Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I
(No Kings, Ever!)

You might recall that Trump's government lawyers have switched to attacking Obamacare. But when asked what will replace it, Trump has, essentially, said "fuck you, America". Whatever bullshit the Party of Trump has in mind for health care won't be shown for two years, or so they say.

Which means they have nothing. Oh, they say they have ideas, but they have nothing that they can discuss. In other words, nothing.

The Weasel of Missouri, Josh Hawley,* thinks this is OK.

“Obamacare is in place; it’s going to be for the foreseeable future,” Hawley said.

Great leadership from those guys. Fade back, punt, run away.

Cowards, all of them.
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* Hawley ran for state attorney general in 2016 and won, with lots of promises about what he was going to do for Missourians. But all he really did was position himself for running for the Senate in 2018. If there is any senator who nakedly only gives a shit about himself, it's Hawley.

The Trump administration has told a federal appeals court it wants the entire Affordable Care Act struck down, an outcome that could leave millions uninsured and re-ignite a winning political issue for Democrats.

The administration, in a terse filing Monday with the court in New Orleans, said it agrees that former President Barack Obama’s health care law should be declared unconstitutional after Congress repealed one part of it — unpopular fines on people who remain uninsured.

Health insurance was a big issue in the last election, with oodles of Republicans running away from full repeal of Obamacare. They were proclaiming that they really didn't want to take away people's health insurance, that they wanted to ensure that people who have pre-existing conditions kept their coverage.

Trump has now thrown high-octane gasoline on those embers. A few days after Trump was handed his big political win by Bob Mueller, now Trump has ensured that nobody is going to care about that. The news stories will be how Trump is trying to ensure that tens of millions of people lose their health insurance. "Repeal and Replace" has been supplanted by "Overturn and Fuck You."

"Donald Trump Wants to Take Away Your Health Insurance" will be the banner campaign ad if this case isn't decided by next year, or if Obamacare is upheld.

"Donald Trump Took Away Your Health Insurance" will be the main campaign ad if Obamacare is stricken down. Every Republican running for federal office will be tarred with that brush.

And you can be sure that every one of those birds knows that.

In the last few years, you might have noticed things going on. New facilities have been built. Existing facilities have been expanded.

They are doing that because they have more money coming in. The "why do they have more money" is fairly plain: Obamacare. More people have insurance, hospitals are treating fewer people without insurance. People without insurance often don't pay or cannot pay. Or if they were solvent, a medical crisis would drive them into bankruptcy (the hospital doesn't get paid). Everyone else who could pay, whether by insurance or because they're rich, subsidized all that.

The GOP's "reform" plan is to (a) kick 22 million people off insurance and (b) give a tax cut to the rich. That's wicked perverse-- Take away from those who don't have money in order to give more money to greedy bastards who don't need more money.

Everything TrumpCare's supporters say is to obscure one salient fact: They want to deny insurance to over 20 million people in order to give more money to the rich. You know, people like Donald Trump, Martin Shkreli and Betsy DuVois-- people who are more than happy to take a few more millions and if lots of people end up dying, not their problem. Because they are heartless.

That's what TrumpCare is all about, Gentle Reader: Greed. Avarice. Fiscal gluttony. Ryan and McConell and the rest of that pack can blather all they want about the benefits of TrumpCare, but the only winners in TrumpCare are those who already have gobs of money. And, of course, the politicians that they are paying so they can have more.

Trump's got competition in the quest to replace Doug Feith as the title-holder:

A conservative Republican congressman from Idaho is drawing criticism for his response to a town-hall attendee’s concerns about how his party’s health-care bill would affect Medicaid recipients.

“You are mandating people on Medicaid to accept dying,” the woman said.

“That line is so indefensible,” said Rep. Raúl R. Labrador, a member of the influential House Freedom Caucus. “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”

The boos instantly drowned him out.

Worse for this challenger to be the Dumbest Fucker on Earth, the comment was caught on video:


That is so contradicted by reality that it was a gob-smackingly stupid thing to say. You will not have to search far, Dear Reader, to find stories of women who didn't get a lump in their breasts looked at because they couldn't afford to. Or people who die of hypertension or other medical issues because they couldn't afford to go to a doctor for a checkup.

