Republican Death Panel

January 4, 2017 JanF Editors' Choice, News and Opinion 15

These are the faces of the 12 men who will repeal the Affordable Care Act.

They will be condemning 36,000 people a year to death by their blind obeisance to an ideology that places cuts in marginal tax rates for billionaires over the well-being of millions who will lose access to health care.

None of these men will ever suffer because of a lack of health care, none will never have to mortgage their home to pay for a sick child’s cancer treatment, none will never feel the pain of watching a loved one die because they cannot afford to go to a doctor or pay for life-saving drugs.

Why are these men smiling? Because they are Republicans and when people suffer and die, it does not bother them one bit.

Yesterday, Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, introduced the resolution that will begin the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act, legislation that has given 30 million Americans health insurance.

On January 27th, these men will vote to take that insurance away from those people and countless others who may have benefited in the future from access to affordable health care.

Say their names, memorize their faces, wonder at their shrunken souls – men who reject their own humanity, men who would rather see their constituents die than have one of their wealthy patrons pay a penny more in taxes.

Senator Mike Enzi (R – WY)
Senator Charles Grassley (R – IA)
Senator Jeff Sessions (R – AL)
Senator Mike Crapo (R – ID)
Senator Lindsey Graham (R – SC)
Senator Pat Toomey (R – PA)
Senator Ron Johnson (R – WI)
Senator Bob Corker (R – TN)
Senator David Perdue (R – GA)
Senator Cory Gardner (R – CO)
Senator John Kennedy (R – LA)
Senator John Boozman (R – AR)

If any of these Senators are yours, please call them and ask them to vote against repeal without replacement. Their Senate websites are available via this link.

Call their home offices – do not email them – and talk to their staff. Maybe some of them still have a shred of human decency left.

15 Comments

  2. Thank you, Jan! I have copied these names to my action file, will look up their crappy home state addresses, and send postcards. Going to type the addresses but hand-write the postcards, basing my comment on your post. “How does it feel to be on the DEATH PANEL? You care more about tax cuts for your rich donors than you do about your voters’ lives! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

    Or perhaps I should put, “Your mother would be ashamed of you,” although it’s true that some mothers are just awful and would egg their sons on.

    • It is difficult to think of these men having mothers as they seem to have emerged as the hatchlings of alien creatures with no shred of humanity. Certainly they have no decency.

      Send those postcards! The link to the Senate committee has links to each member’s website which might give you a starting place to find their addresses. Good luck!

  3. Here is a report on the difficulty of even just repeal, much less replace:

    Republicans made the first move to undo the Affordable Care Act through a Senate budget resolution Tuesday, beginning in earnest their long, complicated journey to repealing and replacing the Democrats’ signature achievement.

    The Senate Budget Committee’s resolution, which starts a two-step process known as reconciliation, directs two committees in the House of Representatives and two committees in the Senate to do the hard work of writing the language that repeals the bill.

    But even just repealing the massive bill is proving onerous as Republicans debate the merits of doing so without a replacement ready. […]

    With a Republican president about to assume the Oval Office, any legislation they pass will have real-world consequences. They must consider the 20 million people who have gained insurance through the ACA, business interests of the health care industry and the impact any changes will have on the economy. In addition, Republican leaders have to balance the economic impact with the demands of their members who span the conservative ideological spectrum.

    “Real world consequences”. Indeed. It was all fun and games and mailing list donation fodder for 7 years – now it means people literally getting sick and literally dying.

    • Public opinion polls suggest that only 26% want full repeal and my guess is that many of those people have no idea what the ACA does. But in any event, 49% want it expanded or implemented as is and another 17% want to keep it but scale it back. So even after 7 years of lies and vilification, they can only find 26% who want it to go away completely.

    • Most people have no idea how much ACA programs helped to improve Medicare services while lowering costs. To say nothing of the prescription drug donut hole. Folks on Medicare need to start calling too.

