Comments

1
No way they hold a vote if they don't know they can pass it. Right? Right?
2
They won't repeal it because they can't repeal it.

Liberals, democrats, the poor and sick... they all may be grotesque to conservatives, but deep down in places they don't talk about at parties, they WANT affordable health care for all, they NEED affordable health care for all.
3
Man, time zones sure are difficult, aren't they?
4
@1: Yes. According to Nancy Pelosi, that would be a rookie mistake!
5
Repeal or don't, it'll be fun to watch regardless.
6
Why would the President get to tell the legislature to hold a vote they don't want to?

And why do they care if he threatens to move on to "other legislative priorities" since they do the actual legislating? Unless he's going to stand up and veto a repeal of the ACA if they pass one later.
7
Will the Rep base tear Ryan apart like a banished Skeksis once this finally fails? Is it ghoulish to hope so?
8
@6,

Remember, Trump doesn't know how the U.S. government functions. He thinks he's the only important person and if he's not personally working on some such issue, then no one else is either.
9
Aaaaaaaaand down it goes in flames, all because it wasn't cruel enough and didn't kill enough people.

Well, ha ha, eat shit and die, fascists--or even worse--sign up for the predatory, junk insurance you were pimping in your own bill.
10
Trump is like the creature mentioned in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy that is so thoroughly stupid that it thinks that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. Seriously, he's beyond merely insular and incompetent, he simply doesn't understand the basics of how "other people actually existing" works. He's got the mind of a pre-conscious infant.

11
Heard a snippet of an interview with John Beohner recently and he seemed to be deriving a great deal of amusement from watching them attempt to cater both to mainstream GOP members as well as the idiot freedumb caucus. You know things are rough when they're making THAT guy into a sympathetic character.
12
@7:

TRIAL BY STONE!
13
Also, according to NBC, Ryan has pulled the bill from the House floor.

One can assume SCROTUS has already completely forgotten the AHCA ever existed, and presumably Spicer will claim in his next press conference that any reference to it is simply "made up" by the lying, fake news purveying press.
13
However, this is only the second month of this administration.

They've still got another 46 months to fuck us over.

Or nearly eight years if Jill Stein collaborates with Russia again to fuck us over.
15
White House response: Steve Bannon floats into Senate wearing Harkonen hover suit and pulls the heart plug out of a Ryan intern.
16
@15: Oh my God that made me laugh!
17
Trump is going to have to tweet something really fucked up to distract everyone fro this.
18
@17 is right. This will trigger a Twitter spat to rival the ones he used to have with Madonna. And maybe still does, for all I know.
19
@ 17, Yup.

Epic, coked-out twitstorm 'sploding at 3 am.

As a bonus, it sure will be fun watching Tantrum Spice ragesplaining his way outta this one.
20
@17 tweet? Why not bomb somebody?
21
Its a little too early to crow victory. the GOP is every day passing damaging bills in both Houses such as the one allowing overzealous ISP's to sell off your private data. Further, the bill did not fail a vote- it was merely pulled from the roster for now. It can come back later, after the House majority whip has enough time to exert pressure on those Reps voting no.

Then there's the nominees, who have mostly sailed through, many of whom got Democratic votes in favor of. Unless we can mount a credible primary candidate in places like North Dakota or West Virginia to scare Heil Heitkampf and J/O Mansion into compliance, we still have to deal with the problem of Democrats voting in favor of Trump nominees.
22
While a good sign that important ground work is being done, as @ 13 rightfully noted it's still waaay too early to celebrate .
23
The Golfer in Chief is blaming the Dems for the failure of Trumpcare. Like they were ever asked to participate at all in that disastrous bill. Worst projection ever.
24
"Its a little too early to crow victory."

What the fuck are you talking about?

Do you think this is a game that ends all at once, when the clock runs out and the referee adds up the scores, and somebody gets a trophy? No. This is life. You win, you lose, you win, you lose, eventually you die, and everybody else goes on winning or losing.

Today Trump and Ryan defeated themselves, and that's something to celebrate. Tomorrow, there will be other shit. Life goes on.
25
@15:

Great, now I have an image of Milo Yiannopolous wearing a metal speedo stuck in my head.
26
@21: hokay, Debbie Downer. hear that? NO SCHADENFREUDE!
27
#13 You call the the woman INCOMPETENT who was a dedicated public servant who both got healthcare for all the children in the US, and helped prevent the architect of 9-11 from ever raining terrorism down on us again -- among other actions for the good.

So what have you -- or Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein -- accomplished for the welfare of this country that even comes within a mile of just those two things.

Nothing but hot air from all three of you.

And thanks again to the three of you for being part of the party of the assholes who helped elect Trump!
29
I was fascinated to watch (and not retch) as Lyin' Ryan announced the withdrawal. Did he actually hear himself speak when he acknowledged that the Repubs' only function for the last ten years had been to oppose? That they'd had no interest in achieving a bipartisan solution, but now expect everyone to fall in line?

