The national GOP has moved-on from their unpopular attempts to strip healthcare from millions of Americans. Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel evidently did not get the memo. On Tuesday, he announced that he was spending your state tax money in yet another attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act.
Along with the AG of Texas, Schimel is leading the charge to destroy our healthcare system. If he succeeds, anyone with a pre-existing condition can be denied insurance. The sale of useless junk insurance will once again be legal. Kids under 26 could be thrown off of their parents' coverage. There will be no limits on how much more you can be charged if you are older, or sicker, or a woman. Insurance prices will skyrocket due to hordes of newly-uninsured descending on hospitals and clinics.
Appearing on Fox (of course) on Tuesday, Schimel boasted about his new suit against the Federal Government to declare the ACA unconstitutional. Schimel's weak legal argument is based on Congress's recent ending of the penalty on individuals who decide to go without insurance. The abolition of the penalty was one tiny aspect of the huge tax-cut for the rich that was jammed-through Congress late last year.
According to Schimel's bizarre logic, without a financial penalty for going without insurance, the personal mandate built into the ACA is not constitutional. Further, without the the mandate, the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. As Schimel gleefully told his Fox interviewer, "If this falls, the whole thing is gone."
This is not Schimel's first attempt to use your state tax dollars to sue the US government (which is ironically supported with your federal tax dollars) over the ACA. In your name, he entered into three other national lawsuits to fight various ACA provisions.
Where is all of the money coming from to advance Schimel's far-right agenda? I thought that Wisconsin was broke! At a time when our university system, roads, public schools, and the DNR have undergone drastic cuts, the DOJ keeps getting more and more money. Walker gave the DOJ a hefty 5.2% increase in funding between 2014 and 2017. The DOJ got another 2.5% increase in the new 2017-19 budget.
What are Wisconsinites getting for all of that increased legal spending? Schimel has built himself quite the little empire. He formed a Solicitor-General office in the DOJ and staffed it with at least six new hires. According to a spokesperson, the group's ominous mandate is to "counter the multiple overreaches by the federal government".
In addition to his multiple suits fighting the ACA, Schimel has many more GOP-fantasy cases in his large portfolio. He has entered into federal cases to protect polluters, punish workers, support partisan gerrymanders, end reproductive freedom, deport the Dreamers, and fight trans bathroom rights.
Wisconsin Attorney General, Brad Schimel has taken gross GOP partisanship to an unprecedented level. Hardworking Wisconsin taxpayers are footing the bill for his spree of lawsuits against the federal government.
Many of us rely on the ACA to survive. We don't need our elected officials working to end it. We need an Attorney General whose first obligation is to the people, not to his extreme ideology.
I never thought that I would say this, but thank you, Mr. Trump ! Because of your recent actions to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, I will get my health insurance for free in 2018.
My wife and I can be considered an Obamacare success story. We are both retired, but not quite old enough for Medicare. For the last four years, we have purchased insurance through the Federal ACA Exchange. Each year, our retirement income was too high for cost-sharing subsidies, but we kept our IRA income low enough (<4 times the poverty rate) to qualify for tax credits at the end of the year .
Thanks to the ACA, our insurance costs have stayed comparatively low. The available tax credits are based on the Second Lowest Cost Silver Plan (SLCSP) for each county's exchange. In the interest of saving money, we have always bought one of the less-expensive, higher deductible Bronze Plans.
After tax credits, our monthly out-of-pocket costs for insurance for 2014-17 has averaged $400/month. That is substantially less than we paid for similar insurance before implementation of the exchanges. Thank you, President Obama!
Of course, we signed-up again for 2018 coverage. It was fast and easy to re-enroll online at https://www.healthcare.gov/. We did not need help, but telephone operators are available for those who do. But if you also plan to get your 2018 insurance through the Exchanges, please hurry ! Open enrollment ends on December 15 this year.
Several companies, including the carrier we used from 2014 through 2017, dropped out of our exchange for 2018. In Washington County, we went from a choice of 41 plans in 2017 to just 20 plans (offered by three companies) for next year. Both Anthem and Molina cited the "uncertainties" in Washington as their reason for exiting the Exchange. This was a polite way of saying that Trump and his HHS Secretary have been purposely sabotaging the law.
