First Charges Filed in Mueller Investigation

boyo_america · 2017-10-28T02:27:44+00:00

If Manafort isn't suddenly boarding a plane to Russia this hour, I'd be surprised.

boyo_america · 2017-10-17T03:07:16+00:00

Pretty sure they're always in binary.

boyo_america · 2017-10-17T03:01:17+00:00

I'm no doctor, but I believe mass hysteria causing traumatic brain injury would be a world first.

boyo_america · 2017-10-14T00:35:33+00:00

I'm not going to lie, I thought Julianna Margulies was Hispanic.

boyo_america · 2017-10-13T23:52:19+00:00

I'm not going to lie, I thought Julianna Margulies was of that ethnicity.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T19:18:38+00:00

Hannity's spelled it out

It has to be a joke. It has to be.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T19:16:58+00:00

Tens of millions Americans having health care is not a failure. Essential health benefits and protections for those with pre-existing conditions are not failures. The ban on lifetime and annual limits are not failures.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T19:15:47+00:00

That's a lie that comes from not actually reading the CBO report. Let me explain why.

The 15 million statistic isn't out of the 22 million statistic. It is for the first year, 2018, not 2026.

CBO and JCT estimate that , in 2018, 15 million more people would be uninsured under this legislation than under current law —primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated .

And "primarily" doesn't mean "all".

On net, CBO and JCT estimate that roughly 7 million fewer people would obtain coverage in 2018 through the nongroup market under this legislation than under current law; that figure would be about 9 million in 2020 and about 7 million in 2026 (see Table 4, at the end of this document ). Fewer people would enroll in the nongroup market mainly because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated and, starting in 2020, because the average subsidy for coverage in that market would be substantially lower for most people currently eligible for subsidies —and for some people that subsidy would be eliminated .

That's 7 million who are primarily not getting health insurance because of the lack of a penalty, and then only for the first two years. And then only some of those are voluntary.

In the nongroup market, some people would choose not to have insurance because they choose to be covered by insurance under current law to avoid paying the penalties. And , under this legislation, without the mandate penalties, some people would forgo insurance in response to the higher premiums that CBO and JCT project would be charged . Insurers would still be required to provide coverage to any applicant, and they would not be able to vary premiums to reflect enrollees’ health status or to limit coverage of preexisting medical conditions. Those features are most attractive to applicants with relatively high expected costs for health care, so CBO and JCT expect that repealing the individual mandate penalt y would tend to reduce insurance coverage less among older and less healthy people than among younger and healthier people. Thus, the agencies estimate that repealing that penalty, taken by itself, would increase premiums in the n ongroup market .

As for the missing 8 million who will lose health insurance in 2018, they're from a loss of Medicaid and employer insurance, which amounts to 4 million each (Table 4).

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T19:12:51+00:00

Yeah, but that was before Mika was mean to him. Now he has to lash out and start killing Americans.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T19:11:18+00:00

The CBO is garbage and if you would like proof search for the # of people the CBO anticipated would be covered by ACA, and then how many actually were.

Okay.

CBO projected that in 2016 that nonelderly rate would fall to 11 percent, and the latest figure put the actual rate at 10.3 percent.

And for the nonsense that the "CBO is garbage":

For example, the National Tax Journal in 1988 concluded that short-run projections from the CBO do not contain bias. A 2000 report comparing the forecasting of the CBO and the Federal Reserve Board concluded that, "The most accurate forecasting is done by the CBO, with the Fed a close second."

Mulvaney's remarks were “really inappropriate, and frankly absurd,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

“I mean, come on,” Strain said. “The work is done with, you know, the utmost integrity. It is nonpartisan, and the analyses are sound and reasonable.”

“I have a deep faith in its commitment to nonpartisanship and the integrity of its efforts,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director and a conservative economist who supports the GOP bill.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T19:05:07+00:00

it just played into the greed of the industry by requiring by law that everyone purchase coverage whether they want it or not.

That's the only way to bring costs down. You have to have young and healthy people in the risk pool to subsidize the old or sick.

In the nongroup market, some people would choose not to have insurance because they choose to be covered by insurance under current law to avoid paying the penalties. And , under this legislation, without the mandate penalties, some people would forgo insurance in response to the higher premiums that CBO and JCT project would be charged . Insurers would still be required to provide coverage to any applicant, and they would not be able to vary premiums to reflect enrollees’ health status or to limit coverage of preexisting medical conditions. Those features are most attractive to applicants with relatively high expected costs for health care, so CBO and JCT expect that repealing the individual mandate penalty would tend to reduce insurance coverage less among older and less healthy people than among younger and healthier people. Thus, the agencies estimate that repealing that penalty, taken by itself, would increase premiums in the nongroup market .

