The CBO projections are in and they estimate 24 million Americans will lose their health insurance by the year 2026 if the Republican plan is implemented. 14 million will lose their health insurance NEXT year. In total, an estimated 52 million people would be uninsured by 2026 under the GOP plan. As if that weren’t bad enough, CBO estimates monthly health insurance premium for a single 64-year-old who makes $26,500 would jump more than 700% (from $1,700 to $14,600). But all is not lost in this plan. The wealthiest 1% will get a $900 billion tax cut.
Vox: “Republicans in Congress and in the Trump administration are now going to face a barrage of questions about why their health care bill leaves so many Americans uninsured. Trump in particular has promised repeatedly that he’d write a bill that covers everyone. His top advisers said as recently as this weekend that nobody would lose coverage under AHCA. The CBO report tells us that isn’t true — and you can bet this is exactly what reporters are going to want to talk about.
“The White House’s own internal analysis of the GOP plan to repeal and replace Obamacare show even steeper coverage losses than the projections by the Congressional Budget Office,” according to a document viewed by Politico.
“The executive branch analysis forecast that 26 million people would lose coverage over the next decade, versus the 24 million CBO estimate — a finding that undermines White House efforts to discredit the forecasts from the nonpartisan CBO.”
Breitbart has obtained a never-before-released private October conference call with House Republican members in which Speaker Paul Ryan said he was abandoning then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump forever and would never defend him ever again.
Said Ryan: “I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future.”
“House Republican leaders plunged into damage control mode Monday after a brutal budgetary assessment of their Obamacare replacement threatened to upend Senate GOP support and armed their critics on the left,” Politico reports.
“Speaker Paul Ryan’s team quickly pinpointed rosier elements of the report by the Congressional Budget Office, from cost savings to lower premiums. But the bottom line — that the number of uninsured Americans will climb by 24 million within a decade — threatened to upend the GOP leadership’s fragile efforts to unite congressional Republicans around the plan.”
Washington Post: “From here, the goal of Ryan and other GOP leaders is basically to convince already-skeptical Republicans that the big ’24 million’ figure is pie in the sky — not a real number and nowhere close to where it will be in reality. It simply cannot be.”
David Nather: “It’s not a surprise that CBO predicted people would lose coverage — most health care experts predicted it, and Republicans have been prepared for it. They’ve insisted they’re not trying to compete with Obamacare, which required people to buy coverage. But today’s estimates are worse than expected — the Brookings Institution predicted the number losing coverage would be 15 million over 10 years.”
CNBC: “The CBO’s analysis is an uncomfortable, but long-expected, reminder to Republican leaders, including President Donald Trump, about the potential political perils of getting rid of Obamacare. The ACA has been credited with driving down the nation’s uninsured rate to record low levels, from 18 percent of Americans in 2013 to 10.6 percent in the last quarter of 2016.”
“A company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, stands to receive more than $400 million from a prominent Chinese company that is investing in the Kushners’ marquee Manhattan office tower at 666 Fifth Ave,” Bloomberg reports.
“The planned $4-billion transaction includes terms that some real estate experts consider unusually favorable for the Kushners. It provides them with both a sizable cash payout… for a property that has struggled financially and an equity stake in a new partnership.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) slammed the GOP’s Obamacare repeal plan as “disgusting” and “immoral,” predicting that “thousands of Americans will die” if it becomes law, Politico reports.
Said Sanders: “That’s what this legislation is about. And it must be defeated. I hope there is enough sense among some of the Republicans to vote against it.”
Dylan Matthews: “The Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of Republicans’ plan to replace Obamacare is a description of one of the largest, most significant income redistribution programs the US government has ever considered — from the poor to the wealthy rather than the other way around.”
“The plan, the CBO concludes, would take more than $1 trillion away from programs targeting poor and middle-class families, to fund an $883 billion tax cut targeted at the wealthy. It is upward income redistribution of a truly massive scale.”
New York Times: “Left-leaning MSNBC, after flailing at the end of the Obama years, has edged CNN in prime time. Stephen Colbert’s openly anti-Trump ‘Late Show’ is beating Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Tonight’ for the first time. Bill Maher’s HBO flock has grown nearly 50 percent since last year’s presidential primaries, and ‘The Daily Show’ has registered its best ratings since Jon Stewart left in 2015.”
Washington Post: “As of noon Monday, President Trump will have spent about 15 percent of the time he has been commander in chief at a property that he owns or that bears his name.”
“Most of that time has been spent at Mar-a-Lago, a property he owns in West Palm Beach, Fla. But Trump also has spent time dining at his hotel in Washington (apparently leaking news about the visit to ensure positive coverage) and, this past weekend, at Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia, where he held a “partial Cabinet meeting” on Saturday.”
Josh Marshall: “People who have a hard time buying care have their subsidies slashed. Many of those people will go back to not having coverage at all. Meanwhile, in addition to the repeal of taxes on people with high incomes, the new plan actually gives subsidies to millions of people who are fairly well off and can afford insurance already. As many have said, Trumpcare is a tax cut disguised as an Obamacare replacement.
It’s a joke.
On top of that, in addition to the roll back of Medicaid expansion, Trumpcare also fundamentally changes and damages Medicaid itself and paves the way for phasing out Medicare. So the plan actually does more than simply take us back to the 2009 status quo ante.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) refused to say on CNN that Muslim Americans are equal to German Americans in their usefulness to society — doubling-down on recent comments that white people have made greater contributions to Western civilization than other “sub-groups.”
Said King: “I’d say they’re all created in the image of God and they’re equal in his eyes. If they’re citizens of the United States, they’re equal in the eyes of the law. Individuals will contribute differently, not equally to this civilization and society. Certain groups of people will do more from a productive side than other groups of people will.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that President Trump “doesn’t really think” that Barack Obama “tapped his phone personally,” seeming to walk back Trump’s explosive and unsubstantiated claim that his predecessor ordered an illegal wiretap of Trump Tower, Politico reports.
Spicer claimed that the fact that Trump put quotation marks around the words “wire tapping” in one tweet was proof that he was not speaking literally.
Believe the Breitbart leaked bit with Ryan talking about Trump is a Steve Bannon ploy to take down Ryan. As predicted repealing Obamacare is not going well and will now plague the Republicans as angry voters take revenge on the creeps and crooks playing games with the health of Americans. Looks like the Chinese are buying a friend in Jared Kushner, does it not? And finally Steve King, if he kept his mouth shut he could blend in with the rest of the sub humans in the house, instead he brands himself a racist. Clever, ain’t he?