Of course, Labrador is whining about how everybody is blasting him for one comment he made. The poor man must have severe organic brain damage, for he clearly doesn't understand the game of politics. If he doesn't have brain damage, then he is a fucking sociopath who allowed his mask to drop.
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In other news, conservatives are proceeding with Operation Butthurt. The last time I looked into things, the percentage of complaints to the FCC that were traceable back to the Parents Television Council were in the upper 90-percentile rage, maybe as high as 99%. In short, the FCC essentially operates as a tool of a wingnut pressure group.
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Condoleeza Rice is making the round to flog her new book, here, on Sunday Morning. She's dropped her Iraq War defense down to "we went with what we knew," which was pretty much "we went with the lies that Dick Cheney's stooges told up." The historical record is revealing that Bush-43 and his team were focused on Iraq before the smoke had stopped rising from Ground Zero. They knew what they wanted and they were not willing to give credence to any contrary information. They saw what they wanted to see, heard what they wanted to hear, and there were plenty of people, including an alleged Iranian agent, willing to give them what they wanted.
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The French Nazi Party is going to have yet another makeover. Le Pen didn't get trounced as badly as her father did fifteen years ago. But she is little more than a pretty face masking the same old antisemitism, Holocaust denialism and xenophobia that has always been a hallmark of her party.

No evidence of wiretapping. Or microwave-camera tapping.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of people will lose their insurance coverage under TrumpCare. TrumpCare is a traditional Republican program: Fucks over the poor and working people, while giving massive tax breaks to the rich.

Kasich calls for Democrats to work with Republicans to enact TrumpCare.

Kasich conveniently forgets that the Republicans in Congress decided that their approach to enacting health care legislation in `09-`10 was to say no to everything. The ACA was patterned on the very plans that the Republicans wanted in the 1990s and on RomneyCare in Massachusetts. Republicans, out of hatred and spite for President Obama, chose to stonewall and, at the time, the Democrats were able to cobble up the votes to enact the ACA.

Well, now the Republicans want to repeal the ACA and replace it with TrumpCare, something that is far worse, and Kasich expects the Democrats to play along? When one of the pushers of TrumpCare clearly doesn't understand how insurance works?

Republicans aren't interested in "fixing" health care. Everybody knows it, except maybe John Kasich. The GOP has bleated that they would repeal the ACA and they whined and kicked and took comfort in the fact that they didn't have the power to do that. They were like a bunch of lance corporals complaining about the Corps.

But now they have to make good on their promises, and they want the Democrats to play along? Fat fucking chance. The GOP owns this pig, TrumpCare, let them dance with it.

So, blow it out yer ass, John.

President Trump appears to be courting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), his onetime rival, to help sell the House’s healthcare plan to conservatives in Congress.

The president and first lady Melania Trump hosted Cruz, wife Heidi, and their two children for dinner at the White House on Wednesday evening.

Cruz is pretty much a political sociopath who will do whatever is in his best interests. So it's possible that Trump could buy him off and get Cruz to forget, for the moment, the extremely nasty comments that Trump made about Cruz's father. Because Trump really needs Cruz's help to get TrumpCare through the Senate and Trump will make nice, for now.

But I don't expect Cruz to forgive Trump. Most people wouldn't. Cruz certainly knows that Trump is a Ph.D., if not a post-doc, in the art of backstabbing and butt-fucking his former friends and business partners. Even family, if they displease him.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said this weekend that he was nearly ready to unveil a plan to replace President Obama’s Affordable Care Act with “insurance for everybody.”

Mr. Trump, in an interview Saturday evening with The Washington Post, said that health care offered under his plan would come “in a much simplified form — much less expensive and much better.”

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Mr. Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”

That's beginning to smell a lot like the ACA, only with a different nameplate. How he can get to that without a form of single-payer is going to be interesting. The ACA was a rehash of past GOP proposals, from what they wanted in 1993 to RomneyCare, but because it came from a Democrat, they automatically hated it.*

The options for what Trump wants are limited. Private insurance for all is the ACA. Single-payer is Medicare for all. There can be a mixture, maybe, with means-tested co-pays.

Trump also signaled that he is aligned with one of the things that Republicans and the Big Pharma lobby have despised: Directly negotiating on drug prices:

He told The Post that he would force drug manufacturers to negotiate better prices with Medicaid and Medicare, the government-run health programs.

Interesting.

Trump is very good at running his mouth, so far. On Friday afternoon, he's going to have to start delivering on his promises.

If he can deliver on this, I will cheer him on. But I don't see how he can, as the GOP is welded to the idea that "gummint health insurance is tyranny". Trump will have to make the case that his plan is better, then he'll have to persuade enough Republicans to peel away from the Teabaggers and then get enough Democrats to sign on to pass his bills.
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* Obama Derangement Syndrome.