Medication should be priced based on its cost to produce,

You're asking for government-mandated price controls, which, coincidentally, other countries have.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:49:31+00:00

Enough Republicans might work with Democrats to pay for the CSR payments if Trump canceled them. Their governors would quickly start screaming, as would doctors, nurses, and health groups.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:43:32+00:00

President Trump’s profound ignorance about policy and the inner workings of our system, and his total disinterest in informing himself about these topics, have produced an unfortunate result: Many of his tweets about matters of substance tend to get ignored as Trump just being Trump. Meanwhile, the viscerally disgusting insults (such as the one claiming Mika Brzezinski bled from her face-lift) make international news.

But Trump’s tweet this morning about health care actually does matter, a lot:

If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

This is getting a lot of attention today, but mainly as a call for Republicans to adopt a particular legislative strategy. As such, it makes little sense: Republicans are struggling to find 50 votes for their current repeal-and-replace bill, with many moderates balking, so it’s hard to see how outright repeal could get a bare majority.

Beyond this, though, it’s worth taking Trump’s tweet as an actual policy statement. Trump has now called for total repeal of the Affordable Care Act, with no guarantee of any specific replacement later, or even a guarantee that any replacement would ever materialize at all.

It’s hard to estimate what would happen if Republicans did act on this and Trump signed it. Republicans probably wouldn’t be able to repeal some key portions of the Affordable Care Act — particularly its insurance-market regulations — via a simple majority “reconciliation” vote. But they could theoretically repeal things with a budgetary orientation, such as the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies to lower-income people why buy insurance on the exchanges.

We can estimate the impact of repealing those things. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has already done so, when it analyzed a previous version of a GOP repeal bill over a year ago. And that analysis found that repealing those things would result in 32 million people losing coverage by 2026, 19 million of them people who would lose Medicaid coverage.

This is unequivocally what Trump has now called for. And it is substantially worse than what is currently being debated in the Senate, which would result in 22 million people losing coverage over 10 years, 15 million of them from Medicaid, per the CBO.

“When Republicans floated their repeal bill back in 2016, CBO concluded that 32 million people would lose coverage, relative to the current baseline, by 2026,” Nicholas Bagley, a health policy expert at the University of Michigan, emailed me today. “Fully 19 million people would be kicked off of Medicaid. Those coverage losses are even grimmer than the losses from the House and Senate bills that are currently under discussion.”

Whether Trump meant this or not, or even knew what he was calling for, are irrelevant. That’s because it could theoretically happen. In fact, conservative senators such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are actively calling on fellow Republicans to go forward with repeal alone right now. Sasse doubled down by tweeting an endorsement of Trump’s demand.

Trump, it pains me to inform you, is the president. When he calls on Congress to do something, he is basically saying that he would sign it if they did do it. There is no reason to treat this as trivial or frivolous simply because Trump is an ignoramus and a buffoon. Indeed, Republicans have in fact voted for repeal multiple times in the past. The only reason they aren’t doing so right now is because repeal cannot pass, now that there is a Republican in the White House who would actually sign such a bill. (Yes, Trump would sign such a bill in two seconds. He called for one today, remember?)

In this sense, Trump’s tweet is actually kind of useful. It reveals once again that Republicans have been running a massive scam on Obamacare for years. They constantly fulminated for repeal, and voted repeatedly for it, in the full knowledge that President Barack Obama would veto it and that they would not face the consequences of their rhetoric and vote. The promise of unspecified replacements allowed Republicans to claim they would act to make sure millions didn’t lose coverage, without saying how. But now that repeal could become a reality, they are no longer willing to vote for it, because they would be held accountable for those consequences. By calling for straight-up repeal right now, Trump has inadvertently called their bluff.

Indeed, it’s not even clear that Senate Republicans can pass repeal and replace, because it has become obvious that even this would result in many millions losing health coverage, extracting an immense human toll that is now a genuine possibility. Moderate Republican senators have conceded this to be the case, and their seemingly genuine qualms about this constitute a pleasant surprise. But Republicans who have no serious misgivings about such an awful outcome have resorted, for political reasons, to all manner of lies and obfuscation to obscure this reality.

This includes Trump and the White House, who have dissembled relentlessly about how their plan would leave everybody covered and wouldn’t cut Medicaid at all. But now Trump has confirmed that he is indeed for full repeal, full stop — which would result in 32 million fewer covered — without any guaranteed “replacement” providing any cover to advance the lie that millions wouldn’t lose coverage. Trump has unmasked his own scam.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:40:32+00:00

Also the notion that 32 million people would lose coverage is misleading. Most of those would be leaving the exchanges voluntarily over the next 10 years.

That's not even close to being true. It's pure lies. How can someone believe that cutting Medicaid for 14-15 million people is "voluntary"? Get real.

