"[Obamacare] is the law of the land" - Paul Ryan; AHCA Round Two soon??

So It Goes

This thread is about the Republican's stated goal of repealing Obamacare, and replacing it with an as to be yet written plan.

Last night (well technically this morning at 1 AM) the Republican senate began this process with a "Vote A Rama" budget vote that could not be filibustered. The vote was down party lines. What's a Vota A Rama? Basically a rapid fire voting process where amendments are quickly voted on. More info here: http://keithhennessey.com/2010/03/25/vote-a-rama/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/health-care-congress-vote-a-rama.html?_r=0

Beginning of article:

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans took their first major step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, approving a budget blueprint that would allow them to gut the health care law without the threat of a Democratic filibuster.

The vote was 51 to 48. During the roll call, Democrats staged a highly unusual protest on the Senate floor to express their dismay and anger at the prospect that millions of Americans could lose health insurance coverage.

One by one, Democrats rose to voice their objections. Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington said that Republicans were “stealing health care from Americans.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said he was voting no “because health care should not just be for the healthy and wealthy.”

The presiding officer, Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, repeatedly banged his gavel and said the Democrats were out of order because “debate is not allowed during a vote.”

The final vote, which ended just before 1:30 a.m., followed a marathon session in which senators took back-to-back roll call votes on numerous amendments, an arduous exercise known as a vote-a-rama.

The approval of the budget blueprint, coming even before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated, shows the speed with which Republican leaders are moving to fulfill their promise to repeal President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement — a goal they believe can now be accomplished after Mr. Trump’s election.

The action by the Senate is essentially procedural, setting the stage for a special kind of legislation called a reconciliation bill. Such a bill can be used to repeal significant parts of the health law and, critically, is immune from being filibustered. Congress appears to be at least weeks away from voting on legislation repealing the law.

Republicans say the 2016 elections gave them a mandate to roll back the health care law. “The Obamacare bridge is collapsing, and we’re sending in a rescue team,” said Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “Then we’ll build new bridges to better health care, and finally, when these new bridges are finished, we’ll close the old bridge.”

Here is a Gallup poll about public opinion on Obamacare from Sept 2016: http://www.gallup.com/poll/195383/americans-negative-positive-aca.aspx




Bernie Sanders has started to try to rally people around the goal of "Save Our Health Care" with a day of a rallies on January 15: https://berniesanders.com/ourfirststand/

Here is one article about how repealing Obamacare could affect the economy: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/obamacare-economic-effects-repeal/512618/


Let's keep this thread to discussing the repeal/replace efforts going on now and in the future, and try not to relitigate Obamacare's Constitutionality itself if we can help it.

Panda4You

Whatever minor, slight medical issue or itch you've been having, and haven't been bothered to check up on, do it now!

DevoutlyApathetic

Yes, get medical care before we collapse our health care sector. Good plan.

For the chronic disease sufferers out there.....whelp. This is gonna suck.

durandal4532

Yeah this is fucking terrifying.

It's not going to go back to the state it was before the ACA, the healthcare industry is going to be in incredibly bad shape.

kaid

Yup as much as the republicans would like you can't just remove the ACA totally. They can only remove the parts that directly effect the budget with a majority vote. So there are a lot of the benefits of the ACA they can't get rid of without Dem votes. So you wind up in a situation where a lot of the benefits still will be there but the ways to pay for them get removed.

Without some sort of replacement going in you probably get insurance companies collapsing and many hospital networks too. They have adjusted their industry model over the last 8 years to work with the laws as written that is not something they can snap their fingers and change without a great deal of pain.

Part of me hopes if this fails as badly as it looks like it will it may be a path to single payer health. If enough insurance companies fail something like medicare for all becomes a lot more viable.

ArbitraryDescriptor

Maaan. My work HSA plan just hit a resonable cost/benefit relative to our long gone PPO options.

Hakkekage

I am quite scared. The ripple effects will be awful for many people and even for those tho get to keep their insurance through work, which will suddenly cost a fuck ton for both employers and employees.

Kid Presentable

What's up with this amendment for imported Canadian prescription drugs? It has a really wacky distribution of votes. Drafted by Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), voted FOR by the usual crowd of folks like Sanders, Schumer, Warren, McCaskill, Franken, Duckworth, Grassley, Cruz, McCain, Paul wait what?

