Correction: Republican bloodsuckers who sentenced poor to die didn’t drink Bud Light

A group of leeches growing fatted on the dying bodies of the poor celebrates without any Bud Light (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty)

As part of a reality-based community, it is important that we get our facts right when reporting on important political developments. The Onion AV Club, the more serious side of the well-known satire site, knows this quite well, and wants to be sure that they openly admit it when they make an error.
 

By Sean O'Neal @seanoneal

Posted May 5, 2017 at 3:59 p.m.

 

Yesterday, we reported that a passel of grotesque Dickensian caricatures gathered in the House of Representatives to vote, by a margin of 217-213, to let poor people die and to punish women for the blasphemy of having a vagina, effectively putting some 24 million Americans at the perpetual risk of poverty should they fall victim to accident or debilitating disease—a monstrous display of selfishness that, by their own admission, many of them performed solely out of adherence to partisan dogma and unabashed spite, and a ghoulish, symbolic bloodletting ritual that they then commemorated by drinking Bud Light. However, we have now learned that they did not, in fact, drink Bud Light.

We hereby offer this retraction.

Amid the rush to report on the passage of a bill that removes mandates to insure people with pre-existing conditions—which now includes everything from alcoholism to sexual assault—essentially defunds Planned Parenthood, and rolls back Medicaid protections for low-income families, and cover the celebration that President Trump had subsequently organized in the Rose Garden so that he and his fellow gloating jackasses could laugh at all the people whose wellbeing they’d put into jeopardy, just to prove that they’re big, strong boys, many writers—ourselves unfortunately included—seized upon sightings reported from inside the Capitol of a cart laden with Bud Light, and we irresponsibly repeated it.

We assumed, incorrectly, that this Bud Light was intended to be the cheap swill that would briefly douse the taste of brimstone licking the throats of these pasty wraiths as they boarded a bus headed toward their feast of bones, where they would cackle over their selfish destruction of millions of lives while slapping each other on the back, the utter hollowness inside creating a reverberating, tympanic sound that was barely discernible over their thick-tongued clucking about all the blood money they would reap and the aluminum crush of beer cans against skulls.

However, it turns out the Bud Light wasn’t actually for them.

In this era of “fake news,” it’s more important than ever to not let unverified rumor or libelous insinuation get in the way of the facts of the matter, which is that a bunch of soulless, greedy, waterlogged copies of Atlas Shrugged stuffed inside ugly suits stood around the White House yesterday, laughing and jacking each other off about how they’d successfully sentenced so many of their constituents to die just so they and their cronies could get a huge tax break, but while doing so, they most definitely did not drink Bud Light.

We regret the error.

Trumpcare Is the Best Advertisement for Nationalizing Insurance

Trumpcare will make health insurance too expensive again for the 40 million people who were uninsured in 2008. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

06 May 17

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he sadism and greed of the American Republican Party was on full display Thursday, as the House GOP voted to destroy Obamacare and remove the coverage for pre-existing conditions (50 million Americans suffer from them). Oh, this sabotage is camouflaged, but the way Trumpcare would work would make health insurance too expensive again for the 40 million people who were uninsured in 2008. People will be shifted into pricey high-risk pools. Ending the individual mandate would ensure that healthy young people were exempted from having coverage, making it impossible to establish pools so private insurers can cover pre-existing conditions or chronic ones and still remain in business.

Apparently what the old white men of the GOP minded most of all about Obamacare was that it removed from the more racist states in the union the ability to shield rich white taxpayers from paying to keep the children of minorities alive. (Their image of the situation is anyway false; half of those living below the poverty line are white).

Here are some of the countries that are better than the US Republican Party: 

President Hassan Rouhani of Iran has pledged universal health coverage in Iran by 2018. The GOP is always going on about how Iran is the world’s major sponsor of terrorism (this is not true), but even these bloodthirsty ghouls apparently are better than US Republicans inasmuch as they want to make sure poor children don’t have to just die for lack of money to pay for treatments.

