there's too many people anyway. maybe we should have some panels that decide who gets healthcare and who won't.

someone come up with a pithy name, ok?

It simply doesn't matter that the GOP is proudly going to commit the equivalent of fifteen 9/11s every year against Americans. RepubliKKKan voters will gladly die in agony while screaming their Heil Twitlers if it means that even one black or Latino person is unable to buy access to healthcare. As the Liberal Redneck said "they'd burn their own house down if the GOP told them their liberal neighbor would choke on the smoke."

The bug-eyed, hair-pulling, tongue-talking, hate-crazed, shrieking GOP orcs would gleefully vote for Adolph Hitler as long as he had an (R) after his name.

Thank you Dan.

If the AHCA passes, it will increase the number of uninsured Americans to over 50 million.
Over 28 million are already uninsured under the ACA.

Americans deserve real healthcare, not for-profit healthcare.

And Dan, thanks for pointing out that the ACA was originally written by a GOP think tank. Lots of people forget that very important fact.

Americans deserve universal coverage.

Too goddamned many humans on this little planet. Not enough room for other species. Its not a (R) or (D) issue.

Take it away, Dan Savage: http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/06/…

As long as the likes of the Big Money, Big Pharma, the Koch Bros, Sheldon Adelson, et al., pull the strings of the GOP AND some Dems in Congress, we won't have single payer. The wealthy have come to expect that their money trumps the greater GOP's and that donations to politicians buys their votes.

The republicans will spin it to say that with their plan, they don't steal from the job creators, so they can create more jobs for people and then those people will get insurance through their employer so everyone should be happy.

A majority of Americans were opposed to the Affordable Care Act, and even today, the ACA garners the support of just 48 percent of the Americans. Even people who benefit from the ACA have repeatedly voted for candidates who are today seeking to repeal this law. Those were not protest votes cast in an effort to create a single-payer system.

So while its nice that certain liberals are talking to each other about the benefits of a single-payer system, absent a sea change in the views of a majority of Americans, there is simply no way that such a program will be enacted. Democrats, who accept certain political realities and wanted to advance a major piece of healthcare legislation, understood that fact in drafting and enacting the ACA. If so-called progressives, who believe that rank-and-file Democrats are to the left of Democratic officeholders, and who want to pull the Party leftward, think they can enact a single-payer system, let demonstrate that they've convinced the majority of Americans and not just each other.

@6:

Sure, except that early analysis is indicating employer-based plans could see increases in premiums combined with reductions in coverage as the GOP plan will allow employers to pick-and-choose coverage options, and give states the ability to limit "essential health benefits", all of which will create chaos, since there will be a complete absence of uniformity from state-to-state, thus severely reducing the portability of plans if one relocates or changes employers.

$20 says the GOP will continue to win elections regardless because at least they pretend to care about the growing number of voters who suffer due to severe income inequality and cronyism (though they refer to it as elitism) as Democrats hobble along on the politics of identity and morality.

@7:

Good points. Unfortunately, Single-Payer is a non-starter in this country, for the same reason many people objected to the ACA, namely, S-P would require EVERYONE to pay into the risk pool in order to get benefits, and if there's one thing far right GOPers HATE it's being told by the gubbamint they have to pay for something, even if (or perhaps despite the fact) it would ultimately be cheaper and of greater benefit to them.

The ACA was never meant to be the end point of improving health care. It was the best we could do at the time. Nobody was saying "well, the ACA passed, so we're done, we never have to think about health insurance again". Do what you can, and then start fighting for more. Unfortunately, we never got to the second part because Republican lies took hold before the ACA got popular enough to be protected. Denigrating the ACA doesn't help anything.

@10,
To add to that, there are large swaths of people who believe that they're paying into the system but other people are getting the benefits. A lot of rural and exurb (and suburban) people truly believe that they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits and that city dwellers take more than they pay. Of course, the exact opposite is true, but when you live in relative isolation and only ever see the potholes in your street, all you think is that there must not be any benefits coming to your town because hey, there's potholes in my street.