Voted against by 13 Dems including Cory Booker, my dude in VA Mark Warner. I can't make sense of a way to defend this sort of thing.

http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/pharma-booker-canada

The amendment, drafted by Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, would “establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to lower prescription drug prices for Americans by importing drugs from Canada.” It would have amended the Senate budget resolution passed early Thursday morning that brings Obamacare a step closer to being repealed.

enlightenedbum

The Democrats who I have seen published a reason for their vote (Booker among them) cited a lack of safety standards imposed on the imported drugs in a way that Wyden's bill was better on so they voted for that.

Polaritie

Ugh. Cannot parse exactly what that quote block is saying.

Spoit

enlightenedbum wrote: »

The Democrats who I have seen published a reason for their vote (Booker among them) cited a lack of safety standards imposed on the imported drugs in a way that Wyden's bill was better on so they voted for that.

I mean, it's not like we'll have the FDA in a few months anyway?

Kid Presentable

enlightenedbum wrote: »

The Democrats who I have seen published a reason for their vote (Booker among them) cited a lack of safety standards imposed on the imported drugs in a way that Wyden's bill was better on so they voted for that.

Isn't Canada running it through safety standards already?

kedinik

Was this budget resolution the set-to-repeal-in-several-years plan that Republicans initially described, or is it setting up an immediate repeal with no replacement?

I'm having trouble finding clear information

Nobeard

My employer had their yearly health insurance seminar today. We were advised that "Due to the election, we may see some changes throughout the year, but this is the plan right now".

Ha. Ha ha ha.

moniker

I'm curious as to what can be put into Reconciliation. I saw some reports talking about preexisting conditions and staying on a parent's plan until you are 26. However, those should not be considered budgetary provisions and were part of the law passed under regular order rather than the amendatory law passed later via Reconciliation. Since the author's of those columns seem like normal journos I figure they just don't know what they're talking about, but at the same time relying on McConnell to abide by the Senate Parliamentarian is a bit...well, fuck McConnell is what I'm saying.

KetBra

Kid Presentable wrote: »

enlightenedbum wrote: »

The Democrats who I have seen published a reason for their vote (Booker among them) cited a lack of safety standards imposed on the imported drugs in a way that Wyden's bill was better on so they voted for that.

Isn't Canada running it through safety standards already?

Canadian regulations and American regulations will differ in some ways, but are very similar

May just be that certain senators get a lot of donations from certain sectors

Nobeard

My wife is on disability and depends on Medicaid to treat her chronic autoimmune arthritis and diabetes. I hope this doesn't fuck with her ability to get her meds.

Meeqe

I just finished reading through the whole budget bill, AND all the amendments, none of which passed. There were lots of them, proposing a pile of repeal and replace options, as well as token efforts from the Dems to enshrine the ACA protections into broader law.

The ACA is intact ATM, with no changes yet. It goes to the house next, watch that space for the next round of fuckery.

ElJeffe

I work for the state crime victims compensation board, and a couple years ago our expenditures for medical benefits for victims started plummeting because of the ACA and our health exchange. Dropped from about $20M per year in 2013/14 to about half that for 2015/16, because - surprise! - the number of uninsured went through the floor.

We've been trying to get bills passed to increase benefits in other areas since a lot of money was freed up. The amount we pay for a lot of things are way below what people actually need, and we haven't adjusted caps in like a decade. We were pretty excited about what we could do with all that money.

So yeah, guess none of that will be happening now.

Thank God the GOP will rescue us from the scourge of accessible health care.

Sleep

So do we get have the actual repeals they will be voting on yet?

As in, do we know how long it will take for those repeals to take place.

Could they not stagger the repeal, basically vote for a "repeal" next week that takes time to actually hit, thus that the insurance companies can get a chance to fix their shit and not just outright collapse?

Or is it really just have to be a fucking policy guillotine? Just vote, bang, chop off parts of the system to fuck the whole industry effective immediately?

moniker

Sleep wrote: »

So do we get have the actual repeals they will be voting on yet?

As in, do we know how long it will take for those repeals to take place.