Then there is China, where the government has successfully covered all 1.3 billion citizens. The Republican Party has made its way in the world by promising that if some businessmen are allowed to get fabulously wealthy that will lift all boats. What they said Thursday is that there are 40 million boats they won’t be lifting. But now the Chinese Communist Party has shown that it really can lift all boats.

Given the serious commitment of the Chinese Communist Party to green energy and meeting the goals of the Paris Accord, and the way in which it has lifted over a billion people out of poverty and given them universal health care, it seems obviously a superior party to the American GOP if you don’t happen to be a billionaire. It used to be boasted by the US Republicans that they provided an increased standard of living as well as democratic freedoms, but they don’t seem nearly as committed to either of these goals as Beijing is.

It is not clear why there is private health insurance. There are some things that the market does poorly and should be nationalized, as is the case in most advanced countries. The electric grid is another. The American myth that all government enterprises are inefficient and monopolistic ignores the fact that most large corporations in the US are de facto monopolies and are not particularly efficient.

The one percent who profit from health insurance will also try to tell you that government health care takes forever to see you. America’s privatized system also can take a long time to see you. Anyway, nationalizing health insurance would not stop people from going to a private hospital and paying out of pocket if they wanted to.

Here are the countries with a single payer system, which is defined this way “The government provides insurance for all residents (or citizens) and pays all health care expenses except for co-pays and coinsurance. Providers may be public, private, or a combination of both.”

Norway 1912 Single Payer
Japan 1938 Single Payer
United Kingdom 1948 Single Payer
Kuwait 1950 Single Payer
Sweden 1955 Single Payer
Bahrain 1957 Single Payer
Brunei 1958 Single Payer
Canada 1966 Single Payer
United Arab Emirates 1971 Single Payer
Finland 1972 Single Payer
Slovenia 1972 Single Payer
Luxembourg 1973 Insurance Mandate
Italy 1978 Single Payer
Portugal 1979 Single Payer
Cyprus 1980 Single Payer
Spain 1986 Single Payer
Iceland 1990 Single Payer

None of these countries is bankrupt. In fact, health care costs in these states are lower than in the United States and in many of them health statistics are superior to those of the US. Spain, Iceland, the UK, Portugal and Italy all have a life expectancy higher than the US.

Over a dozen other advanced countries have a two-tier system: “Two-Tier: The government provides or mandates catastrophic or minimum insurance coverage for all residents (or citizens), while allowing the purchase of additional voluntary insurance or fee-for service care when desired.” 

Many two-tier countries also have lower health care costs and better health statistics than the US.

The US is the only advanced economy where millions are left without health insurance and are one illness away from bankruptcy and one paycheck away from dying or seeing their children die.

Even developing countries like Ecuador have quadrupled spending on health care and have markedly improved the lives of those living under the poverty line.

Raw American capitalism hasn’t increased the average wage of the average worker since 1970. It apparently can’t provide universal health care insurance to Americans.

It is time for the American public to realize it is being taken for a ride. There are several industries that need to be nationalized. The electrical grid and some utilities are on the list, in order to fight climate change. But really, the only proper response to the vicious brutality that is Trumpcare is to punish the insurance companies who bought and paid for the congressmen that voted it in, by just having the government take over their industry.

Paul Ryan's American carnage

The Week

Ryan Cooper 1 day ago

What have you done? The American Health Care Act is an absolute moral abomination.

House Republicans voted Thursday to pass this monstrosity by the narrowest of margins, 217-213. Not a single Democrat voted for it, and 20 Republicans broke with Speaker Paul Ryan and voted against the bill. It now goes to the Senate, which will also have to pass it (no small feat!) before it can be sent to President Trump to be signed into law.

In the meantime, Republicans are celebrating with a bunch of Bud Light.

But let's not get lost in the hypocrisy or the politics. The substance of this bill is awful, and demands examination.

