So, who’s being corrected or educated there?
Like a stool sample!
What the fuck should he care? He’s got the kind of cancer that doesn’t get better; he’ll be room temperature before Christmas.
I’d like to think he’s making this enormous effort to get back to the Senate and vote “no,” in penance for his past shitty life. I’d also like to think there’s fairies living in my rose garden.
You have been educated.
You have been corrected.
Okay, name states 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, and 57.
Kinda. The Senators have to pass the Motion to Proceed (to debate on the bill) for them to find out what’s in the bill.
This is easily the craziest fucking thing I’ve seen in 50 years of following Washington politics. Maybe weirder shit has happened in the states during that time, but never at the Federal level. This is a huge and important issue, and they’re going to deal with it in a procedure that makes your average game show look deliberative by comparison.
I’ve called my Senators (both Dems, so it doesn’t really make a difference, but I do it anyway), and now I can only hope the Motion to Proceed fails. Looks like Collins and Murkowski will vote No, but since McCain will be there (and what a great guy he is, getting excellent and affordable health care, and getting off his sickbed to deprive others of the same - fuck his sorry ass), they’ll need one more.
The rest of the so-called ‘moderates’ - Heller, Capito, Cassidy, Flake - have backbones of spaghetti, and it’s hard to see any of them being the third vote. Portman’s a fake even as a ‘moderate’ in scare quotes. My best hope is that Sen. Moran of Kansas meant what he said, that this needs to go back to regular order. Or that there’s enough GOP Senators doubting the wisdom of bringing this bill to the floor that, as a group, they’ll have the guts that they lack individually.
So what’s the CBO estimate on this option?
There isn’t one. Can’t wait around for frivolities like a CBO score when you’ve got to get something, anything, to conference - and the only route there is for Mitch the Turtle to bamboozle and buffalo the handful of GOP Senators who are nervous about voting for this turkey.
Getting something to conference resurrects the House bill, of course, and the conference committee is another anything-can-happen forum. The good news is that both houses of Congress have to vote on whatever comes out of conference, but the bad news is that there’s usually a strong predisposition to pass it.
Given how much the Republicans have shat on the ACA, claiming it’s the worst piece of legislation in history, I think they should just attempt a straight repeal of the entire bill. Once they do that, they can pass the perfect legislation they have up their sleeves.
“Usually” doesn’t seem to apply here, though.
It was all Eddie Munster could do to squeak his own bill through the House, and that was before the backlash got so intense. It’s only a matter of *how *it dies, and how entertainingly, not whether. I think.
They did a weird analysis last year that said 15 million more uninsured. But they assumed lots of people would drop Medicaid, which I find baffling (except for people in Indiana or other states with premiums).
Washington State did that in the 90s. Guaranteed issue but the mandate was repealed. Three years later all insurers had left the individual market in the state.
So, from the “Kill The ACA” point of view, skinny repeal is smart…
Sure, except they will absolutely own it.
And also that’s not what I would expect to see come out of conference. Though they could then prance about like fools and claim they repealed Obamacare. And most of their voters would eat it up, since they aren’t incredibly interested in facts right now.
I’ve said this before, but if the Republicans wanna own health care, let 'em. I don’t understand why anyone would want this hot potato.
Well, they’ll have one year, three months and a couple of weeks to own it, with millions losing their insurance, before the mid-term elections.
I’m sorry to say this, but I think at this point, we need health care to fail in a spectacular way in order to save it. And yes, this means people will die, but it’s often the the case that people have to die to make things better. We’ll send the sick to the health care war, and hope most make it back alive. Maybe after the casualty count is high enough, our country will actually work together to come up with a solution.
Nuts to that.
I don’t want Obamacare repeal to be some great political club for the Dems to use against the GOP next November.
I want people to keep their health care.
You know, Dems have had all sorts of tweaks and improvements to Obamacare on tap for some time now, but with zero chance of even getting a House or Senate committee to look at them. If Trump wanted to take all those improvements and call the whole thing Trumpcare, and get it through Congress, I’d be fucking delighted, even though it would make it much more likely that the GOP stayed in control of Congress.
This isn’t a damn football game. This is a Big Fucking Deal in the lives of tens of millions of people. For many of them, Obamacare is the difference between life and ruin. I don’t want the GOP to own health care, because they’re on the side of Ruin.
Sadly, I agree with you.
That’s all peachy keen if someone would actually beat them in the mid-terms. But since I have seen no proof of that, I’m not going to count on it.