Representative Paul Ryan explaining the Republican health care plan on Capitol Hill.
Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
It has long been obvious to anyone following health policy that Republicans would never devise a workable replacement for Obamacare. But the bill unveiled this week is worse than even the cynics expected; its awfulness is almost surreal. And the process by which it came to be tells you a lot about the state of the G.O.P.
Given the rhetoric Republicans have used over the past seven years to attack health reform, you might have expected them to do away with the whole structure of the Affordable Care Act — deregulate, de-subsidize and let the magic of the free market do its thing. This would have been devastating for the 20 million Americans who gained coverage thanks to the act, but at least it would have been ideologically consistent.
But Republican leaders weren’t willing to bite that bullet. What they came up with instead was a […]
The effect of Obamacare has been calamitous for many of its supposed beneficiaries.
Many people have seen double- and triple-digit increases in premiums for plans that have very high deductibles, leaving them in effect uninsured.
Trump’s plan is no better, but anyone who thinks the ACA is good for uninsured Americans is drinking the kool-aid of self-serving Democratic propaganda.
The “healthcare” industry wrote most of that monstrously huge bill and they benefited the most from it’s passage.
The US is more than 50 years behind most first world countries because of its lack of basic health coverage for all citizens.
What should have been done then and should be done now is to make something like Medicare the basic health plan for all citizens.
I have been on Medicare for a long time and I bet a single payer plan would work well for ALL Americans.
Hmmm..the blue Kool-Aid looks different from the red Kool-Aid but I get sick drinking either. Maybe we should just throw out the Kool-Aid and try something else altogether?!
The purpose of TrumpCare is to provide a bill which can’t NOT fail. In other words they are sabatoging the ACA so that it HAS to collape, and then the GOP will say, “See, we told you ObamaCare was a failure; it was just a matter of time. We tried to fix it but it was fatally flawed from the start.”
Hypocrisy is in full bloom among the Democrats. They jammed the ACA down the throats of the Republicans, and they didn’t read it before passing it. Now Pelosi is demanding that the bill be read before passage.
Medicaid for all (not just those in government) with no co-payments, is the ultimate type of healthcare for any “civilized” society. Good health should be a right for all, not just the rich, and those who are rich should pay for those who cannot.
Yes, Rev. Dean I agree. Every other developed nation in the world has worked out how to have universal healthcare. The reason we haven’t is that we don’t actually have healthcare in the U.S.. We have an illness profit system. The problem with Obamacare, which will be greatly exacerbated by Trumpcare is that both are still basically about profit not wellness. We in the U.S. spend more, much more, than any other country on earth and yet according to WHO we rank 37th in terms of the quality of our healthcare. Why? Because the whole system is designed to create and protect profit.
Rev. Dean, I would like to see a massively different paradigm occur in healthcare where the best of “alternative” and “complementary” medicine linked with restoration of food with actual nutritional value becomes the primary health system in America. Until that tall order comes to pass, it seems like single payer is the most straight forward path that has a reasonable chance of success. I say this with a grimace because I am loath to have the corrupt corporatocracy get another beaurocracy to trainwreck and bankrupt.
I don’t like to “clog up the comment section” but I thought this may be of interest: A few years ago, my best friend’s son, who was in college at the time here in America, went over to England one summer while on break and while he was there he had a serious problem occur. He had a collapsed lung and he went to one of their great hospitals and had to stay there for about a week as I recall. When he was ready to leave, after being cured of the problem, he went to check out. He was expecting a huge bill, possibly in the thousands of dollars, that his parents would have to pay, but what happened amazed him: they said there will be no charge because the government paid for everything, even though he was from America. He and his family as well as my family were amazed by this incident. We all wonder to this day: how can we make our system like theirs? Of course Stephan’s new book (The Eight Laws of Change) has some answers which can help point the direction for us to take to change our system and I admire you Stephan Schwartz and thank you for making this guide book which can be of great value to humankind, not just Americans.