Wall Street Cheat Sheet has a very good summary of all Republican ‘proposals’ to replace Obamacare with something:
The Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act is strongly reliant on market competition, with notable differences from Obamacare; it would likely cover fewer uninsured Americans, increase premiums for many older adults, shrink Medicaid, decrease subsidies for middle class Americans, scale back protections for people with preexisting conditions, and allow private insurers to escape many of the consumer-friendly requirements imposed on them by Obamacare.
Oh boy, that sounds soooooo popular!!!
Status quo bias now works in our favor.
Baud
The nice political thing about Obamacare is that you can’t improve it except by making it more liberal.
Russ
Yeah? That will work. What is the point? Boy’s “put the shovel down”.
piratedan
yeah, it’s epitome of GOP governance, screw the folks, help the corporate moochers…. Once folks finally realize that the GOP doesn’t give a flea fart for personal liberties unless its under the guise of allowing someone else to screw YOU, then we’re doomed to continue to live in this media twilight of only being shown the face of the card and never seeing it for nothing more than a thin veneer concerned with image and no depth.
shelly
Summary: Pretend that we give a shit about uninsured Americans.
Davis X. Machina
The “Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act”? What the hell is this? These asshats may not be able to write a bill, but at least you used to be able to count on them titling them right.
It should be the American Patriot Awesome Freedom with Awesomeness, and Eagles, Act.
Ben Cisco
I see their penchant for naming things inversely proportional to their actual effect continues…buncha doofuses/doofi/whatever the hell the plural of “doofus” is.
Quicksand
But freedom.
C.V. Danes
Note that by “market competition” what the Republicans mean is competition between the insurers and the insured, not competition between insurers.
boatboy_srq
@Ben Cisco: It’s a good name – if what you’re really after is ensuring repsonsible physicians can afford to choose their patients.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
More Free Market Fetishism, mon frere.
aimai
@C.V. Danes: Like my piranha competes with my guppy.
Shakezula
They have to unload the rest of those purple heart bandages somewhere and under this plan, a bandage is all you would get. (At the market-friendly rate of $100.90!)
Tommy
Let me try and tell a story.
My parents are rich. They have a second house in TN (we live in IL). They drive there and like to stop at this place that has a Ryan’s (a buffet kind of place). They sit in the same section to have the same waitress.
My mom left her purse there once, I hate to think how much money could have been charged to her credit cards. The women took the purse home, worried about leaving it at the place, and called my parents.
They picked it up from her. I beat my mom bloody they didn’t give her any money. I was like “a fifty would have been fair.”
Mom didn’t understand, she lives in a different world. I explained I think her wage is $2.50/hour since she gets tips. She has no health care.
This was years and years ago, but it hit home with her. She didn’t know that you could work for that wage. That you could work a 40+ hour week and not have health care. A foreign idea/concept to her.
I explained that Obamacare (the ACA) was trying to fix things like this. To spread out costs. To einnsure as many as possible. Not to drop a person cause they are sick or reach some limit. To help people.
Mom started to get it. Really get it. Still working on dad. Harder, but working him :).
She is now something of a liberal.
Will Reks
Richard, do you have any thoughts on Ezekiel Emanuel’s article on the future of insurance companies?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116752/ezekiel-emanuel-book-excerpt-end-health-insurance-companies
Tommy
@Shakezula: LOL. I am blessed with amazing health but about ten years I almost died. Ended up in the ICU with a tube down my throat for a week. When that tube was removed I got this little plastic bin I was supposed to use to wash myself. In it a razor. Toothbrush. Stuff like that. That plastic bin cost me $27.75. Not with all the stuff in it, just the bin! It was a joke.
I keep it and use it daily to remind me (keep dish towels in it) how FUBAR our health care system is.
Gene108
@piratedan:
As long as the Negroes and other Coloreds get hurt worse than Whites, what is the problem with those GOP policies?
The problem the GOP has now is a good chunk of whites are getting hurt as bad as the blacks and Latinos, but the only alternative is for the GOP to admit they are wrong and change course. I do not see that happening.
Fred
@Tommy: Good for Mom. Good for you.
piratedan
@Gene108: I know gene, so much for GOP rebranding… what bothers me the most is the folks doing the governing for the GOP are either insane fundamentalists (Gohmert, Bacmann, Bourn, Franks, et al) or are nihilistic opportunists hoping to ride the tiger (Ryan, McConnell, Graham, Boehner et al) and as much as it pains me to say it, our system needs a 2nd viable party of politicos who are actually invested in a set of ethics and economic and social standards that aren’t drawn from the 1850’s.