Could they not stagger the repeal, basically vote for a "repeal" next week that takes time to actually hit, thus that the insurance companies can get a chance to fix their shit and not just outright collapse?

Or is it really just have to be a fucking policy guillotine? Just vote, bang, chop off parts of the system to fuck the whole industry effective immediately?

Well, this is the procedural vote to determine what can get put into a reconciliation bill, not the budget bill itself. That will come later with more specifics.

Spoit

Sleep wrote: »

So do we get have the actual repeals they will be voting on yet?

As in, do we know how long it will take for those repeals to take place.

Could they not stagger the repeal, basically vote for a "repeal" next week that takes time to actually hit, thus that the insurance companies can get a chance to fix their shit and not just outright collapse?

Or is it really just have to be a fucking policy guillotine? Just vote, bang, chop off parts of the system to fuck the whole industry effective immediately?

If they kill the mandate, I don't think there's anything the companies can do to keep it from collapsing. Other than take ridiculous losses and fold.

DevoutlyApathetic

Yea, all the stuff that people like about the ACA and the GOP is too cowardly to cut are all things that would ruin the insurance companies without the evil bad no good personal responsibility requirement of the mandate. That was the payment for the increased outlay from the insurers.

Mayabird

Yes I do believe they are willing to collapse the entire healthcare system. Some of them will because they're idiots who just want to stick it to Obama and damn the costs. Some of them want the world to burn. And some of them are so deep down the self-enrichment hole that they plan to profit as the American people are bled dry as healthcare costs become truly, mindbogglingly crippling but people still pay in order to not die.

Astaereth

It's worth pointing out that the Gallup poll in the OP is capturing people's disapproval from both sides of the spectrum. There's a significant majority who prefer ACA as-is or wish it to be moved further left. Those who want a system to the right of ACA (or just total repeal) are a minority.

Anyway this is one of the worst things the GOP is planning on doing. It will absolutely kill people and I hope the Democrats count every one of the dead they can to make sure everyone knows the cost.

Fencingsax

I can't fucking believe it's been 6 years, and the Republicans have fucking nothing. Nothing! No ideas at all for replacement. Not even an outline.

I mean, I can believe it, but good gods.

I remember people suggesting that this was how we dig out single payer after the catastrophe of removal of the mandate completely killed insurance companies. But no, the current majorities are spiteful enough that that isn't going to happen.

So It Goes

Astaereth wrote: »

It's worth pointing out that the Gallup poll in the OP is capturing people's disapproval from both sides of the spectrum. There's a significant majority who prefer ACA as-is or wish it to be moved further left. Those who want a system to the right of ACA (or just total repeal) are a minority.

Anyway this is one of the worst things the GOP is planning on doing. It will absolutely kill people and I hope the Democrats count every one of the dead they can to make sure everyone knows the cost.

From bernies site

Forar

So everyone should be calling everyone at this point, I guess?

I'm Canadian and I kind of want to start calling up congresscritter offices and be like "guys, all kidding aside, shit will get real if people realize just how many of them actually need this".

enlightenedbum

Especially target the Republicans who have been soft on this and the Democrats who are generally backstabbing motherfuckers.

Dems: Manchin, Tester, and Heitkamp
Reps: Corker, Portman, Murkowski, Collins

Rand Paul has like 37 different things going on his head, but he seems kinda soft, at least on the repeal without a replacement plan part. Hell, he voted with the Democrats last night even though he's philosophically opposed to any kind of government service. I guess somebody has to represent the people on Kynect, since motherfucking Mitch McConnell won't.

moniker

How do I target a Senator whose constituency I'm not in? Since I'm repped by Durbin and Duckworth, who are both awesome. Just call and threaten to support/donate to a challenger?

enlightenedbum

Though I will say the backstabbing motherfucker caucus has been fairly quiet on the ACA front.

enlightenedbum

moniker wrote: »

How do I target a Senator whose constituency I'm not in? Since I'm repped by Durbin and Duckworth, who are both awesome. Just call and threaten to support/donate to a challenger?

I have the same problem. I'm mostly saying the people in the states represented should call. Never hurts for the two of them to hear you have their backs though.

Polaritie

moniker wrote: »

How do I target a Senator whose constituency I'm not in? Since I'm repped by Durbin and Duckworth, who are both awesome. Just call and threaten to support/donate to a challenger?

