"I just can't believe this is happenin'! I can't!"
It was amusing reading the WSJ Op-Ed pages today to see the rhetorical backflips being done to try to portray the Republicans and the Right as having a poor little misunderstood law. Their "better care reconciliation act" won't really toss millions off of healthcare! How dare the Dems and their activist base lie like that!
First there was Karl Rove ('Obamacare Health Care Audacity'), aka "turd blossom", as noisome as ever since outing Valerie Plame (and letting Scooter Libby take the rap) belching about "the Left's new club", i..e. that 23 million will lose insurance if the GOP bill passes, "since only 10 million get coverage through Obamacare exchanges". But he misses the point! Because the Medicaid expansion puts its enrollees technically under the ACA, that means that any loss of Medicaid insurance is also a loss of Obamacare insurance.
Rove also tries to argue cleverly that in any case the Left has "misunderstood" and that no one is ruining Medicaid. It will simply continue to grow at a slower rate. But see, the devil is in the details. If that means (and it does) that the growth rate is slower than the rate of medical inflation, then indeed it is taking a "meat axe" to the program as one commentator put it last week.
Further, if federal expansion of the program is reduced - say from 72% to 50%, that does mean states will have to take on the burden and most lack the money, or budget flexibility to do so. Look at Illinois, now facing insolvency, as reported in the WSJ of June 27 (p. A1). Here in Colorado, diminution of Medicaid funding would definitely mean exploding budget deficits and much more stringent qualification requirements which too many low income earners could not meet.
By any reckoning that spells catastrophe, and yeah, deaths - if medical needs - such as for cancers, kidney disease, diabetes - go unaddressed. And no, it isn't a matter of "choice" as assholes like Rand Paul try to make out. If people lack the money and their health care is set against food or rent, that's a Hobson's choice not a real one.
So when 'Turd blossom' goes off on Elizabeth Warren ("the bill uses tax cuts as blood money") or Hillary ("if Republicans pass this bill they are the death party") he isn't losing points except for himself Also, when he takes the Center for American Progress to task for its finding that "217,000 Republican - caused deaths will ensue over the next decade"
Rove tries to mock it for its precision, but the Center never claimed it be exact but rather an estimate projected from likely removals of beneficiaries from state Medicaid rolls.
The WSJ Op-Ed (next page) actually tries to outdo Rove for desnity of baloney published per square inch. For example, this chestnut:
"The bill is carefully designed to avoid overreach and would save taxpayers $772 billion compared with what Medicaid would otherwise spend under current law."
But it is in fact exactly that money that Medicaid would need to spend, state by state, to: keep frail oldsters in nursing homes, to keep disabled people in their homes and functional, to keep opiod addicted people in states like Ohio with naxalone, and to keep children in low income homes suffering from leukemias, autism, bone diseases etc. from being warehoused in some rat hole.
That money then, is not just "free up" money that can be jettisoned like most Reepos would their granny if she cost too much. Moreover, the "taxpayers" aren't just ordinary Joes like you or me, but the top one percent who'd take home $54,000 a year on average (for $1 m income earners). In other words, it is the taxpayers who can most afford to part with these ill gotten gains - if the bill passes.
Then we have this giveaway clue:
"The GOP can't meaningfully ...increase defense spending without fixing Medicaid and replacing Obamacare".
That the GOP wants to use that extra money from defunding Medicaid expansion for defense spending too. $641 b to be exact, for FY 2018. It doesn't take tons of insght or genius to see that the Goops want to decimate tens of thousands to get their precious bag of silver...for the rich...and for defense. Then they wonder why we refer to them as reptiles
Any party that would rather use $$$ for defense (already we spend more than the next 13 nations, including to operate 800 bases around the world) than on the health security of its people is a nation doomed to fail, to go into massive decline. Especially when it puts tax cuts for the rich above human needs too.
But the bastards are now caught out and no matter how much Bitch McConnell tries to sneak the next iteration under the rug it won't work. We're onto them and him, and the activist resistance is now waiting for the rats....errrr ...reptiles, to show up at their town hall meetings.
Stay tuned.
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