There are certainly fewer choices this year than in the past. Still, the Marketplace is thriving, despite the moronic "Obamacare is dead!" bleating from the Saboteur-in-Chief.
Trump has done everything he can to kill Obamacare. He refused to allow the Government to spend funds allotted for publicizing the Exchanges. He has cut the enrollment window in half. He has berated Obamacare at every opportunity, often confusing many into believing that the program no longer exists. Worst of all, he has played politics with the lives of Americans by reneging on the law's Cost Sharing subsidies (CSR) provision.
CSR helped especially poor people afford insurance. It remitted money directly to the insurance companies in exchange for lower rates on Silver plans they bought on the Exchanges. After Trump welched on the government's payments, the insurance companies were still legally required to provide the lower rates to poorer people. In order to stay out of a Trump-induced bankruptcy, most of the remaining exchange insurance providers drastically raised the prices of their Silver plans.
The huge Trump-caused price increases only affected Silver plans. For examples, the Bronze plan that we selected for 2018 is only 16% more than the similar Bronze plan that we had in 2017. In contrast, the Second Lowest Cost Silver Plan (SLCSP) for 2018 is a whopping 67% higher than the SLCSP for 2017.
With our Bronze plan increasing by just 16%, and the SLCSP, upon which federal tax credits are based, increasing by 67%, we will end-up paying zero dollars for our Bronze plan. That is correct. We will get free health insurance in 2018. Through his ham-handed efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act, Trump has inadvertently made insurance much cheaper, or even free for many of us. Thank you, Mr. Trump !
IQ45 has become increasingly deranged as the FBI investigation of his collusion with Russia closes in. In a desperate attempt at distraction, he resurrected a discredited conspiracy theory accusing Hillary Clinton of handing-over US uranium to the Russians.
On Sunday, he tweeted:
It is unclear who Trump is desperately begging to "DO SOMETHING !" It is equally unclear what he expects them to do. However, I have a suggestion for somebody in Washington who really should do something.
Congress has much that they should deal with before the end of the year. They must do something to allow the Dreamers to remain in America, after Trump ended DACA. They must do something to authorize payment of Affordable Care Act cost-sharing subsidies, after Trump ended those payments. They must do something to reauthorize the expired Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). They must do something to increase the debt limit in December, so that the Government can actually stay open.
But instead of doing something on these four critical tasks, what has the House of Representatives done since the first of October? They voted to criminalize abortion after twenty weeks (Sensenbrenner, Grothman voted for). They named three Post Offices. They jammed through a sham budget in a procedural scheme targeting huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. They passed a bill allowing clear cutting of National Forests with no environmental review or public comment (Grothman for, Sensenbrenner against).
Most importantly, the House passed the South Carolina Peanut Parity Act of 2017. This all-important bill will allow South Carolina to appoint members to the Peanut Standards Board.
With only twelve in-session days remaining in November and nine in December, we should worry about the ability of the House to act on the critical matters waiting for them. However, all we seem to hear from House leaders is the importance of gigantic tax cuts.
The American people are not clamoring for tax cuts. We have been here before. We realize that the unwise move will balloon the deficit in order to give huge tax breaks to profitable corporations and the ultra-rich. These cuts, that Republican politicians are hell-bent on jamming-through by the end of the year, are a callous pay-off to wealthy political contributors.
Failure of Congress to implement a new Dream Act will affect over 700,000 young people. Since Trump killed the DACA program two months ago, the lives of these kids have been a Kafkaesque nightmare. Paul Ryan has not promised any plan of action on the issue.
It has been 33 days since Congress allowed the Children's Health Insurance Plan to expire. The program provides healthcare to 8.9 million children through state-run Medicare and CHIP plans. The House GOP is attempting to attach poison pills to this must-pass bill. States are scraping to keep their programs going, but can't continue emergency funding efforts forever.
It has been 21 days since Trump announced that he was ending cost-sharing subsidies, a provision of the Affordable Care Act. This cost-sharing program helped low-income families afford health insurance. Last year, nearly six million people received assistance. Trump timed his announcement for maximal disruption of the insurance markets. His decision means that millions will be unable to afford insurance, the government will pay billions more, and fewer insurance companies will participate in the exchanges. Neither Paul Ryan nor Mitch McConnell appear to be interested in a bipartisan solution negotiated in the Senate.
