GOP plans to Repeal HCR Law; Replace it with Identical Law

I'm excited by this. I look forward to the day I can cancel my insurance and just buy it whenever I get sick since they can't deny me coverage. Once I'm healthy, I'll just cancel it again. This system is GENIUS.

 

The Grand OLD Party needs to get the ***** out...

I'm to the point that I'm almost as pissed as the Teabaggers.

 

From what I've been reading and hearing today (especially from the right) all around the innertubes is the "Promise to America" pledge is....how shall I put this delicately....em...underwhelming.

 

The only difference is that this plan is more thought and better serves small businesses as well as the general population.

A conservative approach is always better than an overly progressive leap.
November will bring about huge changes for this country and the beginning of the end of this recession.

Taking this country back!

 

LOL. Yes, bankrupting all health care providers by requiring them to cover pre-existing conditions without a mandate is brilliantly well thought-through.

 

Have you seen the Breaks the current Health Care bill gives small businesses? Also the current bill isn't progressive by any stretch of imagination.

And this so called conservative approach is almost identical except where it's worse.

 

Yes you're right... The GOP exudes ridiculousness. I was being facetious.

Sarcasm FTW???

 

The GOP won't touch health care. They don't have the balls. For all the gnashing of teeth, the American people are going to quickly embrace and appreciate HCR, and kudos to Democrats for pushing it through.

 

Good article in Time today about how insipid the opposition to HCR is:

The Republican Plan to Dismantle Health Care Reform
By JEFFREY KLUGER Jeffrey Kluger – Wed Sep 22, 7:20 pm ET

I had a bit of surgery last week. It wasn't much - the kind of outpatient operation that would once have had me hospitalized for three or four days, but with new, less invasive procedures, had me in and out in five hours. When I arrived home, my daughters (ages 7 and 9) met me at the door dressed in doctor outfits - a sweet welcome that made me smile. Before they provided me any make-believe care, however, the 7-year-old handed me a sheaf of homemade forms and said, "Please, sign these." I'm not making this up.

My daughters are too young to know anything but a health care industry in which no visit to a doctor's office can begin without a flurry of forms, a question about your health insurance and the ritual xeroxing of your card for safekeeping. Much of this - though certainly not all - is a result of our nation's patchwork of coverage and plans as well as our lack of a coherent system of electronic medical records.

But my daughters - and everyone else's sons and daughters - are at least growing up in an era in which a real (and admittedly imperfect) step had been taken toward changing things, with the signing of President Obama's signature health-reform law six months ago. That's why it was so dispiriting to read Tuesday's front-page story in the New York Times about Republican plans to dismantle the law if they take control of Congress in November.

No matter how bad the coming Democratic bloodbath is or isn't (and columnist Charles Blow, also of the Times, made a thoughtful if thin argument on Sunday that it may not be quite so ugly as nervous Dems fear), Republicans will still have plenty of ways to inflict a thousand cuts on health reform if they win even a single chamber. They could gum up funding needed to enforce the law; they could try to strip out the requirement that employers offer employees insurance or pay a penalty for not doing so; they could go after the same thing the attorneys general of 20 states are seeking to overturn in the courts: the requirement that individuals obtain insurance or also pay a fine.

The warnings from the GOP's shadow majority come at an apt - if, for them, unhandy - time. Just last week, the U.S. Census announced that the number of uninsured Americans crossed the 50 million threshold for the first time - many of those people having lost their jobs in the economic meltdown. The new law, whose requirements are being phased in over several years, is designed to prevent the loss of a job from equaling the loss of insurance. It is also designed to prevent people from being dropped from coverage because they get sick and being denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition, and it eliminates lifetime caps. Additionally, it allows kids to stay on their parents' policies until they're 26 - especially important when young people are being hit hard by double-digit unemployment.

What's more, in just two months, people who do have jobs will be facing the annual ritual of open enrollment, trying to sort out the cost and benefits of various insurance plans offered by their employers and choosing the right one. Some of the most popular features of the reform law like the no-lifetime-limit rule will take effect in the new employee plans. Promising to undo those protections is not likely to make the current minority party the new majority.

The Republican response to this comes from the same all-dessert policy menu that produced the mathematical impossibility of lower taxes and higher federal revenue: we can cut unpopular provisions like the individual mandate while keeping the popular ones. But unless you agree with the Luo tribesman theory of Obama's leadership style put forward by Dinesh D'Souza in Forbes and endorsed by GOP ideas man Newt Gingrich, there's no earthly reason the President would have pressed for the mandate provision that so many people flatly despise unless it was impossible to make the numbers line up any other way.