Until I'd read about them on SLOG this week, I had no idea the Freedom Caucus existed. ::shudders:: Ugh.
30
Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?
31
Obamacare is just a baby step when it comes to what's needed to truly reform health care in the US. It's not nearly enough and what was proposed would have only made things worse.

For starters, having access to health care should NOT be based on where you work or how many hours you work or even if you're working at the moment. Neither should employers have to bear the burden of providing health care access.

The consolidation of health insurers that led to the creation of behemoths like United Healthcare that now control the marketplace (as goes United Healthcare so goes the rest of the health insurance sector), as well as their wholesale movement of insurers from non-profits to for-profits has hurt Americans' ability to access health care. There is little competition among insurers now.

When health insurers were non-profits, they had some public service accountability. Turning themselves into for-profits, they have none. They now see their primary responsibility as taking care of their shareholders, not those that they insure.

Having third-party, for-profit entities standing between patent and provider, while siphoning money from both sides of the equation, adds to to the cost and inefficiency of the entire health care system. And that's what we have now.

We still desperately need more health care reform, not legislation that tries to send us "back to the future". I'm glad this legislation failed because it needed to.

And here's something to remember when you start blaming the federal government for your health insurance woes. The federal government has no responsibility for regulating the health insurance sector. This is entirely in the hands of states through their state insurance commissioners. States have the right to set up their own health care systems. Massachusetts did it with Romneycare, the program on which Obamacare is modeled. Remember that adage, "Think globally, act locally." It's true for health care. We're not at the mercy of DC on this one.
32
Can't deliver on his signature issue! SAD!
33
Republicans disliked Obama so much they spent millions of our $ trying to repeal Obamacare. It was a personal thing and the person I blame the most is mitch mcstupid. He vowed to make the Obama admin. a 4 year deal and then to repeal Obamacare. He spent thousands of hours fretting over this and didn't support #45 until it was obvious he was the Rep. candidate. He's the one to blame for all this waste of time and money. He should go away.
34
@31 makes a good point about state action. Romneycare in MA worked reasonably well, though we should be able to do better.

But we need to boot out some Republican state legislators. Get activist in the suburbs, ask soccer parents if they're happy with Republican obstructionism on healthcare. And ask the legislators to go on record who is interested in being part of a solution.
35
MA got better access, better quality, and lives saved, but it has to be said they haven't controlled costs. That's gonna be a tough sell. On the other hand, we're not Mitt Romney, and we are not obliged to make the insurers' CEOs quite so happy.

36
It may be that what this failure shows most clearly, is how gerrymandering has hurt the Republican party, creating seats so partisan they distilled representatives so extreme they do not feel compelled to compromise even with the more moderate portion of their own party.

Further, this demonstrates there is a significant and perhaps growing percentage of House Republicans that are not cowed by Trump's threats.

If tax reform goes at all sideways, such that Grover Norquist and his ilk begin to doubt the sufficiency of Trump's status as having "enough working digits to handle a pen", I think we'll promptly see impeachment proceedings on whatever pretext seems least damaging to the party while remaining effective, unless Acting President Pence has beat them to it by having invoked the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
37
This is a great step, but it's only one step. We need to continue resisting this administration. I would recommend that the only topic, ever, is money. No one cares about ethics, morality or hypocrisy. It's always about the money. If people knew how much this idiot "president" cost us every day, that would finally start to move the needle in a serious manner.
38
Here's hoping "trumpcare" stays dead for awhile...
This was a crap bill that wasn't going to fix anything.
Trump dodged a bullet by it failing.

This will allow another year for the decomposing corpse of ObamaCare to stink up the political landscape, and give the GOP another issue in the midterms.
By then how many counties will only have one (or none) insurance carrier?
How many state exchanges will have gone belly-up?
How much higher will the premiums of average Americans have gone up?

The Democraps have been having so much fun Resisting! they may have forgotten just.how.shitty.ObamaCare is.
They disgruntled disgusted American voters will soon remind them.
39
@38:

Except that that's not what's happening - if you actually look at what IS happening. For one thing, most of us don't get our health care through the marketplace: more than 150 million of us get it through our jobs, and another 55 million disabled and retired people get theirs through Medicare. Funny thing about those two: since the ACA was enacted increases in familiy premiums have slowed dramatically, down to an average of 3% annually as of 2016. And since 2011 other premiums have been averaging increases of about 4% per year, as opposed to more than 6% in the previous five year period, and way better than 2001 - 2006 when they shot up more than 12% per year. Medicare has seen similar low annual increases since 2011, averaging less than 1.5% per year, the lowest five year growth rate in the program's history. Meanwhile, more than 20 million more U.S. citizens have coverage than they did before enactment.

