Ideology kills

[Admin]

The Freedom Caucus is a group of hardline ideologues for whom markets are not a means but an end in themselves. They ignore a library of economic literature (including at least for Nobel prizes) that markets can actually fail, instead simply pretending that they can solve all problems. Regulations invariably impose costs, never produce any benefits. Government is always the problem, never the solution.

This has led them to propose a whole host of scary deregulation proposals including silly stuff like:

• Abolish the rules for healthier school lunches, despite the fact that 97% of schools have implemented the regulations that should steer them towards healthier pupil lunches and snacks and most parents behind the efforts, there could indeed be some cost attached. But aren't the cost of the obesity epidemic and other health consequences of bad diets orders of magnitude higher?
  
• Abolishing rules that oblige food companies to add info on labels on stuff like sugar content. Yes, there are some cost attached to obliging food companies to specify the ingredients on food packaging, but don't customers have a right to know what they're buying? Doesn't a well functioning market economy depend on well informed consumers?
  
• Abolish rules that oblige food companies to prevent (rather than react to) outbreaks of food poisoning. While there are cost attached to the 'intentional adulteration' rule, don't consumers have a right that food companies do everything they can to prevent food poisoning outbreaks rather than just react to them?
  

Either they are blind ideologues or they are in the pocket of the respective industries, or both. From the above examples you might already have guessed that their sweeping deregulation approach can have real consequences for people's health. 

I mean, the US suffers from an obesity epidemic, but that is supposedly all the result of massive amounts of people suddenly becoming more irresponsible with respect to their diets? Their own responsibility, right? How we produce food and market it has nothing to do with that, right?

The US also suffers from a massive opiate addiction epidemic, but that has nothing to do with pharma companies pushing supercharged opiate painkillers aggressively and downplaying their risks, right?

[Admin]

And now they want to simply repeal Obamacare. Get on with it:

The House Freedom Caucus, a conservative wing of congressional Republicans, voted Monday night to support a swift and aggressive repeal of the Affordable Care Act, complicating GOP efforts to unite around a plan to repeal and replace the healthcare law better known as Obamacare. According to reports, the Freedom Caucus said it would not back a repeal if it did not include all of the elements of a repeal bill that debuted in 2015. It also said it wanted to quickly repeal the law, even if no replacement bill was ready.

The 2015 repeal bill, which was passed by the GOP in Congress but vetoed by President Barack Obama, included repeals of the individual mandate, the Medicaid expansion, and the taxes to fund premium subsidies that aid people in paying for coverage.

What kind of effects will this produce, if implemented:

In fact, studies show a straight repeal would cause between 24,000 and 44,000 deaths a year. Research shows that high rates of uninsurance tears at the fabric of a neighborhood. It makes the uninsured feel dehumanized; it makes residents feel like their neighbors are less trustworthy and benevolent. Instead of blurring the differences between people we see on a daily basis, it brightens them. And some research even suggests that as we're exposed to these signs of impoverished people in our communities, we become less willing to help them. We become less generous.

How repealing Obamacare could splinter neighborhoods - Vox

Yes, between 24,000 and 44,000 deaths a year. To hell with them.

[Admin]

Hey, but these Freedom Caucus people are good Christians, right?

"it's in my understanding that the ACA mandate requires everyone to have insurance because the healthy people pull up the sick people, right?" she said. "As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is to pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate, that's what it does, the healthy people pull up the sick." 

Bohon also criticized a proposal favored by Republicans that would put sicker people in high-risk pools for those with preexisting conditions, saying "we are effectively punishing our sickest people" by using the pools. Bohon pointed to previous state high-risk pools, which have exhibited high costs and poor coverage. Bohon asked why the government doesn't just "fix" the ACA or provide Medicaid for all instead of repealing the law.

GOP lawmakers get blasted at Obamacare town hall in Tennessee - Business Insider

Good Christians let the strong pull up the weak. The Freedom Caucus wants exactly the opposite:

There is one fact that is both central to the debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act yet strangely absent from explicit discussion about it. One of the main ways the ACA makes health insurance affordable is by providing families earning less than 400 percent of the poverty line (i.e., less than $85,000 for a family of three or less than $47,550 for a single person) with tax credits to defray the cost of purchasing insurance. 

Giving people money helps make things more affordable. President Obama and the congressional Democrats who wrote the law didn’t find the money for those subsidies hidden in a banana stand — they did what Democrats like to do when paying for things and raised taxes on affluent families. Republicans do not like this idea.

They dislike the idea of raising taxes on wealthy households so much that back in 2011, they pushed the country to the brink of defaulting on the national debt rather than agree to rescind George W. Bush’s high-end tax cuts. In December 2012, they tried to insist that they wouldn’t let Obama extend the portion of the Bush tax cuts that everyone (including rich people) got unless he also extended the tax cuts that only rich people got. 

All of which is to say that despite Democrats’ occasional protestations of bafflement as to why the GOP would so uniformly oppose a market-based approach to universal health care that Mitt Romney happily adopted in the mid-aughts in Massachusetts, there’s no real mystery here. Subsidizing the health care costs of working-class people is expensive, and while Democrats want rich people to pay the freight for doing it, Republicans do not.

The hidden reason Republicans are so eager to repeal Obamacare - Vox

[Admin]

But at least all that deregulation will be good for growth and jobs, right?

A repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is popularly known, could reduce job growth by almost 1.2 million in 2019, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. Although Republicans, who voted in favor of a repeal, say that cutting taxes associated with Obamacare would stimulate the economy, the report found that cuts for the ultra-wealthy are simply not enough, and would actually slow economic growth. 

The job losses would be the result of a reduction in low-income and middle-income Americans’ disposable income. When Americans don’t have to pay higher subsidies and out-of-pocket health care expenses, they tend to spend more. More than three-fourths of the jobs gained by the expansion of Medicaid were not in the health care sector.

Report: Obamacare repeal could cost the United States 1.2 million jobs

[Admin]

And, of course there will be a massive increase in the number of people without health insurance, from the CBO:

Repealing the ACA also would affect the number of people with health insurance and their sources of coverage. CBO and JCT estimate that the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would increase by about 19 million in 2016; by 22 million or 23 million in 2017, 2018, and 2019; and by about 24 million in all subsequent years through 2025, compared with the number who are projected to be uninsured under the ACA. In most of those years, the number of people with employment-based coverage would increase by about 8 million, and the number with coverage purchased individually or obtained through Medicaid would decrease by between 30 million and 32 million. 

[Admin]

But, but, at least these rightwing ideologues would be in favor of promoting freedom and individual careers, right? 

Hahahaha.

Health insurance and career opportunity are impossible to separate for Erin Hoover. Hoover is a 37-year-old Florida State University student who will graduate with a doctorate in English literature this spring. She is also eight months pregnant. Until recently, Hoover had a clear plan. She would have her baby in March, graduate in May, and begin adjunct work to build up her resume. She felt like she was on a good path; one of her poems was recently selected for the Best American Poetry anthology of 2016. Adjunct positions typically don’t offer health insurance, but that seemed fine. Hoover expected she and her baby would continue to get coverage through the Affordable Care Act, which she has relied on since 2014. 

I spend a lot of time talking to Obamacare enrollees like Hoover: people who struck out on their own — left a job, started a business, went back to school — after Obamacare. They felt empowered to do this because in the reformed individual market, insurers had to offer everyone coverage — and couldn’t charge sick people more. And now, many of them are already beginning to rearrange their lives around the law’s uncertain future. There were 1.4 million self-employed people who relied on the marketplaces for coverage in 2014, recent research from the Treasury Department shows. That works out to one-fifth of all marketplace enrollees being people who work for themselves.

For so many Americans, Obamacare offered career freedom. A repeal could take that away.

[stpioc]

Keeping Americans safe..

Each year, more than 40,000 Americans die from drug overdoses. That's on par with the annual death toll from HIV/AIDS at the peak of the US epidemic, in the late '80s and early '90s, and far more than are killed each year from car accidents or gun violence. More than half of those overdose deaths involved opioids, a class of drugs including heroin, Vicodin, OxyContin, and fentanyl. So dire is the epidemic of opioid addiction that it inspired a rare moment of political bipartisanship earlier this year, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act to increase accessibility to addiction medications and the overdose reversal drug naloxone. Democrats tried to include $920 million in treatment funding, but Republicans blocked the move, saying they would address the issue during the appropriations process this fall.

Drugs Kill More People Than Cars or Guns | Mother Jones

Not regulating dangerous drugs gives the companies free reign to exaggerate their benefits and downplay side effects, and that's exactly what happened with these powerful addictive painkillers..

And now it's an epidemic.

[stpioc]

Keeping Americans safe..

Lawmakers have struck down an Obama administration rule that attempts to keep guns out of the hands of people who suffer from mental illness.  The Republican-controlled House voted 235-180 in an apparent effort to improve gun ownership under President Trump. The rule affected nearly 75,000 Social Security recipients diagnosed with mental health conditions, such as extreme anxiety and schizophrenia, and are considered incapable of managing their own affairs.

House Republicans vote to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns | The Independent

Yes, banning refugees from majority Muslim countries (who killed no single US American, according to even the rightwing Cato Institute) is soooo much more important..

What are the chances you get killed by a Syrian refugee, versus an American with a gun? The difference in risk is orders of magnitude..

[Admin]

A small, efficient, 40-year-old program to provide legal aid to middle- and low-income clients in civil proceedings is facing the budget ax, according to a New York Times report on the early stages of the Trump administration’s internal budget planning.

The cut would hardly lighten taxpayers’ burden — even at $375 million last year, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) was roughly one one-hundredth of one percent of total federal spending — but would make life significantly harder for people who can’t afford to hire a fancy lawyer with their own money. About 1.9 million Americans turned to lawyers paid through the LSC’s grant programs in 2014, according to the organization’s website.

Trump’s first budget would end program to help low-income Americans get lawyers

Yes, another way to bust the little guy and make him defenseless against the skimmers.. Weren't they going to do the exact opposite? Drain the swamp, or something?

[stpioc]

Two new studies add to the growing body of evidence that air pollution is causing higher rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Particulate matter may be responsible for more than one in five dementia cases, as the smallest particles appear to travel directly from the nose to the brain, where they do considerable damage.
Tragically, the new president campaigned on rolling back Clean Air Act rules and boosting coal use, which, along with vehicle exhaust, is the principal source of particulates..

Trump’s EPA policies risk more Alzheimer’s cases, doctors warn