As Sarah Kliff explains, this bill is quite similar to the previous one that failed to pass the House — only the new version is much, much worse. It would get rid of the individual mandate and replace it with a more punishing rule that wouldn't work as well, phase out the Medicaid expansion in ObamaCare, and slash the rest of Medicaid by putting it through a welfare-reform style meat grinder (total cuts: $880 billion over 10 years). ObamaCare subsidies would be calculated based on age rather than income, leading some elderly people to have tremendously increased premiums.

States would be able to get waivers from regulations that insurance companies cover "essential health benefits" and that they not charge people with pre-existing conditions more. Those waivers would certainly be taken up by conservative states, and would unquestionably cause many bankruptcies and deaths.

Earlier this year, defections from moderate Republicans helped sink the original American Health Care Act. How did Paul Ryan and Co. bring them around this time? By adding a piddling $8 billion of extra funding for high-risk pools, which is only about $192 billion short of what would be necessary to make them maybe work. Just as I predicted, "moderate" Republicans are actually just slightly more cowardly versions of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus.

Why would Republican lawmakers do all this? So that they can massively cut taxes on the rich, of course. TrumpCare is in no meaningful sense a health-care reform bill. It is a bill to cut the taxes of the top 2 percent, paid for by taking health insurance away from poor and working-class people. (Naturally, when Republicans are done with this they're moving on to regular old tax "reform," where they will cut taxes on the rich even more.)

The Congressional Budget Office found that the previous version of the bill would leave 24 million more people uninsured by 2026, as compared to current law. We don't know what the precise number would be this time, because Republicans voted before the CBO could even conduct an updated analysis, which would only take a couple days. Not only that, but they have held no hearings, no committee markups, and didn't even circulate a final text of the bill before the vote. They quite obviously don't want the American people — or even their own membership — to know precisely what carnage this bill will inflict.

Now, the CBO is coming out with its analysis next week, perfectly in time to bottle this god-awful legislation up in the Senate. The results are certain to be brutal, and ought to make it very possible to keep the American Health Care Act from passing in the upper chamber. But it is vitally important to not take that for granted. Quite literally, the lives of the poor, working-class, and those with pre-existing conditions depend on it.

And alright, as for the politics: Whether the American Health Care Act becomes law or not, in the 2018 campaign, Democrats need to hang this piece of poison around the neck of every one of the 217 Republicans who voted for it. Make them own the cruelty and carnage that is the American Health Care Act.

Paul Ryan Straight Up Deceives People in a Last-Ditch Attempt to Sell Trumpcare

Paul Ryan caught a fish that was THIS BIG! (photo: Cliff Owen/AP)

By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress

03 May 17
readersupportednews.org

 

Why worry about the truth, when you can have a monster tax cut?

ouse Republican leadership hopes to vote later this week on an unpopular health bill that will cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health coverage. It’s the third time since Donald Trump moved into the White House that House Republicans have stepped up to the brink of such a vote — the last two times, the vote didn’t happen after it was clear that the bill would fail.

This time, however, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) has two new weapons in his arsenal: an amendment, favored by the most conservative members of his caucus, that will make the bill even harsher for people with preexisting health conditions; and a completely shameless willingness to mislead people about what this amendment actually does:

To explain, House Republicans hoped to vote on this bill last March, but they hit a serious roadblock after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined that their health care proposal would strip 24 million people of health coverage by 2026. A few days later, a Trump White House analysis of the bill leaked which showed that it may cause as many as 26 million people to become uninsured over the course of a decade.

The Trump White House supports the bill.

Trumpcare failed in March due to a combination of three factors — universal opposition from Democrats, scattered opposition from Republicans who viewed the bill as too harsh, and similar opposition from Republicans who viewed it as not harsh enough.

Since the bill’s failure, Republicans apparently tried to shore up support for it by appealing to the faction that wants a harsher bill. This effort produced the “MacArthur Amendment,” which contains several provisions impacting people with preexisting health conditions.

