Shooting the Hostage – Or Not
Welp, no one can accuse this president of being consistent. In fact, the only consistent trait Trump possesses is inconsistency. His administration swerves from ditch to ditch worse than a drunk driver on a three day bender at the local watering hole, and this week’s swerving has been epic. Yesterday, in an interview with Fox Noise Business, Trump reversed himself from putting tax reform cuts first to going back once again to urinate on people who need healthcare. Then, in an interview with the WSJ, he declared that he’s going to “force” Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to negotiate by cutting off federal Obamacare subsidies, which will destroy the program for millions of poorer Americans.
Let’s get this straight – Trump who is already holding poor Americans hostage is now threatening to kill those hostages to force the Democrats to the table. What a dumbass (sorry, Momma). If the ACA fails on Trump’s watch destroying Trump’s voters’ health insurance, guess what happens in 2018 and 2020? Yep, you guessed it, ol’ Dandy Don Meredith will be heard singing “Turn out the lights…” to the GOP.
The real tragedy here is that Trump and the Knuckle Draggers have painted themselves into a real corner here by chanting the “repeal and replace” mantra for 7 years. All of Obamacare’s problems can be solved if only an adult stood up and stopped the nonsense. For instance, Alaska solved its problem of skyrocketing premiums by diverting some tax revenues to supplement money being paid out by insurance companies to the sickest insured Alaskans. The result? This year’s premium increased dropped from 42% to 7%, and Obamacare continues to function. The state is also setting up a reinsurance fund to stabilize its market. Alaskan elected officials are considering introducing legislation to federalize the program. How novel – working to actually fix a problem rather than burning it down.
As for CJ, the usual bunch of . . . malarkey(9here’s to you, mama). Not surprised at what Alaska is doing. All they have to do is look across the borderless border and see how the Canadians did it and try to come somewhere close.
1Donnie accepts the “complicated” about health care reform, while with Congress ignoring the simple solutions. On average administrative costs for Medicare run ~1.4%. So while health insurance companies are protected from covering the aging population and potentially more expensive population, they have cornered the market with a 20% profit guarantee, so they think. By law, they are required to spend 80% of their earnings on actually medical care for patients. They are allowed to spend more. (stop laughing) If they had to spend 90% this year, that would still be a nice profit margin on a very large chunk of change. Yet Donnie wants to play “call their bluff” with Democrats, instead of putting his yuuuuge negotiating skills to work to trim the fat guarantees away from insurance companies.
2Drumpf’s tax reform (aka massive taxcuts for billionaires) is totally dependent on gutting the ACA and raiding Medicaid fund to pay for the taxcuts. Won’t work any other way. Drumpf is just blowing smoke some more.
3I wonder who gave him this bright idea. The Freedom Caucus is against anything short of total repeal and the semi-sane Republicans finally figured out that total repeal will not only cost their insurance company donors boatloads of paying customers (many of whom are the taxpaying public) it will also put boatloads of people out of the jobs they have administering insurance and providing medical care to people. So Trump thinks he needs to get members of the Democratic Party in Congress to help him out. But they won’t so he’s going to try to strong arm them into supporting something that will hurt fewer people than he can on his own. Brilliant!
4I don’t know how to link to it, but today’s cartoon by Peter Brookes has Trump standing in the Oval Office wearing deelyboppers, a red nose, a tie nearly to the floor, and no pants, with a banana in his pocket, and one foot in a bucket. There’s a bust of Putin on the desk. Trump is yelling into a phone, “Spicer! Your gaffes make me look soooo ridiculous!”
The saddest thing is that this cartoon is in The Times of London. This “president” is an international clown.
5The idiots over at Fock’s News where making sure everyone knew the only (ONLY) reason the democrats were refusing to budge on the ACA was to preserve Obama’s legacy. It will never occur to them that someone in the gubmint might, just might, want to help the American people.
6Well, Paul Ryan said the ACA is the ‘law of the land,’ so it would fair to believe that CJ would be breaking the law by doing what he is threatening.
7@ Rhea Here ya go, Brookes is on Twitter @BrookesTimes
https://twitter.com/BrookesTimes/status/852485334327848961/photo/1
8It’s as if Trump suffers from multiple personality disorder.
All of them unpleasant.
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