US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7061

On March 07 2017 06:58 xDaunt wrote:
Just out of curiosity, how many of you on the left who think that the media screwed over Bernie during the primary also think that the media is biased against republicans?

On March 07 2017 08:13 xDaunt wrote:
The GOP has finally released a draft of Obamacare Lite.

On March 07 2017 09:33 zlefin wrote:

have they released a summary document which says what the changes are supposed to do?
The draft law there, while good to have, is not very easy to read or informative on actual effects.

looks more or less as the ones leaked last month except with some numbers changed around

basically moves the penalty for not having insurance from being paid to the government to being paid to the insurers as a 30% upcharge. lol. described as an "incentive to maintain continuous coverage".

lmao, they're calling it a 100 billion risk pool... when it's really 15/10 b a year. that's a reduction to what it is now (which is already considered underfunded, btw).

tax credits - 2k to 4k (depending on age) with a lot of deductions (10% income exceeding 75k).

looks like tax credits wont apply to plans that cover abortion, that's an maneuver that i kinda have to appreciate from a drafting perspective. evil, though.

FSA's are now uncapped (those are the non rollover funds), HSA's also heavily emphasized - cap raised from 2250 to the out of pocket limit on the plan.

kills device tax, insurance tax

oh, and it removes the deduction for insurer execs making over 500k a year - there's that wet sloppy blowjob analogy!

also, apparently they're removing the tax on tanning. that's random but invites jokes.

On March 07 2017 09:36 Nebuchad wrote:
Oh btw zlefin I see you're talking a lot about how helpful people are, do you think kwiz is being really helpful in this conversation? Cause I can't help but notice you haven't commented on that.

“We will not support a plan that does not include stability for Medicaid expansion populations or flexibility for states,” Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (R. W.Va.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

House Republicans on Monday released long-anticipated legislation to supplant the Affordable Care Act with a more conservative vision for the nation’s health care system, replacing federal insurance subsidies with a new form of individual tax credits and grants to help states shape their own policies.

Under bills drafted by two House committees, the GOP would no longer penalize Americans for failing to have health insurance and would begin winding down the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid three years from now.

The legislation would preserve two of the most popular features of the 2010 health-care law, letting young adults stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26 and forbidding insurers to deny coverage or charge more to people with pre-existing medical problems. It would, however, allow insurers to impose a surcharge on such people if they have had a gap in coverage.

The drafts culminate two months of intense work by a pair of House committees to try to carry out the GOP’s ardent desire, ever since the ACA was adopted seven years ago without Republican support, to replace the law with a more conservative set of health-care policies.

The shift in approach to tax credits in particular reflects the treacherous political and substantive challenges that Republicans face in trying to convert anti-ACA talking points into an actual plan now that they have an ally in the White House.
To win enough support among Republicans who control both the House and Senate, the bill must address concerns of both conservatives concerned about the cost of the overhaul and worries that it might in effect enshrine a new federal entitlement, as well as more moderate members who want to ensure that their constituents retain access to affordable health care, including those who received Medicaid coverage under the ACA.

Even so, signs emerged on Monday that Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber could balk either at the cost of the proposal or if it leaves swaths of the country without insurance coverage.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) one of three conservative senators who opposes the plan to provide income-based tax credits, tweeted: “Still have not seen an official version of the House Obamacare replacement bill, but from media reports this sure looks like Obamacare Lite!”

And four key Republican senators, all from states that opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA, said they would oppose any new plan that would leave millions of Americans uninsured.

“We will not support a plan that does not include stability for Medicaid expansion populations or flexibility for states,” Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (R. W.Va.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The four senators were split on exactly what proposals would meet their standards, but with 52 Republicans, McConnell would not have enough votes to pass repeal without the support of at least two of them.

The tax credits outlined by the Ways and Means Committee’s portion of the legislation incorporates an approach that Republicans have long criticized: income-based aid to help Americans afford health coverage.

Until now, the GOP had been intending to veer away from the ACA subsidies that help poor and middle-class people obtain insurance, insisting that the size of tax credits with which they planned to replace the subsidies should be based entirely on people’s ages and not their incomes. But the drafts issued Monday proposed refundable tax credits that would hinge on earnings as well as age.

