Mitch McTurtle just pinched out the latest bill. As expected, even worse than the last version.
The way this process has been going thus far, I wouldn't be surprised if the new version mandates colonoscopies starting at age 18 and requires every American kill a kitten to qualify for insurance.
I'm baffled at the Republican approach to healthcare reform. They spent all these years complaining about specific problems with the ACA, and now that they have the chance to fix them they are instead making every single of those same problems much, much worse.
On the bright side, it's beginnign to look less and less likely they will be able to do anything at all. The country passed the ACA by voting for a sweeping Democratic majority in both houses, including a filibuster proof 60 senators. The Republicans just didn't get that many votes this time around, so it looks like they only have the power to break healthcare, not actually fix it.
it's unfair so say the tax on insurance companies and medical devices goes to rich people - in theory reducing taxes on them should reduce premiums and/or out of pocket costs for all.
Did I say that? I didn't mean to say that.
But it's a slippery slope you're on. The Republican philosophical basis for tax cuts has always been closely tied to advancing the interests of rich people, by advancing the interests of businesses that are owned by rich people, at the expense of poor people who work for those businesses. They call it a "pro-business" agenda and claim they are trying to grow the economy, and that businesses are merely pass-through entities that connect poor people to goods and services, but it's closer to the truth to say modern wealth-inequality is perpetuated by businesses which concentrate wealth in the hands of the minority of wealthy business owners, by extracting wealth from the majority of consumers.
Yes, businesses respond to market forces like tax increases by raising prices, but don't fall for the supply-side economics trap of believing that anything you make will get bought. Economies are driven by demand from buyers, not by supply from sellers. Businesses profit when people want their services, which is the reason why it is consumers, not business owners, who determine the health of our economy. This is the reason why taxes on businesses are less harmful to the economy than taxes on consumers. If you tax consumers and take away their ability to buy goods, the business gets nothing. If you tax businesses and they raise prices (instead of reducing profits for the owner), the business still makes money by selling because consumers are still buying.
Republicans usually think that entire paragraph is bologna. They are so invested in the "job-creator" mythos that they they don't see any role at all for consumers in our economy. They think that the rich white men who own businesses are the backbone of the American economy, they decide what gets made and sold, and consumers will inevitably show up to buy whatever crap the owners decide on. This is the supply side myth, the Joe The Plumber myth, the trickle down myth, the Reaganomics myth, the "tax cuts generate government revenue" myth, the Republican myth. We keep disproving it again, decade after decade, but Ben Stein is just convinced it's inarguably true. It just HAS to be, he can feel it in his bones.
One of these days, maybe even in my lifetime, the Republican party will start looking at data as evidence, instead of as a grand liberal plot to undermine their core beliefs.
Topic: What comes after the ACA? (Read 2011735 times)