Tell them that you want a health care system where everyone pays and everyone benefits and they'll immediately say that they know they'll get ripped off and the city folks will get all the benefits.

@10 It's a non-starter and that might be part of the reason but the main reason is that the majority of voters are people with employer-provided health insurance (or Medicare) and a majority of these people freak the fuck out at the slightest hint that what they have and what they are familiar with is going to get disrupted in the slightest way.

There's also the small problem that tax hikes on the middle class would be required to institute single payer. The third rail of politics in this country. Almost impossible that we will ever see a middle class income tax hike again ever. All well and good that single payer would (in theory) eventually save people money. That matters not a bit when the tax hike is up front. The premise that employers would pass on to employees all of the money they saved from no longer paying for their health insurance is a dubious one at best.

"oh my god, we can't get single payer because the GOP won't let us do it"

LOL. Useless wanks.

@14; useless comment.

What's the go on the Palmer Report. He just put up that proof is in the Russians hacked votes, that the election was rigged. Is this guy credible?

@14/anon1256: "oh my god, we can't get single payer because the GOP won't let us do it"

No, it's not the GOP, its millions of Americans who don't, even now, subscribe progressive views on healthcare. While it may be true that our system allows a plurality of Americans to have an out-sized sway in our political system. That is the constraint under which Democrats operate, and until you can show that your arguments are convincing Republican voters that your policy views are correct, you're going to either have to accept compromises like those that led to enactment of the ACA, or you become radicalized, like the members of the Tea Party. And while it may give some progressives psychic pleasure to be as strident as those on the Right, an America held hostage to a militant Left and Tea Party Right sound like a disaster.

While I agree that a single payer may not be do-able right now, one step we could take is to lower the age of Medicare eligibility to 55. Or even 50.

And we need to keep discussing single-payer to get people used to the idea.

In the meantime, we need to continue to improve the ACA, but first we need to defeat the AHCA.

It seems illogical to say that something that reduced the number of deaths, the ACA, is a killer because it didn't reduce all the deaths. That's like saying guardrails kill people because they aren't in place on every highway. It's especially shitty when you consider the amount of political capital and effort that was expended to get this far. Yes, we have to go further, but there is no reasonable argument that achieving single payer healthcare was possible in 2009.

Also, the claim that it was written by a rightwing think tank is blatantly and verifiably false. It doesn’t even resemble the Heritage Foundation proposal except for the individual insurance mandate—which is not rocket science or some sort of original idea. It’s how they achieve universal coverage in Switzerland.

@20,
Totally off topic but when I saw your name, I initially thought it was "person whore ads" instead of "person who reads"

I think I need to get laid soon.

(and now all I can think of is Celebrity Jeopardy and Sean Connery's "The Rapists" instead of "Therapists")

But think of all the lawyers and insurance agents who will lose their jobs!

The truly infuriating thing for me is that Obamacare has actually made healthcare less affordable, not more.

Here's how: I have to pay about $40 a week for health insurance but the deductable is $5,000 and then the insurance only covers about 80% of costs there on out. That means I'm paying about $2K a year for insurance that's really doing nothing for me. Worse, I had to have surgery last year and even with a payment plan my debt keeps shooting up. I had crappy insurance before but at least I didn't have to pay for it.

In the meantime Obama is getting $400K for a fucking speech to the very assholes who crashed the economy, none of whom were even threatened with jail.

Looks like it's time to call white people racists again. That way we'll never lose another future election as long as we live and, if we do, we can blame Nazis.

Thank you, Dan. I'd forgotten that the ACA (Obamacare) was a GOP think-tank, originated under former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney's state healthcare plan. It just goes to show how ridiculous as well as unfit to govern the RepuliKKKans are to shoot down what they first thought up, but only because a Democrat was in the White House when the ACA was enacted into law.
We do need to fight for the ACA---affordable healthcare should be available for everybody.
Obamacare isn't perfect (as Michael Fonda @24 points out), but the Trumpzillan idea of a "replacement" is unacceptable.