This big pivot, developed by the Ways and Means Committee under the guidance of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), stems from a combination of problems that were arising with the idea of age-only credits that would have been available to any individual or family buying insurance on their own, no matter how affluent.

Estimates from congressional budget analysts and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget kept showing that the credits would be both too small to provide enough help to lower-income people and too expensive overall for a GOP determined to slash federal spending that the ACA has required.

Those analysts have not had time to assess how this new configuration would affect federal spending or the number of people with insurance coverage.

While the number of Americans who can afford health insurance has never been the priority for the GOP that it is for Democrats, Trump has made clear that he is sensitive to any changes that would strand large numbers of people who gained coverage under the ACA.

In addition, it is unclear what the size of the tax credits will be compared to the ACA’s subsidies.

Meanwhile, the portion of the legislation drafted by the Energy and Commerce Committee would substantially redesign Medicaid in a way that attempts to balance the GOP’s antipathy for the ACA’s expansion of the program against the concerns of a significant cadre of Republican governors — and the senators from their states — who fear losing millions of dollars that the law has funneled to help insure low-income residents.

Under the bill, the government would continue for now the aspect of the ACA in which the federal government pays virtually the entire cost of covering people who have joined the Medicaid rolls because their states expanded their program.

Thirty-one states, plus the District of Columbia, have adopted that expansion. Starting in 2020, however, the GOP plan would restrict the government’s generous Medicaid payment — 90 percent of the cost of covering people in the expansion group — only to people who were in the program as of then. States would keep getting that amount of federal help for each of those people as long as they remained eligible, with the idea that most people on Medicaid drop off after a few years.

For the other 19 states that did not expand Medicaid, the legislation would provide $10 billion spread over five years. States could use that money to subsidize hospitals and other providers of care that treat many poor patients.

While members of the two committees working on the replacement drafts were determined to begin considering legislation this week, final work on them was still underway over the weekend and Monday, according to three individuals with knowledge of the process.

The change in thinking about tax credits emerged since Friday, when a White House meeting chaired by Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and attended by key GOP congressional figures was called to finalize key provisions.

Lauren Aronson, a spokeswoman for Ways and Means, which is drafting the tax provisions of the bill, declined Monday to comment on specific provisions, saying the bill was still being revised.

“We are now at the culmination of a years-long process to keep our promise to the American people,” said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan.

Certain details of the new approach to tax credits remained unclear, including whether they would be restricted to people under a certain income threshold — perhaps $75,000, according to the House member briefed on the plan — or whether the subsidy would taper off after a specific income level but not end entirely. Two sources said age would remain one factor in determining the size of a person’s credit.

At the same time, the shift to take income into account could create a potentially difficult ripple effect for Republicans, who regard a reduction in the federal government’s role in health care as a central reason to abandon the sprawling 2010 health care law. One motivation for the GOP thinking that credits could depend only on age was that the Internal Revenue Service would no longer have needed to verify the eligibility of people for financial help, as it has for ACA subsidies. If income is taken into account, the IRS would still need to be involved.

The goal of lessening the government’s role also is behind another major change from the ACA that the Republican plans envision: getting rid of the federal requirement on insurers to include a minimum set of “essential benefits” in health plans sold to individuals and small businesses.

Conservatives have aired sharp concerns about the inclusion of refundable tax credits that can be advanced to insurance providers through the year, calling them too similar to the ACA’s tax subsidies. They have also balked at revenue-raising measures that had been floated in previous proposals, including retaining the ACA’s “Cadillac tax” on especially generous employer-provided insurance plans, as well as capping the exclusion from taxation that employer-plan premiums now enjoy.

One member of Congress who was briefed on changes to the proposal over the weekend said that drafters were not only moving toward capping the tax credit, but were also exploring how to avoid taxing employer-provided plans for the first time — something that could provoke a fierce response from conservatives. Instead, the member said, the cost of the scaled-back tax credits could be offset by savings gained by rolling back the ACA’s Medicaid expansion over the coming years.

At a closed-door GOP conference meeting last week, several House Republicans expressed concerns that the committees might start to work on the legislation without a complete fiscal assessment. To be eligible for special budget rules known as “reconciliation” — allowing bills to pass in the Senate by a simple majority — the legislation cannot incur a net cost after its first 10 years in effect.