Once again, for the 12 millionth time: if you don't require people to buy insurance, no one will bother to do so until they get sick, meaning that the insurance business becomes all risk, no profit. How's free-market coverage going to work then? The alternative to an individual mandate is simply to deny coverage to people who wait too long - otherwise known as the pre-existing-condition rule. Even in the GOP, few people are taking the position of once and perhaps future GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee, who in a speech last week at the Values Voters Summit made his way through a metaphorical thicket to suggest that maybe the old denial because-you're-already-sick idea wasn't such a bad thing: "How would you like to be able to call your insurance agent for your car and say, 'I want you to insure my car.' 'Well, tell me about your car.' 'Well, it was a pretty nice vehicle until my 16-year-old boy wrecked it yesterday.' Now how much would a policy cost if it covered everything? About as much as it's gonna cost for health care in this country."

The difference - as Huckabee surely knows - is that you can't simply take your uninsured car into the auto equivalent of an emergency room and get it fixed on everybody else's dime, which you can do with your uninsured self in a humane country that wisely forbids ERs from turning people away. What's more, illness may sometimes be the result of carelessness - the equivalent of letting a 16-year-old drive - but just as often it's simply a roll of the dice.

A final bit of unexpected - and perhaps unintentionally sound - reasoning came on Fox News on Sept. 21, courtesy of host Greg Gutfeld. Citing statistics from economist Mark J. Perry, Gutfeld points out that 10.6 million uninsured Americans live in households making $75,000 per year or more and another 9.4 million uninsured are in the $50,000 to $75,000 range. His conclusion from this? "So while we've been constantly told that people cannot afford insurance, these numbers say otherwise. Some reject insurance by choice, maybe cuz they're self-insured or more likely to get their prescriptions at Walmart. But more to the point: the people I know who don't have health insurance don't care."

It's hard to know from Gutfeld's entire argument whether he's in favor of or opposes health reform. But putting aside his less than Churchillian "cuz" and his less than scientific sample group ("the people I know"), Gutfeld makes the reformers' point: When uninsured people do get sick, do you think they'll shrug, accept the fact that they placed the wrong bet and go off quietly to expire? Or do you think they might be the next ones at the ER door - driving up prices for everyone else? The only way everyone wins is if everyone plays.

It's naive to believe that with the current law - or any law - we'll ever be living in a health care utopia. We're still years away even from the time a 7-year-old pretending to be a doctor would hand her pretend patient a pretend iPad and say, "Touch if your electronic records are up to date," but at least we're moving there. We'd be wise to continue.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599202066300#mwpphu-container

Common sense laid out in words even a 5 year old could understand, just read the comments underneath the article to get a sense of how stupid the American people are and how ignorant they are of how health insurance works, why it costs so much, and what mechanisms will effectively bring costs down.

 

BUT SOCIALIZMZ!!!! OMG DON'T TAKE MY GUNS!!! OMG U HATE JESUS AND U LOVE STEALING MY MONEYZ!!!! U GO 2 HELL!!! U GO 2 HELL AND U DIE!!

 

what's the difference between dem and rep?

dems are actually willing to pay for the massive spending, reps just want to pretend the money will come from somewhere.

this is the garbage that the teaparty is (should be) pissed about.

 

"tea partiers" are just a bunch of jumped up Republicans who own Lipton stock.

 

You forgot to mention MUZLIMS and COMMIEZ, but other than that, you've captured the GOP platform succinctly.

 

The real issue is that the tax penalty for no coverage is not enough to discourage free riders. 2.5% of annual income in 2016 is a pretty good deal for insurance.

 

You'd think so, but Massachusetts had very minor penalties and everyone still bought in. There are two aspects. One, people don't like to be in violation so there is a societal pressure aspect. Second, most people that are uninsured aren't that way by choice - they simply can't afford it. The subsidies are supposed to make it affordable, so they help address that problem. Most people, if they can get insurance, want and will get it. Right now, they just aren't able to.

 

There's also "societal pressures" on people not to let their houses get foreclosed even when the house's value is less than the loans. So the slow and years long recovery ahead will show different behaviors than the relatively sunnier days we've had before. There's also climate of distrust and frustration at the government that's increasing. All the G-Man does is tax and spend... All of these combined could show different regional results than Mass.

That said, the majority of Americans hate using fractions or balancing their checkbooks, so it might not catch on immediately. But it's there and information spreads quickly, such as some phony late night finance guru peddling it as a legal, albeit unethical, option in books and seminars ::cough::housing boom::.

Since there's subsidies for poor families, the young are asked upon to shoulder the burden of the universal mandate the most. The affordability angle is the most questionable to this group because there have been insurance plans that require higher deductibles and buy-ins but offers protections against catastrophic care. So they pay a couple grand (negotiable) on a broken leg, but are covered if they end up in the ICU. These end up as more affordable options for that group while not breaking their banks if they suffer some unforeseen accidents.

The average psychology of a Gen Y'er would likely fit your broad generalization, but they have the most to gain from welshing against mandates and eating the penalty, especially when they can't find a job.

 

The penalty might not be as much as a health insurance premium, but it's still more than the $0 they can pay without the penalty, right?