Under current law, insurers cannot discriminate against people with preexisting conditions, and they must cover certain “essential health benefits” — such as prescription drugs, pregnancy care, and hospitalization. The MacArthur Amendment, however, will allow states to “specify their own set of essential health benefits” at a lower level than the requirements set by existing law. And it would also permit states to obtain waivers that would allow insurers to charge more to many people with preexisting conditions.

The amendment Ryan refers to in his tweet, in other words, does not “protect” people with preexisting conditions. It raises costs for many people with preexisting conditions, and it permits many insurance plans to exclude benefits that people with preexisting conditions may need.

And that’s on top of the harsh cuts to federal health care spending that were already contained in the bill. CBO estimates that the March version of Trumpcare — the one that would strip about 24 million people of health coverage — would cut $880 billion from Medicaid alone over the course of the next decade.

To offset some of the bill’s impact on people with preexisting conditions, it does allocate as much as $13 billion a year to “high-risk pools” and similar programs that provide insurance to people who are unable to obtain it in an inadequately regulated private market. But that’s only enough to insure a small fraction of the people who will lose coverage under the GOP’s bill.

In 2008, the McCain-Palin campaign released a health plan that proposed spending between $7 and $10 billion on such pools. At the time, however, analysts estimated that a national program “funded at $7 billion per year would cover only 875,000 people.”

Republicans, in other words, would have to spend about 15 times as much on high-risk pools than they are planning to spend in order to cancel out the other impacts of their bill — and that’s a conservative estimate that does not account for inflation.

As Ryan nevertheless tried to rally support for Trumpcare, he apparently turned to the Almighty during a House Republican caucus meeting.

Dear Lord, help us to immiserate the poor. Help us to enfeeble the meek, to quicken the deaths of the innocent, to cast suffering upon the infirm, and to give Donald Trump a fat daddy tax cut.

In the spirit of Your mercy we pray.

CNN refuses to air false, misleading ad from Trump

By Jen Hayden  

Tuesday May 02, 2017 · 8:57 AM PDT

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The Donald Trump 2020 campaign (yes, that is a real thing already happening) released an ad claiming Trump’s first 100 days have been amazing, the best, "America has rarely seen such success." For real, that’s a statement in the ad.

The original ad was quietly removed from YouTube yesterday because it featured Donald Trump shaking hands with National Security Advisor, Lieutenant Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was wearing his Army uniform.

That’s a big no-no, a clear violation of Defense Department rules.

Let’s have a big round of applause for the folks featured in Trump’s video; they must be doing something right!

A notable element of both the original and revised ad is a part whining that you, the general public, are unaware of Dear Leader’s great success because the “fake news” is keeping it a secret from you. The Trump campaign wanted to air the commercial on CNN, but the ad was rejected because it labeled the media as “fake news.” In a statement, CNN said:

CNN requested the advertiser remove the false graphic that the mainstream media is “fake news.” The mainstream media is not fake news, and therefore the ad is false and per policy will be accepted only if that graphic is deleted.

You can see the craptastic propaganda Trump is desperately trying to peddle to his supporters. He’s clearly going with the “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it” approach. Sadly, it has worked for him thus far.

Republican civil war is the best thing happening

Every day without GOP action is a gift

By Mark Sumner  

Wednesday May 2, 2017 · 1:33 PM PDT

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Donald Trump may feel that his legislation-free first 100 days were beautiful, wonderful, and the best ever, but he’s the only one. What the rest of the Republican Party is seeing is falling support, ineffective leadership, and internal strife.

Some Capitol Hill Republicans have envisioned the nightmare scenario for 2017, and it goes like this: No ­ObamaCare repeal. No tax reform. No trillion-dollar infrastructure package. No border wall.

As it turns out, Republicans have their obstructionism refined to razor sharpness, but the time they dedicated to actually thinking through workable alternatives to existing laws is restricted to the length of time it takes to say “It’ll be easy.”