  5. Paul Waldmann thinks we might be able to stop repeal in its tracks:

    “Republicans are essentiallypushing the throttle all the way forward on the repeal train before they’ve even laid the track that will take them to their destination — and to boot, they don’t know what that destination is. On one hand, they’ve made a commitment to their base to repeal the law, a commitment they feel is impossible not to fulfill. But they’re beginning to understand that it’s easy to say you’ll do that when you don’t have to be responsible for the consequences.”
    …
    “A gigantic political threat looms over them. Toss all those millions of Americans off their insurance, and the news will be filled with horror stories of people who found themselves without coverage because of what Trump and the Republicans did. People will suffer. People will die.”
    …
    “While they try to figure out what they’ll replace the ACA with, Republicans are piling up promises they can’t keep, saying that “no one” will be worse off under that as-yet-nonexistent replacement. Those pledges are preposterous, and should be used to demonstrate just how disastrous the Republicans’ plans are.”
    …
    “*Don’t compromise*
    Democrats need to [say] that they’d be happy to work with Republicans to address specific health care reforms, but only once repeal is off the table. They can’t negotiate the details while Republicans are holding a gun to the heads of tens of millions of Americans.”

    [How Democrats can defeat the repeal of Obamacare – The Washington Post]
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/04/how-democrats-can-defeat-the-repeal-of-obamacare/?utm_term=.c6f78179cab5

    It is possible that repealing the ACA is already a third rail. Not surprising … government programs that improve the lives of millions of people become popular very quickly.

  6. From the Senate floor …

    @SenStabenow: “Republican plan will put insurance companies back in charge, cut Medicare & Medicaid, drive up prescription drug costs #MakeAmericaSickAgain ”

    From Twitter

  7. Impact on senior citizens …

    @NCPSSM: What happens if the Affordable Care Act is repealed? Find out below. #ACAWorks #Medicare
    From Twitter

  8. The full Senate voted 51 to 48 to pass the Budget Committee resolution with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) abstaining.

  9. From yesterday’s news, some articles of interest:

    WaMo: Obamacare Repeal and Delay Becomes Obamacare Rescue

    If Republicans truly believed Obamacare creates more victims than beneficiaries, they would blow it up immediately. And if they really had an alternative that was more popular, they would wait to write it before they eliminated it. Repeal-and-delay proves that neither one of these is true. They have no better plan.

    ~

    CNBC: Here’s how GOP repeal of Obamacare would swell the federal deficit

    Repealing Obamacare will cost the federal government as much as $350 billion, according to a new estimate.

    ~

    Bloomberg: Repealing Obamacare Could Be Trump’s First Lesson in the Glacial Pace of Congress

    Donald Trump promised voters an immediate repeal of Obamacare, but Republicans in Congress likely won’t have a bill ready for him on Day One. Or Day Two. Or perhaps even his first two weeks.

    Republican leaders will start deploying fast-track procedures Wednesday to get the bill through the Senate, but that will require weeks of wrangling, if not longer.

    It’ll be an early lesson for Trump in the sometimes-glacial pace of Congress. And it’s likely to get more difficult from here, as the incoming president moves on to other areas where Republicans aren’t in such lockstep, such as infrastructure spending, where he might need bipartisan support.

    ~

    Vox: Trump’s “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” moment

    Donald Trump, by contrast [to Congressional Republicans], might think Obamacare is bad mainly because it’s unpopular, and because people at his rallies cheer when he says it’s bad. And if that’s the case, he is not going to want to replace it with something that’s less popular, that leaves fewer people uninsured, and that creates nationwide chaos that he gets blamed for. But that’s going to put him at odds with Republicans who want to roll back the law for ideological reasons, and who are willing to pay the price.

    ~

    Reuters: Obamacare repeal would cost New York state at least $3.7 billion: governor

    The repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the goal of Republicans in Washington, would cost New York state $3.7 billion and strip 2.7 million residents of health coverage, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday.

    ~

    NPR Fact checks.

    CLAIM: “The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare”

    FACT CHECK: Prices were going up at faster rates before Obamacare.

    CLAIM: ACA repeal would “rip health care away from millions”

    FACT CHECK: True, if Republicans don’t protect them or replace ACA with something that provides coverage.

  10. President Obama’s advice to Democrats:

    In the closed-door meeting, the President urged fellow Democrats to not “rescue” Republicans by helping them pass replacement measures, according to sources in the room.