On March 07 2017 09:43 zlefin wrote:

I haven't looked closely enough to assess accurately, so there's a large margin of error. It seemed fine, and correct, which is also very important. Not sure if it was actually helpful to anyone in particular or not, it seemed useful for correcting mistakes/untruths to me. my guess would be fairly helpful, not really helpful. again the margin of error is very high.

On March 07 2017 09:49 Introvert wrote:
Here is a section by section breakdown.

Sorry for tweet link, mobile link not working for me.

https://twitter.com/philipaklein/status/838894436658647040

On March 07 2017 09:54 Nebuchad wrote:


I haven't looked closely enough to assess how accurately you use the word "helpful" in general, so there's a margin of error to what I'm answering too. In this particular instance I think you should consider using the word "wrong" instead of the word "helpful", so that way you get to portray your position of "I think you're wrong and you should bow down to my side because it's correct" a little more honestly, instead of this "I think we should aspire to be united and those ideas that work us against each other don't help" that you're pretending to be on the side of.

On March 07 2017 09:49 Introvert wrote:
Here is a section by section breakdown.

Sorry for tweet link, mobile link not working for me.

https://twitter.com/philipaklein/status/838894436658647040

On March 07 2017 06:39 GreenHorizons wrote:


They gave a person the top position at the DNC after they knew she had cheated for Hillary. She was replacing someone who resigned because as Reid put it



She wasn't impartial, but Hillary thought she should put her back on her team immediately.

Seriously, maybe Bernie loses anyway (I mean saying he was down 400+ votes before anyone actually voted sure didn't help) but Democrats are going nowhere fast if they can't come to grips with the fact that the primary process wasn't fair to Bernie.

If people come to the conclusion that they didn't have to be fair because he wasn't a "real Democrat", that's one thing, but to act like the DNC didn't try to help Hillary is ignoring that they put a known cheater for Hillary in charge.

On March 07 2017 09:55 zlefin wrote:

helpful link, thanks, i'll look through it.
pity they have to start with the usual nonsense hating on obamacare, i'll have to filter to account for that nonsense then.

On March 07 2017 10:14 ChristianS wrote:

Not quite what I mean. We've had plenty of "this or that person thinks the primary was unfair." We've also had plenty of "this or that leaked email suggests the DNC wasn't impartial." What would actually be new is evidence (or even clarified allegations) about what they actually did to favor one candidate over the other. Donna Brazile leaking (iirc) two debate questions, one of which was not really much of a leak, hardly constitutes the characterization "the DNC screwed Bernie out of the nomination."

You tend to do a lot of your political reasoning, interpretation, and prediction based on signals - the DNC picking Perez signals this, keeping DWS around signals that, etc. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is extraordinarily bad for convincing someone who disagrees with you in an argument because a signal doesn't constitute proof. So you wind up bickering with kwizach constantly, because you seem baffled he can't see the signals, and he seems baffled you never offer any proof. It never really goes anywhere and from what I can tell he gets immensely tired of it. So I'd suggest we try to either talk about actual provable transgressions, or else just not have this conversation again and say we did. It'll save everyone some time and no one will have missed out on any new arguments.

Edit: it's also worth separating the questions of "was the 2016 Democratic primary rigged" and "how should Democrats talk about that primary if they want to win in the future." It's entirely conceivable that it was rigged but they'll win more if they deny it, or that it wasn't rigged but they'll win more if they don't try to fight that misconception and just accept it. Shield asked whether it was rigged, not which history Dems should embrace going into 2018.

On March 07 2017 10:02 zlefin wrote:

I can't tell what you're trying to say. it seems like you're trying to snidely insult me, and/or otherwise are trying to mean something other than what you're saying.
part of the issue is that switching the words wrong and helpful wouldn't be applicable without applying a negation at least.

On March 07 2017 09:42 ticklishmusic wrote:


some highlights based on skim:

On March 07 2017 11:31 Nebuchad wrote:


I disagree that I was very snide about it. I tried to engage you on the whole "helpful" thing and you decided not to answer with a passive agressive comment about the worth of what I was saying, and now you're back saying "not helpful" when you actually mean "wrong". I think you should use more precise language so that it fits your actual position.