The Senate hates poor people too
The Times summarizes the Senate Republicans’ health insurance bill.
Senate Republicans, who have promised a repeal of the Affordable Care Act for seven years, took a major step on Thursday toward that goal, unveiling a bill to cut Medicaid deeply and end the health law’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance.
The 142-page bill would create a new system of federal tax credits to help people buy health insurance, while offering states the ability to drop many of the benefits required by the Affordable Care Act, like maternity care, emergency services and mental health treatment.
The Senate bill — once promised as a top-to-bottom revamp of the health bill passed by the House last month — instead maintains its structure, with modest adjustments. The Senate version is, in some respects, more moderate than the House bill, offering more financial assistance to some lower-income people to help them defray the rapidly rising cost of private health insurance.
But the Senate measure, like the House bill, would phase out the extra money that the federal government has provided to states as an incentive to expand eligibility for Medicaid. And like the House measure, it would put the entire Medicaid program on a budget, ending the open-ended entitlement that now exists.
The people who want to slash Medicaid are of course the same people who want to keep wages low so that they can have cheap house cleaners and gardeners and factory hands. They want an ample supply of poor people to draw on and they also want to punish poor people for being poor. That’s The Market.
It would also repeal virtually all the tax increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act to pay for itself, in effect handing a broad tax cut to the affluent, paid for by billions of dollars sliced from Medicaid, a health care program that serves one in five Americans, not only the poor but almost two-thirds of those in nursing homes. The bill, drafted in secret, is likely to come to the Senate floor next week, and could come to a vote after 20 hours of debate.
Oh well. If Medicaid uses up its budget there’s always euthanasia.
Euthenasia? Wait; you mean they aren’t dismantling Obama’s Death Panels?
Removing maternity care at the same time you defund Planned Parenthood. If we can’t stop this travesty, someone needs to make a very public tracking of maternal and infant mortality statistics, because I guarantee they’re going to skyrocket.
Freemage, I’m sure they’ll put a line through the funding for the specific grant to the CDC or any other organisation that tracks such things. That seems to be the new way.
-Demand information and analysis to support a policy.
-When that is forthcoming, deny future funding for such research and analysis.
-Criticise policy or regulation as being unsupported by any current research.
-Remove regulation.
But, Freemage, that is poor women and poor children, and why should they matter? Trump’s friends will be able to get health care. Trump’s family will be able to get health care. All the Senators, their families, and their friends will be able to get health care. So if someone isn’t able to get health care, clearly they don’t really want it much.
The problem is, these people think that people are poor because they are inferior, not because they work long hours at hard jobs that these corporate types wouldn’t dream of doing, and that they are not making much money, because if they were paid decently, the bosses might be a little bit less rich.
Rich people are rich because they are better, smarter people. That’s the code of the American economy, and facts do nothing to faze such thinking.