    He also floated this idea: Start referring to the GOP’s new plan as “Trumpcare.”
    The suggestion was a clear indication of the Democratic Party’s goal of turning the tables on Republicans, who are already facing pressure to quickly craft a replacement bill.

    As he walked by a scrum of reporters, Obama would only say this about the Democratic Party’s message: “Look out for the American people.”

    But the Republicans have to pivot away from repeal:

    “The President believes that the country would benefit from Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill actually having a conversation about ideas for strengthening and improving the Affordable Care Act,” [White House spokesman Josh] Earnest said at Wednesday’s White House press briefing.

    He said that most of the questions Obama took from House and Senate Democrats at the Capitol Hill huddle were related to Republicans’ imminent attempt to repeal Obamacare. Earnest added that the law could be “improved.”

    “But that’s never the offer that Republicans have put forward. Democrats have put it forward,” Earnest said. “The President himself has put forward ideas for how to strengthen and improve the program. But there’s never been a willingness on the part of Republicans to do that.”

    Republicans are looking for cover:

    In a closed-door meeting in the House basement Wednesday with the whip team, a Republican rank-and-file member rose to convey his deep fear that Republicans were making a big mistake by repealing the Affordable Care Act without any concrete plan to replace it with.

    According to one source in the room, the member rose and got the room’s attention.

    “You lose all leverage once you repeal this thing. There will be people on the left who will never help you replace it and there will be people on the right who aren’t going to help you either,” the member said. “We will own this thing and there will be consequences.”

    The political ramifications:

    Democrats have a chance to fight the messaging war anew, even as they continue to champion the health care law as good policy that’s helped the country. And Republicans, who’ve had political success in attacking the law without offering a unified solution of their own, have a chance to present their ideas and make policy, but risk giving away their political advantage if they become the ones voters blame for problems in the health system.

    The side that meets the challenge most effectively will help determine who prevails in the 2018 midterms, and in the next presidential election four years from now.

    On Wednesday, as he unveiled Democrats’ new attack line against the GOP – “Make America Sick Again” – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that after the health law passed, voters blamed it for every problem related to health care, “and our Republicans colleagues and their message machine did it.”

    “Now, they’re gonna own it,” Schumer said of the GOP. “And all the problems in the health care system, and there have been many throughout the years, no one has solved all of them, are gonna be on their back.”

    Republican Congress members have been running on “Repeal Obamacare” since 2010 and with that gone, and their constituents suffering under either NoCare or TrumpCare, 2018 will be a challenge for them.

  11. New Survey – January 6th

    An overwhelming majority of people disapprove of Republican lawmakers’ plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act without having a ready replacement for the health care law, according to a poll released Friday.

    And judging by the letter-writing and lobbying in the first week of the new Congressional session, many health care and business groups agree.

    A poll released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 75 percent of Americans say they either want lawmakers to leave Obamacare alone, or repeal it only when they can replace it with a new health care law. Twenty percent of those polled say that want to see the law killed immediately.

    But Drew Altman, CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, says the poll shows lawmakers don’t have a strong mandate to repeal Obamacare.

    “Most of the American people said they’re either against repealing it or they’re against repealing it unless Republicans put a replacement plan on the table,” Altman says. “They want to see what comes next before they seen the ACA repealed.”

  12. The $ cost of Repeal:

    Health care providers face a staggering loss of revenue if Republicans repeal Obamacare as promised, according to an Urban Institute report released Thursday.

    The report found that health care spending by public and private health insurers would decline by $1.7 trillion between 2019 and 2028 if the health care legislation is repealed. […]

    The report predicts that repeal will create an additional 29.8 million uninsured people.

    The newly uninsured will be less likely to seek medical care, according to the report, but when they do will be increasingly reliant on what’s known as uncompensated care, which is financed by government entities and providers offering free or reduced-price care. Yet federal funding for uncompensated care through Medicaid is not expected to increase substantially in the repeal bill still to be put forth by the GOP-controlled Congress. This forces providers, which will already be losing billions of dollars in revenue per year by the Urban Institute’s projections, to carry the additional financial burden of offering care to the uninsured.

    The report found that insurer and household spending on hospital and physician care would drop by $59.1 billion and $20 billion respectively in 2019 alone, putting health care providers in a difficult financial fix.

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