Tag Archives: the New York Times

Texas Politics

The Congressional Death Panel: House GOP Votes To DESTROY Healthcare Protections

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Let’s just say that today was a most remarkable day in Washington.

At the White House’s famous Rose Garden, members of the Republican leadership in the United States House of Representatives gathered around President Donald Trump.  It was clear that they were in a most jovial mood.  Today was indeed a first big step toward what could be a signature legislative achievement of the Trump Presidency and Republican members of Congress.

Here’s the story from Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear of the New York Times…

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday narrowly approved a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, as Republicans recovered from their earlier failures and moved a step closer to delivering their promise to reshape American health care without mandated insurance coverage.

The vote, 217-213, on President Trump’s 105th day in office, keeps alive the Republican dream to unwind the signature legislative achievement of former President Barack Obama. The House measure faces profound uncertainty in the Senate, where the legislation’s steep spending cuts will almost certainly be moderated. Any legislation that can get through the Senate will again have to clear the House and its conservative majority.

So the House passed the sent it on to the Senate.  It seems worth a celebration… that is until you dig a little deeper.

This is the second push for the American Health Care Act.  But by most indications, it seems an even worse bill than the first try.  The new bill finds a back way to gut the requirement that pre-existing conditions must be covered by allowing states to opt out.  Which means a state like Texas could just decide that its most vulnerable citizens don’t deserve healthcare, and kick them off of the rolls leaving them to die.  And 217 Republicans actually voted for that.

They also voted to reinstate insurance high-risk pools.  You may remember what obtaining health coverage was like before the ACA.  If you’re completely healthy, rich and young, health insurance was no problem!  But if you’re someone that is already sick, or poor or elderly, obtaining health insurance was next to impossible because it was so expensive.  Again House Republicans didn’t see a problem with that system.

And perhaps the biggest shoe to drop… they voted to basically destroy the Medicaid Expansion starting in 2020.  If this bill became law, literally millions of our poorest citizens which have Medicaid coverage today would be phased out of that coverage.  Someone like Representative French Hill of Arkansas, who has over 80,000 people in his district which stand to lose Medicaid from the vote today, and he still voted for it.

But hey!!  If you didn’t read the bill anyway before voting , why would you care?  Yes, 217 Republicans voted for a bill they likely haven’t read, and have no idea how much it costs.  Who cares how many people might lose their insurance?  Who cares how many at risk children might die if they live in a state that “opts out” of covering folks with pre-existing conditions?  I guess they didn’t catch Jimmy Kimmel’s impassioned speech about his infant son this week.

Who cares??  The American People care.  These members of Congress now have some worries going into their next electoral cycle.  To even vote for such a travesty of legislation is shameful.  But this bill does not have to become law, nor do we have to send these 217 folks back to Congress.

Listed here are the 217 members which passed this bill.  If one of them represents you, let them know how you feel about the American Health Care Act.  Let them know that you would rather not be represented by a member of the Congressional Death Panel.   We may have to deal with these folks today, but come 2018, we can send this Death Panel packing.

Congress’ Death Panel

UPDATE 5/24/2017:  As if we needed more proof that the House Republican Caucus is basically a Death Panel, the Congressional Budget Office released it’s Official Score of the American Health Care Act, Take 2, and their result??  23 million people would be left uninsured, mostly due to Medicaid cuts.  Here’s more from CNBC…

The current Republican bill to repeal and replace major parts of Obamacare will lead to 23 million more Americans not having health insurance coverage by 2026 if it becomes law, the Congressional Budget Office projected Wednesday.

That is only 1 million fewer uninsured people than had been projected for an earlier version of the GOP bill.

Most of the coverage losses still would occur next year, when 14 million more people would become uninsured than would otherwise be if Obamacare remained in place, CBO said in its new report.

The controversial bill would “tend to increase” average premium prices of individual health plans by about 20 percent relative to the current law in 2018, according to the analysis, but just 5 percent higher than Obamacare prices would be expected to be in 2019.