Too much corporate money in politics and a media that is more concerned with advertising revenue than in actually reporting on the news and issues….
Mnemosyne
PCAREA? It sounds like a cheap hotel trying to direct you to their business center. Certainly not nearly as catchy as “Obamacare.”
Violet
@Mnemosyne: I thought PCAREA sounds like what your dermatologist tells you you’ve got when you go in to have a rash in an unfortunate location checked out.
Tommy
@Fred: I am trying. I found out a few years ago my mother, well she had been married before in the 60s (I did not know this). Before she married my father. Why my father’s parents never liked her. Things I saw became clear. Like why my mom always gave to women rape crisis centers. Drop off a check or cloths. She had been abused before.
I say that as an in I used. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but knew because of this she might be open to helping others (she doesn’t know I know this BTW). She was already helping others, just not directly with action.
Pushed her here and well it worked. I told her I don’t need their money. Inheritance. Sure a little :). But not all of it. I don’t know what I’d do with it. I have a retirement savings, how much is enough?
Start to give it away, that is a good thing. Mom has, but as I said in another comment, still working on dad.
Suffern ACE
Well it turns out they could propose something worse than their “Healthcare Bill of Rights.”
rikyrah
so, the GOP plan is to take healthcare away from millions.
but, we already knew that.
StringOnAStick
@Tommy: Tommy, I think your folks are pretty typical of that age group and social standing. They sound just like my folks though they aren’t rich, but well off with life time pensions. They come from a time when anyone with a good job got health insurance and life time pension benefits, and have been on Medicare for decades now; they simply do not have any understanding that those sorts of benefits are no longer universal, and Fox news feeds their old concept that only slackers with crappy jobs could be in such a crappy position. The knowledge that life time pensions are basically extinct or that you could have a reasonable job and still not have health insurance is not part of their daily reality; Fox makes sure of that.
Good on you for figuring out how to reach out to your mom, and that just might be the way you end up reaching your dad too!
Richard Mayhew
@Will Reks: Not yet, but I will try to have some soon.
superfly
@Baud: Exactly.
Richard Mayhew
@Richard Mayhew: Reading the TNR article — I mostly agree with him — the old style insurance company has a short half life in this world. Intergrated payer-provider systems are the way forward for the companies that want to thrive while the public utility/infrastructure model is available for companies that can comfortably stagnate
p.a.
Maybe call it ‘Contract on America’. ‘Sights on Americans’, something martial; Rethugs like that.
NonyNony
@Mnemosyne:
I suspect that the geniuses want to call it the Patient CARE Act. Because they can spin it as “Patient CARE, not Obamacare” or something.
The fact that it will be dropped down to at best the PCARE Act eluded them. Because they’ve forgotten that if you’re going to bullshit with acronyms you need to bullshit with the WHOLE acronym.
ETA: I’m surprised they didn’t try to find a way to blatantly stick the letters GO in the front of the whole thing too. Why not call it the GOP CARE act so that you can have GOPCare vs. Obamacare? It’s the kind of thing that people living in a bubble would like, and the target audience lives in the Fox News bubble, so why not?
Shazza
@piratedan:
The GOP makes it abundantly clear they don’t care about actual working people. If they didn’t fear mong and race-bait, they’d only have the 1% voting for them. If people haven’t figured the GOP out by now, there’s no hope for them.
NotMax
P-CARE.
As in, we yearn to pee on your healthcare.
Just One More Canuck
PCAREA – rhymes with dia
Bill Arnold
@StringOnAStick:
My elderly dad (3d generation Republican turned Democrat in 1992) knows that if he starts watching Fox News (including fox business), his TV will mysteriously break, and stay broken, in ways that will stump repair people.
Fortunately he’s a NYTimes-cover-to-cover-every-day + PBS news hour guy. Though the MSNBC morning show has his interest, sigh.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
For a sane person’s definition of “improve”.
MoeLarryAndJesus
I suggest the Republicans start pushing the DIARRHEA. That’s the Despite It All Republicans Really Heal Everyone Act.
It would call on Jeezus to make everyone healthy as long as they pray and vote Republican.