Franken and Klobuchar. I suppose call and push for them to dig in their heels because this is the hill to make a stand?

So It Goes

moniker wrote: »

How do I target a Senator whose constituency I'm not in? Since I'm repped by Durbin and Duckworth, who are both awesome. Just call and threaten to support/donate to a challenger?

Continue to tell them you support xyz and if they are vocally and loudly also supporting xyz you are very happy with them

Like it's not enough to vote the right way, the dems need to be very loud about it and keep that energy up for oh ... about four years

Goumindong

Sleep wrote: »

So do we get have the actual repeals they will be voting on yet?

As in, do we know how long it will take for those repeals to take place.

Could they not stagger the repeal, basically vote for a "repeal" next week that takes time to actually hit, thus that the insurance companies can get a chance to fix their shit and not just outright collapse?

Or is it really just have to be a fucking policy guillotine? Just vote, bang, chop off parts of the system to fuck the whole industry effective immediately?

There is basically no duration they could implement that would not fuck over insurance companies et al.

dispatch.o

I don't know how one would even logistically undo some of the things they claim to be all about killing. You don't just undo hundreds of millions of dollars in support to high need community hospitals and expect it to be okay with people.

Edit: I'm trying to locate it, but I recall a poll where they did not mention Obama and asked if people thought the Affordable Care Act was a good idea, and an overwhelming majority said yes. As soon as you call it Obamacare, suddenly it's a nefarious plot by an uppity black man who hates working class white people."THANKS OBAMA!"

shryke

enlightenedbum wrote: »

Especially target the Republicans who have been soft on this and the Democrats who are generally backstabbing motherfuckers.

Dems: Manchin, Tester, and Heitkamp
Reps: Corker, Portman, Murkowski, Collins

Rand Paul has like 37 different things going on his head, but he seems kinda soft, at least on the repeal without a replacement plan part. Hell, he voted with the Democrats last night even though he's philosophically opposed to any kind of government service. I guess somebody has to represent the people on Kynect, since motherfucking Mitch McConnell won't.

Well, that's because McConnell is easily one of the worst people alive in US government right now.

V1m

dispatch.o wrote: »

I don't know how one would even logistically undo some of the things they claim to be all about killing. You don't just undo hundreds of millions of dollars in support to high need community hospitals and expect it to be okay with people.

Edit: I'm trying to locate it, but I recall a poll where they did not mention Obama and asked if people thought the Affordable Care Act was a good idea, and an overwhelming majority said yes. As soon as you call it Obamacare, suddenly it's a nefarious plot by an uppity black man who hates working class white people."THANKS OBAMA!"

IIRC there have been multiple polls along these lines.

Savant

Fencingsax wrote: »

I can't fucking believe it's been 6 years, and the Republicans have fucking nothing. Nothing! No ideas at all for replacement. Not even an outline.

I mean, I can believe it, but good gods.

I remember people suggesting that this was how we dig out single payer after the catastrophe of removal of the mandate completely killed insurance companies. But no, the current majorities are spiteful enough that that isn't going to happen.

Well, it shouldn't be that surprising, because there isn't really any known workable alternative to Obamacare that would satisfy the congressional Republicans' ideology. Aside from the old system of let the sick fend for themselves, of course, but I don't consider that to be workable.

RedTide

enlightenedbum wrote: »

Though I will say the backstabbing motherfucker caucus has been fairly quiet on the ACA front.

Did West Virginia take the expansion? If they did I can only imagine the number of West Virginians positively impacted considering what its economy looks like. Between that and Manchins family members fuckery in the pharma sector I can imagine him trying to lay low on this one, especially on the ratfucker angle.

enlightenedbum

RedTide wrote: »

enlightenedbum wrote: »

Though I will say the backstabbing motherfucker caucus has been fairly quiet on the ACA front.

Did West Virginia take the expansion? If they did I can only imagine the number of West Virginians positively impacted considering what its economy looks like. Between that and Manchins family members fuckery in the pharma sector I can imagine him trying to lay low on this one, especially on the ratfucker angle.

Yeah, West Virginia still votes Democratic on the state level, since it's like 30 years behind even the south.