However, starting in 2020, premiums in different states would be affected in different ways by the bill, because of an amendment that would allow states to obtain waivers from current Obamacare rules mandating the design of health plans, and barring insurers from charging less-healthy people higher prices, CBO said.

As referenced in the earlier post, those waiver basically allow states to gut the fundamental protections that the Affordable Care Act set originally.  Again, one has to ask why are they even doing this?  Do they want to lose their jobs in 2018??

Equality

A Southern Strategy for LGBT Equality

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If we could travel back in time just 5 years, it would seem impossible to imagine the pace at which marriage equality is occurring today.  To think that even less than 2 years ago, no popular vote granting same-sex marriage rights had been won in any state.  That didn’t occur until the November 2012 elections.

But since those first wins at the ballot box in Washington state, Maine and Maryland in 2012, large parts of the United have seen nothing short of a transfiguration on LGBT marriage rights.  Sometimes it seems like magic to sit and watch this play out from a southern state like Texas or Arkansas… it feels as though time is moving forward in other areas, yet we’re still stuck squarely in the past.  But this swift movement towards equality was anything but magic.  It was earned through the blood, sweat, voices, votes and tears of millions of people working to advance these rights.  For the past several years, marriage equality has been the central orb around which the country’s largest and most powerful Civil Rights organizations have revolved.  You throw all of your time and money into a cause, and hopefully you yield some results.

But a new report from The New York Times reveals that this singular focus on marriage equality is about to change.  The movement itself is now turning to those that have stood patiently on the sidelines…

The country’s leading gay rights groups and donors, after a decade focused on legalizing same-sex marriage, are embarking on a major drive to win more basic civil rights and workplace protections in Southern and Western states where the rapid progress of the movement has largely eluded millions of gay men and lesbians.

The effort will shift tens of millions of dollars in the next few years to what advocates described as the final frontier for gay rights: states like Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Texas, where Republicans dominate elected office and traditional cultural views on homosexuality still prevail.

The new strategy reflects the growing worry within the movement that recent legal and political successes have formed two quickly diverging worlds for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender Americans: one centered on the coasts and major cities, and another stretching across the South and up through the Rocky Mountains, in states where gays enjoy virtually no legal protections against discrimination.

“We can’t allow two distinct gay Americas to exist,” said Tim Gill, a Colorado philanthropist whose foundation is putting about $25 million into a handful of mostly conservative-leaning states over the next five years. “Everybody should have the same rights and protections regardless of where they were born and where they live.”

The push is likely to encounter resistance. Gay rights groups will be engaging in communities where churches and other religious institutions are tightly woven into daily life, and where efforts to expand civil rights protections to gays are sometimes viewed as an attack on people of faith…

In some states, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union and groups Mr. Gill helps fund plan to lobby for nondiscrimination ordinances in housing and employment and for legislation allowing gay parents to adopt. In other states, they are building new grass-roots organizations and pushing for the election of openly gay and lesbian officials where there are none.

Those involved in the planning described it as the biggest realignment of gay rights activism in a decade, one that will shift the movement’s focus into territory where there is almost no unified network of support and where gay people are more likely to hide who they are, making them more difficult to reach.

Just the American Civil Rights movement two generations ago, today’s fight for equality has always been about much more than marriage.  In my opinion this shift in focus is welcome, and long overdue.  When they do get to the south, they will be able to build on the great work of groups like the Campaign for Southern Equality.  This fight is already being waged, but with the help of larger resources, it can be won decisively.

For this shift, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign are in capable hands.  The group’s President, Chad Griffin, knows much of the territory to which he is taking this next great push.  He is a native Arkansan, and grew up in the small, bucolic college town of Arkadelphia, Arkansas (full disclosure, I went to college in the very same town).  Knowing the struggles that some of our most vulnerable LGBT Americans face, Griffin’s voice is sure to be an even greater attribute in this “new” frontier.

Arkansas Pride

(photo credit:  cogvv.com)