So how will health be transformed under this nominee?
The original request was “Can anyone draw some straight lines between the most ardent positions of Trump’s various picks and the benefits that will accrue because of these positions to the angry white people in their rural ghettos who voted him into office in the first place?”
I only brought up poor people in the context of school vouchers. As far as ObamaCare goes, I imagine there are a lot of “angry white people” who aren’t poor, who don’t qualify for ObamaCare subsidies, and who would love to see it repealed.
Take Emery County, for one example I’m fairly familiar with. There are about 11,000 people living in Emery County’s ~4500 square miles (larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined), giving it an extremely low population density of 2.5/mile^2. It’s also 95% white and it voted overwhelmingly for Trump (~80% while Clinton and Evan McMullin both got 8-9%). Despite being extremely rural, it’s not particularly poor. The average household income is close to the average for the nation, the poverty rate is below average.
I can’t speak directly for the “angry” part, but Emery County, Utah is exactly the sort of place that I envision when you wrote “the angry white people in their rural ghettos who voted him into office”.
As for the concern that “NO GOP bigwig has ever elaborated on” what they mean by “replace”, I offer you some light reading: https://abetterway.speaker.gov/_assets/pdf/ABetterWay-HealthCare-PolicyPaper.pdf
When you said “light”, you weren’t just whistling Dixie. Same old crap: allow insurers to sell over state lines so that the least regulated state will be where they all wind up, cutting tort liability, yada yada yada same old GOP nonsense.
You’re free to claim / argue that none of it will have the desired effects, that it won’t work, etc, but it’s not accurate to claim the GOP has no replacement plan. That’s my only point here.
Now McConnell’s wife has been tapped to head Transportation. Yep, that swamp is being drained alright.
When you drain a swamp, the water and mud has to go somewhere.
Is Elaine Chao a bad pick? A quick Google shows nothing immediately objectionable, and I don’t remember her making headlines during the second Bush administration, even though she was Secretary of Labor for eight years. She certainly has the experience, not just in the Cabinet, but also a couple years as Deputy Secretary of Transportation during the first Bush administration.
I’m impressed with the cabinet choices so far. CNN points out 3 women of color have already been selected.
Sounds like a very inclusive group to me. Trump said he’d pick the most highly qualified people and he’s doing that. Mike Pence deserves credit for finding these qualified candidates, but Trump is interviewing them himself.
Conservative? Well yes, of course they are. Conservatives won the election. They get to govern.
Trump is interviewing them? Really? All by himself? Boy, got his big boy pants on now, huh?
He’s only interviewing the women. You know…
Fair is fair. The Republicans did allow Obama to make the appointments he was entitled to make. The Democrats should follow that example.
elucidator said his pants were on.
Washington Post article on Chao. Her prior experience does have applicability, although noted as somewhat adverse to labor union interests and on deregulation, which may have contributed to collapses as Sago and Crandall Canyon mines. Oh, and she’s the daughter of the owner of The Foremost Group, a global shippping enterprise, is on the board of directions of Parsons and Northwest Airlines, was a former vice president of Bank of America and high management at Citicorp, was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the president of the United Fucking Way (also known as “America’s Foremost Charity for Charitable Giving to Itself”) , and is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has stated that he does not intend to recuse himself from her confirmation hearings. Trump has now graduated from airboat to just riding on the backs of alligators in terms of how swampy his Cabinet and directors presumptive are.
If your metric for the quality of his cabinet is the spectral distribution of their skin tone then I suppose it looks fine. If you are more concerned about the competence, character, and integrity of the people Trump is populating his Cabinet and inner circle with, it looks more sketchy than Skid Row at 2 a.m. For a candidate who came to office on the promise of “draining the swamp” and getting rid of corporate and insider influence, he’s pretty much gone to the very well he himself poisoned, save for outliers like alt.right media mogul Steven Bannon as his chief strategist and Myron Ebell, provisionally climate change denier as EPA transition and presumptive nominee for director.
Stranger
I continue to be amazed that the “across state lines” gets any mention. Several states already allow it and nothing has happened.
And now he’s selected a hedge fund operator and former Goldman Sachs partner to run the Treasury. God help us all.
The swamp would be declared a superfund site, but I’m not sure the head of the EPA believes in those.
That Trump, always showing his deep commitment to the working class.
This choice is prolly Obama’s fault, somehow. Or the evil media.
What’s the historical data? If you look at it don’t find Treasury/Fed/financial regulators etc people frequently come from Goldman Sachs? Remember how they care so much that they gave Hillary a big fat check for a speech?
Yes, he really is a piece of human feces. I’m fairly certain this country is going to be raped. Hang on for a real, wild, run…
Let me first explain what I mean by “rural ghettos”. This is a term I coined after Trump’s election to describe the demographic that appears to have swung the election. It is meant to be taken literally- while the poorest inner city areas are on the opposite end of the spectrum from rural areas when it comes to population density, in many cases they otherwise share a striking resemblance in terms of the kinds of problems afflicting them- lousy schools, unemployment, isolation from the rest of society, racial segregation, rampant drug abuse, and the built environment being in a general state of disrepair.
The kind of place that, to me, most fits that description would be a place like Appalachian Kentucky, fromhere:
In terms of the election, the area that springs to mind first is the industrial Northeast states that generally favor the Democrats, but this year swung Republican by narrow margins and handed the victory to Trump. The result was credited to people in what I have termed “rural ghettos”- poor angry white people in rural areas where jobs have left and heroin and other opiod abuse issues have moved in. Word is that this is the population that made the difference for Trump in the election.
The other places that spring to mind when I think of “rural ghettos” are the kinds of poor Midwestern towns where kids steal farm chemicals to cook meth.
So I hope I am not making you feel defensive about Emery County. I don’t have it in for all rural areas (“rural ghettos” isn’t meant to be offensive at all, though I am sure it is)- from your description, it does not sound like that place is riddled with poverty. Drugs? I don’t know- the meth stories seem to come out of the Midwest, not Utah. I associate Utah drug activity with the Mormon-backlash counterculture in Salt Lake, not the rural areas. And I can be very rural-people friendly- I recently damn near married a pickup-and-gun-owning, Christian conservative rural Arkansan -and I am none of those things. The thing is, those kind of demographic identifiers don’t give you enough information to really know somebody much at all, let alone define them.
Still, some rural areas suffer from very serious problems, problems similar to those found in the poorest inner city areas. And it looks like Trump’s message appealed to these people, and they made the difference in voting him in.
Is repealing Obamacare and replacing it with “choices” they can’t afford without the ACA’s subsidies going to help these populations? It doesn’t look like it, but since you were kind enough to post a link to an actual GOP plan, give me another day to read through it before I comment any further.