Yes, “break everything, offer no constructive solutions, then blame the other guys” has been a successful strategy for the GOP for quite some time now. Or have you not noticed how many republicans are mad at Obama because of Iraq?
That would be the smart move, and I suspect that Trump and his inner circle are working toward that sort of strategy. Their problem? House Republicans and a few in the Senate who might already have dementia. I wouldn’t be surprised initially to see Trump spar with radical Republicans in an attempt to be a more bipartisan president – he’s naive and bullheaded enough to think that he could survive the political consequences. But he’ll make enemies, and they won’t forget their sense of betrayal. And when they conclude he’s not the tool they thought he was going to be and that they have a better tool as a vice president, and when he gets politically unpopular, I think that’s when you’ll see impeachment as a real possibility.
My pessimistic prediction:
(1) They repeal Obamacare
(2) They fail to pass any replacement. Or else, they pass something that doesn’t actually help the people screwed over by the Obamacare repeal, just to say they passed something
(3) Trump wins re-election in 2020 anyway, because most of his voters don’t care
The majority of Republicans are too gullible to think Trump could ever make a mistake. Whatever happens for the next few years his lemmings will buy the “Bill Clinton actually caused it” line he feeds them.
As I see it, there are 3 provisions of the ACA that are extremely popular:
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No exclusion for pre-existing conditions. Even young, healthy people seem to see this as a big positive, either since they’re close to someone with a pre-existing condition or understand that they themselves are not exempt from the possibility in the future. Many years ago, my brother was caught by this – without thinking, he changed jobs while my SIL was pregnant, and then realized that the pregnancy wasn’t covered by his new insurance plan.
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Parents can keep children on their plan until age 26. Never having had kids, this is no big deal for me, but to everyone I know with children, it seems to be really important.
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No lifetime max in benefits. I suspect there are a lot of naïve voters who think that $1 million in lifetime benefits will cover their families, but of those who aren’t so ignorant, this is justifiably a big deal.
I don’t see how any plan can include these 3 provisions without some kind of mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance. I don’t think that a tax deduction or even a tax credit will achieve that. Unless I don’t understand how tax credits work (of course, a possibility), if your total tax owed is $4,000 it doesn’t matter if the tax credit is $100,000, the max you’ll see is $4,000. How many insurance plans are there in which the total out-of-pocket including premiums is less than $4,000?
Same here. I can’t come up with that much money UP FRONT, so getting it back at the end of the year will not be helpful. I will simply have no insurance at all, and that almost killed me once. I don’t wish to repeat the experience. Obamacare saved my life. It COULD be better, yes, but I’d bet everything I have that the republicans, left to their own devices, won’t come up with anything better than we have now. More people will have little or no coverage, and more people will get sicker and die younger because of their efforts.
There are “refundable” tax credits that can be given to people even when it exceeds their total taxes owed. That’s how we end up with people who pay net-negative (federal income) taxes.
In the interest of full disclosure, it’s the sort of policy that grates on some conservatives, so it may not be how they’d choose to implement this particular hypothetical tax credit.
I don’t know how long medical expenses can typically be deferred, but my personal experience has been that I often don’t have to pay for the treatment until weeks or months after receiving it, and that’s with no effort on my part to explain any hardships or asking for a deferral. I certainly don’t think it’s a common experience to have to present payment “UP FRONT” before receiving treatment, but maybe that’s just my white privilege experience.
No you don’t have to present payment up front but if I understand correctly, that tax ‘credit’ is only if you have insurance. Having insurance means you don’t have to pay (theoretically) a butt load of money out of pocket if you get sick but you still have to pay for the insurance premiums. Those you can’t get any deferral on. When I was on long term disability at my last job, I wrongly assumed my insurance premiums were getting taken out of my checks. Since they were direct deposit, I didn’t look at the breakdown of the check. My fault. But three months later I finally got some mail from the insurance company saying I owed for three months of premiums, nearly $1000 and money I did NOT have. They wouldn’t allow deferrals or payment plans. When I couldn’t pay it all upfront, not only did I lose my insurance, EVERY doctor appointment/procedure I’d had over that three month period that had been approved by the company was suddenly un-approved. They went went and retroactively declined every insurance claim. Cue a couple thousand dollars worth of bills suddenly hitting me. Fun times.