The 700,000 Dreamers, and the 6,000,000 poor getting cost-sharing insurance subsidies, and the 8,900,000 children on CHIP do not seem to be a priority with this Congress. Their piece-of-mind does not concern Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump. Calls for Congress to "Do Something!" on these issues fall on deaf ears. The problems of millions of Americans will be addressed, maybe sometime, at a future date, in the not-too-distant future.
No, the number one priority of the Republican Congress is tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations. Everybody else will just have to wait their turn. After all, there are only twenty-one Congressional work days left in 2017.
Here we go again. Just when we thought that our healthcare system was safe and ready for improvement, Zombie-Trumpcare re-emerged from the crypt. The latest version of the Republican effort to demolish our healthcare system is the Graham-Cassidy-(Heller-Johnson) bill.
Graham-Cassidy will take insurance away from an estimated 32 million Americans. Every major physician and hospital group is against this travesty. Every major organization dedicated to the health of a particular body part or aimed at fighting a specific disease is against it. Retiree organizations, reproductive rights groups, and consumer associations are all against it.
Who is for it? Most Republican politicians are reflexively for killing Obamacare because... Obama! Trump, who is desperate to sign anything that he can declare a "win", is for it. Billionaire GOP donors are for it, in order to free-up money for their promised tax-breaks. But right at the forefront of this drive to demolish our healthcare system is Wisconsin's worst political hack- Gov. Scott Walker.
The Graham-Cassidy provision that has Walker licking his chops sends huge federal sums to the states as block grants. Governors like Walker could spend these billions any way they want, with little control. Somehow, having 50 different insurance systems is supposed to be better than having uniform healthcare standards and laws across the country.
Walker has been involved in this most recent attack on the ACA from the beginning. Rather than working to help the people of Wisconsin, he has spent much of his time trying to take away our healthcare. He traveled to the White House several times since January to lobby against the Affordable Care Act.
Walker attended an emergency White House meeting in July after a previous repeal bill had failed in the Senate. Among the attendees were HHS Secretary Tom Price, Sen. Cassidy, former Sen. Rick Santorum, and the governors of Mississippi, Arizona, and Arkansas. The far-right group soon congealed around the block-grant concept.
In a Breitbart interview (don't worry, I disinfected my keyboard), Walker spoke about the White House meeting and the repeal efforts that became Graham-Cassidy, "I think it's awesome....What a perfect way to kick start a true repeal and replace of Obamacare by sending it back to the states where we’re definitely more effective, more efficient, and more accountable to the people."
In the same interview, Walker said that Graham-Cassidy is a way to head-off a Medicare-for-All system,"...my fear is at some point in the future there will be a decisive push to go the opposite direction and instead of repealing they will push for a government-run single-payer system which would be horrible for people. That is something we have to prevent from happening and I think this gives us our last best effort to do that.” It appears that Scottie's fear is my hope.
Walker is doing everything that he can to take away your healthcare through the atrocious Graham-Cassidy bill. For example, earlier this month, he published an opinion piece, "States Can Fix Obamacare's Mess". The article strongly pushes the right-wing panacea of block grants to the states.
A bipartisan group of governors wrote to Mitch McConnell, asking him to refrain from bringing Graham-Cassidy to the Senate floor. But Walker was having none of that. He sent his own letter, signed by a strictly partisan group of GOP governors, asking for a floor vote on the bill to kill healthcare.
So Walker, who is responsible for the WEDC boondoggle of lost and untracked millions of dollars is asking for control of billions in federal block grants. Walker, who cost hardworking taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by turning-down Medicaid expansion, wants to have complete control over our state healthcare system. Walker, who negotiated the failed Foxconn fiasco, wants us to trust him with our lives.
Walker wants us to believe that a state government, run by kleptocrats like him, Robin Vos, and Scott Fitzgerald will be "more effective, more efficient, and more accountable to the people".
Under Walker, Wisconsin has become a pay-for-play carnival. Organizations seeking favorable treatment by the state inevitably donate to GOP candidates. With Walker's control of billions more in block-grant money, our state will turn into a special-interest feeding frenzy. It's no wonder that the Governor is pushing this block-grant idea so hard.
