TRUMP THREATENS TO CUT OFF INSURANCE COMPANY SUBSIDIES AFTER OBAMACARE REPEAL VOTE FAILS
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Sounding rather testy that the Senate didn’t give him what he wanted on Thursday, President Trump tweeted on Saturday morning
that he would not only punish senators and their staffs but cut off the
government funding of subsidies — estimated to be $8 billion — to
hungry insurance companies. He tweeted: “After seven years of ‘talking’
Repeal & Replace, the people of our great country are still being
forced to live with imploding ObamaCare!” He then tweeted the
not-so-subtle threat:
quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of
Congress will end very soon!
He added verbal insult to the potential financial injury:
quitters, Repeal & Replace is not dead. Demand another vote before
voting on any other bill!
The president has threatened to cut off those federal subsidies
before, but paid them in June and July. Now, however, with the August
payment in jeopardy, health insurance companies are estimating that they
will be forced to raise premiums immediately by at least 20 percent. In
addition, Trump wants to abrogate the agreement wrought in 2010,
putting congressional staffs under ObamaCare, just like everyone else.
If he holds true to his tweet, Trump will turn off both spigots unless
the Senate bends to his will and votes on R&R next week before
taking their August recess.
This sounds very much like the commissar of a slave labor camp who,
tired of complaints, issues the threat: “Beatings will continue until
morale improves.”
Democrats were quick to respond, defending territory that their
president won over the protests of a large majority of Americans back in
2009 who loudly and repeatedly declared that they didn’t want
government-financed healthcare. Said their chief Senate spokesman,
Senator Charles Schumer of New York, on Saturday:
cost-sharing reduction payments, every expert agrees that premiums will
go up and health care will be more expensive for millions of Americans.
The president ought to stop playing politics with people’s lives and
health care, start leading and finally begin acting presidential.
The “skinny” repeal of the odious, expensive, and unconstitutional
ObamaCare program failed when three so-called Republicans — one of them
getting out of his hospital bed to do so — voted against it. Leading the
pack of RINOs was Senator John McCain from Arizona along with Senators
Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Their voting records reflect a near-total lack of concern over
keeping their oaths of office to protect and defend the Constitution.
The Freedom Index (FI), which rates votes by members of Congress on
their adherence to the Constitution, for them is 63 percent, 40 percent,
and 48 percent, respectively.
But they don’t share the blame alone. Masters of political statecraft
and closed-door maneuvering who spelled doom to Trump’s hopes include
House Speaker Paul Ryan (FI: 58 percent) and Senator Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (FI: 60 percent).
Another person to blame is Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who
voted to uphold the individual mandate out of conviction that his court
must not be responsible for ending the healthcare takeover. Still others
are those in the Republican Party who voted more than half-a-dozen
times to repeal ObamaCare when it was safe to do so, for political
points, but were totally unwilling to keep that promise when Trump
unexpectedly won the White House in November. They “badly
underestimated,” wrote Jonathan Tobin of National Review, “how
hard it would be to do something that no party has ever been able to
accomplish: roll back an entitlement.” Once addicted to the new program,
resistance began to fade as those newcomers were now covered with
healthcare at the expense of their neighbors. Current polls are showing
only 29 percent interested in repeal, with the vast majority wanting
Congress to move on to other things.”
According to Tobin, most of the blame can be placed on President Trump. He explains in his recent National Review
article that Obama “had little respect for Congress or interest in the
normal forms of friendly persuasion that involve entertaining and
back-scratching. But he proved that a president could have neither the
charm of Ronald Reagan nor the penchant for raw political thuggery of
Lyndon Johnson and still have the ability to force dysfunctional
congressional majorities to give him what he wanted.”
Translation: Obama knew exactly what he wanted. Either a full-on
single-payer health care system that would put the remainder of what was
left of the country’s quasi-free market system under total government
control, or a program that was designed to fail that would lead to the
same end. In other words, Obama was an ideologue — a socialist/Marxist
ideologue — and knew exactly what he wanted and wouldn’t quit until he
(with the assistance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) got it.
Trump, on the other hand, is about as far from being an ideologue as
one can imagine. He’s a deal-maker, willing to give up certain chips in
order to gain others. There is no “right” or “wrong” over ObamaCare,
just a “right” versus “left” that currently is getting in his way. He
and his staff need to reduce the impact of ObamaCare in order to
generate enough savings to offset the massive deficits in his proposed
budget. That is his target, and getting something done over healthcare
was merely a steppingstone to it.
Lost in all the shuffle is a surprising piece of proposed legislation
that has generated almost no attention: a bill that would have, in two
simple sentences, utterly and completely repealed ObamaCare once and for
all. No footnotes, no addendas, no “revisions” or “replacements” — just
straight repeal. From Representative Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) came this back
in March:
Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of
law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such
Act had not been enacted.
Neat and tidy. Simple. Effective. And all but totally ignored by
Republicans more enamored with their popularity going into the next
election than with doing the right thing. Brooks couldn’t even generate
enough support for his bill to get it out of committee. He touched on
the real problem about repealing ObamaCare: Neither the people nor their
representatives want to touch it. “If the American people want to
repeal ObamaCare,” said Brooks, “this is their last, best chance during
the 115th Congress. Those Congressmen who are sincere about repealing
ObamaCare may prove it by signing the discharge petition.”
The silence following his plea was deafening.
Related article:
RINOs Stop ObamaCare Repeal in Senate, but Fight Continues