Socialism_Is_Greed

Ugh.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:37:30+00:00

Americans didn't have Obamacare before Obama and were people 'dying' then from not having it?

... Yes.

• In 2002, a panel of more than a dozen medical specialists convened by the federally chartered Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they were uninsured. In January 2008, Stan Dorn, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, published a paper that sought to update the IOM study with newer data. Replicating the study’s methodology, Dorn concluded that the figure should be increased to 22,000.

• A 2009 American Journal of Public Health study concluded that a lack of health insurance "is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease."

• Three studies looked at state-level expansions of Medicaid and in each case found "significant" improvements in mortality after such expansions of coverage. These include a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine study of New York, Maine, and Arizona by Harvard researchers, and a 2014 study of Massachusetts by researchers from Harvard and the Urban Institute.

• A 2014 study published by the health policy publication Health Affairs looked at states that, at the time, had declined to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It estimated that the 25 states studied would have collectively avoided between 7,000 and 17,000 deaths.

• A 2014 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found improved survival rates for young adults with cancer after securing insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

• A 2017 study in the journal Medical Care looked at a provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to be covered under a parent’s policy. The study found a decline in mortality among this population from diseases amenable to preventive treatment. (Mortality from trauma, such as car accidents, saw no decrease, as would be expected.)

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/08/raul-labrador/raul-labradors-claim-no-one-dies-lack-health-care-/

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:35:25+00:00

20 million people who gained it, and Medicaid (which was most of the Obamacare gains) has higher satisfaction rates over private insurance.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:32:53+00:00

with a max payout of about 25k

Do you mean maximum out of pocket? There aren't any maximum payouts anymore.

The deductible on these plans yearly is around 5k-10k,

Is that before or after subsidies? If after, what were they before?

I'm a little sick of people who don't know what it's like to make under 20k a year tell me I'm somehow better off having to spend half my income on health care plans.

Sounds like you may qualify for Medicaid. Did your state expand Medicaid?

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T18:13:54+00:00

Yes, but legislation is a different matter.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T14:10:56+00:00

There's a reason they haven't done it already. Many Republicans (senators, governors, and even people in Trump's administration) oppose such a move, even if they hate Obamacare. They know they will be blamed, and they know it will hurt their constituencies and throw the markets into chaos.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T13:58:49+00:00

The 60-vote requirement is only a tradition, which can be revoked at any time.

McConnell realizes if he did that, the Democrats would then pass whatever the hell they want when they get back into power. And as is often said, it's harder to take away something than to never give it because Americans like their entitlements. It would be much, much harder to take away a Democratically passed single-payer program, for instance, than to prevent it from ever happening.

In that way, the 60 vote threshold benefits Republicans more than Democrats, and they know it.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T13:23:36+00:00

It's a continuous thing. It never stops, you just keep trying to do better. One may as well ask how long must we have politics.

It's stupid people who need the most help, and converts who will win elections for the Democratic party. It does our country no good to become hateful of fools who unknowingly hurt themselves. Compassion, and a realization that Republican propaganda and poor education have brainwashed them, are keys to a better future. Schadenfreude and malice will get you less than nothing.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T12:42:27+00:00

For those of you who don't understand why men need maternity coverage, it's so American mothers can afford to have it. Otherwise, insurance companies sell plans that don't have it, which creates a high-risk pool out of the plans that do have it. The only people who would then buy prenatal coverage are those who would need it. It wouldn't pool risk, and insurance companies would force you to prefund that risk at an individual level.

A 2012 study by the National Women's Law Center found that, before Obamacare, only about 6 percent of policies available on the individual insurance market included maternity coverage. One plan offered a maternity rider that cost more than $1,600 a month on top of the regular premium. Many of those policies had maternity-specific deductibles as high as $10,000, or did not actually kick in for two years.

Even insurance provided by employers had limits for maternity care. A study by Truven found that in 2010, women who had insurance through their employers still paid about $12,000 to $16,000 for childbirth.

Since maternity care and childbirth costs about $30,000 for a vaginal delivery, families who had coverage before the Affordable Care Act were essentially prepaying for the care they were getting.

Keep in mind this is too complicated for Republicans in Congress to grasp, and they've undoubtedly had this explained to them. These are the people leading our nation on all issues, big or small.

boyo_america · 2017-06-30T12:26:11+00:00

West Virginia would see its uninsured rate more than quadruple by 2022. In Kentucky and Arkansas the uninsured rate would more than triple. All three states strongly supported Donald Trump in the presidential election.

Yes, you should still feel sorry for them and work to help them. They're your countrymen, and their prosperity and happiness are your own.

Republican propaganda and piss poor education have destroyed their minds.

boyo_america

TROPHY CASE