff Flake to vote down Trump’s tax plan – ThinkProgress

Ideology kills, literally..

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The Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, is basically a piece of Medicaid targeted on young Americans. It was introduced in 1997, with bipartisan support. Last year it covered 8.9 million kids. But its funding expired more than two months ago. Republicans keep saying they’ll restore the money, but they keep finding reasons not to do it; state governments, which administer the program, will soon have to start cutting children off. What’s the problem?

The other day Senator Orrin Hatch, asked about the program..., declared, “The reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore.” Then he voted for an immense tax cut. And one piece of that immense tax cut is a big giveaway to inheritors of large estates. Under current law, a married couple’s estate pays no tax unless it’s worth more than $11 million, so that only a handful of estates — around 5,500, or less than 0.2 percent of the total number of deaths a year — owe any tax at all. The number of taxable estates is also, by the way, well under one one-thousandth of the number of children covered by CHIP. But Republicans still consider this tax an unacceptable burden on the rich... So ... let’s talk dollars. CHIP covers a lot of children, but children’s health care is relatively cheap compared with care for older Americans. In fiscal 2016 the program cost only $15 billion, a tiny share of the federal budget. Meanwhile, under current law the estate tax is expected to bring in about $20 billion, more than enough to pay for CHIP. ...

By their actions, Republicans are showing that they consider it more important to give extra millions to one already wealthy heir than to provide health care to a thousand children. ..., it’s still hard to believe that a whole political party would balk at doing the decent thing for millions of kids while rushing to further enrich a few thousand wealthy heirs. That is, however, exactly what’s happening. And it’s as bad, in its own way, as that same party’s embrace of a child molester because they expect him to vote for tax cuts.

The Republican War on Children, by Paul Krugman, NY Times

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During a speech on the House floor on Wednesday, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) announced that he has prostate cancer. “Don’t ever, ever, take your health or family for granted. During the holidays, enjoy your family, because no one, no one, is promised tomorrow,” Brooks said, adding that he learned he has cancer following a doctor’s scan in October.  Brooks’ announcement demonstrates the value of having health insurance, and the reality that everyone gets sick at one time or another.

It also highlights the disconnect between his rhetoric about health care and people’s lived experience. While Republicans were trying to repeal Obamacare in May, Brooks — who introduced a one-sentence Obamacare repeal bill in March — went on CNN and defended Republicans’ plan to allow insurance companies to discriminate against people who have preexisting conditions, which he characterized as personal failings. “My understanding is that (the new proposal) will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool,” Brooks said in comments that generated swift backlash. “That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people — who’ve done things the right way — that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”

Congressman announces cancer diagnosis months after characterizing illness as a personal failing – ThinkProgress

Yea, you read that correctly. The Senator argued that it's ok for insurance companies to discriminate against the sick because the latter should blame themselves.

These people are amazing. 

Nevertheless, we wish him a speedy recovery, but also that he learns from this experience.