While many Republicans hold out hope the ­ObamaCare repeal bill will be revived, skeptics say the GOP infighting during last month’s healthcare collapse may have poisoned the well for future big-ticket legislative deals.

It’s not just drafting laws that Republicans have failed at— it’s drafting passable laws. Right now there are Republican factions who believe that health care should be abandoned so they can score a win on tax reform, and factions that believe tax reform isn’t possible without first dealing with the Affordable Care Act. There’s also an increasing recognition that they can’t get everything they want pushed through without seeking some Democratic support in the Senate, a factor that makes it even more likely that they will shed Freedom Caucus votes in the House. Because Republicans have spent decades declaring that anything which can garner a Democratic vote is intrinsically evil.

And the recriminations among Republicans only seem to be getting nastier.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, “is a pathological liar who isn’t interested in getting to yes,” one House GOP colleague of Meadows told The Hill in a fit of frustration over the stalled health negotiations.

For Democrats the result of this Republican civil war is the best possible outcome, considering the current make up of Congress and the occupant of the White House: Nothing.

Or nearly nothing. Republicans continue to erode regulations using the Congressional Review Act, and Trump’s agencies continue to weaken enforcement. But at least on the major legislative front, Republicans are locked down by their own unwillingness to compromise, even with each other.

At a town hall in Cedar Springs, Mich., GOP Rep. Justin Amash, another Meadows ally, hurled blame at the feet of Ryan: Republicans need “either a change in direction from this Speaker, or we need a new Speaker.”

Please. Get one. It won’t help, but it will take time. And right now, every day without Republican action is a gift.

Monster defeat for Trump and GOP: Budget deal funds Planned Parenthood but has nothing for wall

By David Nir  

Sunday Apr 30, 2017 · 8:30 PM PDT

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Late on Sunday evening, details emerged about a new spending agreement that congressional leaders had reached to keep the federal government open past this week, when current funding runs out, and through the end of September. The deal is looking like a huge victory for Democrats—and a massive failure for Donald Trump and his Republican Party:

The bipartisan agreement includes $12.5 billion in new military spending and $1.5 billion more for border security, a major priority for Republican leaders in Congress.
The agreement follows weeks of tense negotiations between Democrats and GOP leaders after President Trump insisted that the deal include funding to begin building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump eventually dropped that demand, leaving Congress to resolve lingering issues over several unrelated policy measures.
The new border-security money comes with strict limitations that the Trump administration use it only for technology investments and repairs to existing fencing and infrastructure, the aides said.

In a way, that’s even more humiliating for Trump—and an even bigger betrayal of his supporters: There’s more money for border security but the government is forbidden from using it to pay for that insane wall. Maybe they’re still hoping Mexico will pony up?

The rest of the bill is also an amazing win for Democrats:

The agreement also includes several policy victories for Democrats, whose votes will be necessary to pass the measure in the Senate. Democrats fought to include $295 million to help Puerto Rico continue making payments to Medicaid, $100 million to combat opioid addiction, and increases in energy and science funding that Trump had proposed cutting. If passed, the legislation will ensure that Planned Parenthood continues to receive federal funding through September.

Hold on, there’s more:

The White House also backed away from language to take away grants from "sanctuary cities" that do not share information about people's immigration status with federal authorities.

Hot damn! It’s hard to believe that Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, isn’t it? Because this bill sure as hell looks like it was written by Democrats. It’s truly amazing that despite its huge majorities and rock-solid hold on Washington, the GOP simply cannot govern in any way, shape or form.

Of course, Congress has yet to pass this bill, and who knows what kind of fuss conservatives will try to kick up. But if far-right Republicans threaten not to support this package, then GOP leadership will have to troll for even more Democratic votes … which would require making the bill even more liberal. The alternative would be a government shutdown, which would fall squarely on Republican shoulders—again, see that bit about how they’re in charge of all the levers of power.

If I were a Republican voter sitting at home watching this, I’d be shaking my head in disbelief—and in deep dismay. Keep fighting, Democrats!