But, yes, there are some areas were things aren't working as well, mainly in states that have eschewed Medicare expansion. And, because the state exchanges didn't even exist prior to 2014, insurance companies had no history of claims from it to use as a basis for setting initial rates; some did a pretty good job guessing, others not so much. The ones that grossly underestimated costs did raise their premiums significantly in subsequent years, but that wasn't a failure the system so much as it was a failure of those insurers to anticipate just how much demand there would be for the new markets in some states. And lets also not forget that since enactment employer-based plans have seen far smaller increases than they did prior, which means that nearly half the people who have health insurance derived some tangible benefit from the ACA, even though they're not enrolled; a crucial fact critics conveniently fail to mention. Plus, increases in the individual market have also slowed significantly; before the ACA it wasn't uncommon for the ensured to see double-digit annual increases in premiums. That too has slowed dramatically since the law was enacted. Furthermore, analysis by the Congressional Budget Office strongly indicates the state co-ops and exchanges will remain stable - assuming Republicans in Congress and in those 19 states where GOP run legislatures and executives have refused Medicaid expansion would stop trying to sabotage the program to the detriment of tens of thousands of their own citizens.

Nobody envisioned the ACA as being a perfect plan; far from it. But just like any new product that goes on the market, you put it out there, see how it works in the real world, and then make improvements to fix what isn't working. Unfortunately, Republicans, both nationally and at the state level have adamantly refused to consider any changes that would actually make it work better, for the simple reason that they WANT it to fail. The irony being of course that, when they finally put forth their own alternative, after seven years of telling us how truly awful the ACA was - it turned out to be orders of magnitude WORSE.
40
39
If ObamaCare was so great we wonder why the Democrats lost the election to a guy like Trump.
The American health care system is a cruel disaster but Obamacare just doubled down on the worse aspects of it.
ObamaCare has greatly increased costs to employers, employees, and people getting insurance on their own, while raising deductibles to levels that in effect make it as if the policy holder has no insurance (The Left loves to focus on phony numbers instead of looking at what is actually happening; in the same way that The Democrats loved to cite apparently low unemployment figures collected by the government and tout their "success" while ignoring that huge numbers of people are underemployed and desperate or have dropped out of the labor force they love to cite the increased "coverage" rates (a huge percent of which is paid all or largely by the government; giving away money is not a terribly clever or sustainable way to improve the situation) while ignoring that that "coverage" is costing much more and many people can not afford to actually use the coverage.
The Republican plan only tinkered around the edges; politically it's failure is a blessing for Trump and The Right, whether they deserve it or recognize it.
ObamaCare will continue to implode, leaving a lot of angry voters.
Effective reform will be enormously painful and unpopular because the current system is so dysfunctional but the national conversation has not even begun to address the real issues yet.

From Time:
Here's What's Happened to Health Care Costs in America in the Obama Years(excerpts)

"...Even as more people are being covered, however, the choices for coverage are decreasing. Major insurers such as UnitedHealth and Aetna are scaling back participation in Obamacare marketplaces for 2017. The result is that in one-third of the counties in the U.S., people who don't have coverage through work will have a "choice" of only one insurance provider next year. Unsurprisingly, soaring insurance premiums are being projected as a consequence of the absence of competition. While many middle- and low-income Americans get some or all of their insurance premiums subsidized by the government, people who are insured through their employers must rely on their companies to pay some of the bill. And the amounts for premiums paid by both employers and employees have risen substantially over the years.In 2008, the average employer-sponsored family plan cost a total of $12,680, with employees footing $3,354 of the bill, according to Kaiser data. By 2016, the cost of the average employer family plan was up to $18,142 for the year, with workers picking up $5,277 of the tab.
"Insurance premiums tell only part of the story for health care costs.
For another, the typical plan's deductible is quite different nowadays. In 2008, high deductibles were the minority:
Fast-forward to 2016, and high-deductible plans have become standard
Workers at smaller firms must pay an average of $2,069 out of pocket before insurance payments kick in..
Because co-pays have risen and high deductibles have become the norm in the Obamacare era, patients are paying more out of pocket for prescriptions than they did in the past. "The average patient cost exposure for brand prescriptions filled through a commercial plan has increased more than 25 percent
As you can see, the results of Obamacare, and eight years of Barack Obama in office ...... Today, Americans face higher health insurance premiums, vastly higher deductibles in health plans, and higher prescription drug costs than we ever have. ."
41
39

ObamaCare did give free stuff to a lot of people, and folks really love to get stuff for free, and those folks (who evidently are the only kind of people Slog reporters know...) will squeal like piglets if anyone tries to take away their free stuff,
but giving those folks their free stuff came at a very high financial cost, disproportionately borne by the struggling working lower middle class who least deserve to be punished and can least afford the cost;
and at a high political costs to Democrats that was paid Nov 8.

Celebrating the failure of this bill as a 'success' for Democrats is pretty dense, this just cranks things back to the way they were before the election.


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