Bolding mine.
That is precisely the problem. The Republicans have floated around a lot of ideas as replacements, but haven’t settled down on any one of them, nor have they fleshed them out beyond the two sentence sound bite stage. They are still very far away from getting a bill that they can get a large enough majority of their legislators to support to overcome any opposition from the Democrats.
No you’re not.
Not bad after seven years. At this rate, we’ll have a replacement plan ready to go by the turn of the century.
And that is the problem with lawmakers who complain about long bills.
They don’t actually know how to write them.
Trump proceeding more or less like I said. Although not the plan I mentioned or any of the other known plans. His exact plan not public yet, but I do assume he has one.
Trump vows ‘insurance for everybody’ in Obamacare replacement plan
People afraid to lose their coverage, starting to feel relieved yet?
I marvel at Trump’s propaganda instincts. Compare to Obama’s “If you like your insurance…” People are still discussing whether that was a lie, but nobody ever wonders why did he have to promise that in the first place? Why didn’t Obama promise, “If you hate your insurance, we’ll get rid of it and get you better insurance”?
Why?
No. Because assuming that Trump has a plan is giving the man entirely too much credit. Or did you assume he had a plan for ISIS, after he explicitly promised he had a plan for ISIS, and then admitted that he did not have a plan for ISIS?
Yeah, I’m looking forward to holding Trump’s “We’re going to have insurance for everybody" - I mean, “everybody” means “everybody”, right?–line to the same standard for veracity as Obama’s “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
I don’t think this assumption is warranted given any knowledge of Trump.
Jesus titty fucking Christ. Is it Obama’s fault if your doctor retired or died? Or if he/she chose not to participate in your insurance?
Maybe my point wasn’t clear. The RW lost their minds over Obama’s statement turning out to not literally mean “everyone who likes their doctor gets to keep that doctor forever and ever, until the end of time.” So now that Trump has come out with his own healthcare promise, I’m looking forward to seeing how his supporters react when “insurance for everyone” turns out to not be literally true for every last man, woman, and child in the US. (Unless that is his plan, in which case–good.)
I do assume he has a healthcare replacement plan. I always assumed he had a healthcare replacement plan. His defense of UHC was/is consistent and consistently better than 90% of Democrats. One of the big criticisms Trump got from Republican opponents was “you sound like a Democrat”. Which he did (or better).
Never thought he had constructive ideas about ISIS (to put it diplomatically).
See, I can do nuance.
Too much credit? Perhaps. We’ll see if/when the “plan” comes out. Remember I’m not saying it’ll be a plan I’ll like. But I’m quite sure he’ll make it sound good to many Americans.
I’m a bit less sure now how it’ll compare to Obamacare.
How will he pay for it?
How will he handle the big private insurers?
Will he get any Democrats to vote for it, or at least, not filibuster it?
Trumps claim did surprise me since usually he doesn’t paint himself in a corner like that. In another thread I speculated as to whether the wild things said by Trump were because he was a self promoter who knew he was lying but was hopeng to convince others, or whether he was actually delusional enough to believe his own lies. In that thread I came down in the former but given the immediacy of which he promises the health care law and will seen to be a fraud if he doesn’t deliver, I am leaning towards the latter in this case.
Here is what I expect happened. The closest thing to a plan that the Republicans have is Tom Price’s plan, which basically stuffs the extra cost of insuring the poor onto the states, opens up cross state plans so that all states race to the bottom in terms of eliminating patient protections, and grandfathers insurance for patients with preexisting conditions, so that if they ever lose coverage (say a premium check gets lost in the mail) they are SOL. This is still really just an outline of a plan, and there is no where near consensus, and will take months of wrangling to iron out the actual details.
But in order to get himself a secratarial position Price probably oversold the degree to which his plan is ready for primetime. Trump meanwhile figures that since he can whip out a contract to buy a building in a couple of weeks, he surely can fill in the details and together an overhaul of 1/5 of the economy by March. When this doesn’t happen he’ll blame it all on the stuffed suits in Washington, who won’t recognize his role as king of everything.