If you ask Paul Ryan, he’ll tell you that their latest failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (and defund Planned Parenthood) wasn’t futile at all, but a highly meaningful message to voters that they’ll achieve those goals next year if only the electorate gives them a President Trump or Cruz or Rubio.
Republicans failed in their latest futile attempt Tuesday to kill President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, a Groundhog Day vote by the House that was solely an exercise in election-year political messaging.
Tuesday’s near party-line vote to override Obama’s January veto of legislation gutting much of the law was 241-186, but that fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to reverse a veto. House Speaker Paul Ryan said the effort to force enactment of the bill, which would have also ended federal payments to Planned Parenthood, would send an important signal.
“What we’re proving today is if we have a Republican president next year, we will repeal Obamacare,” Ryan, R-Wis., told reporters, using a nickname for a law that GOP lawmakers have despised since it was pushed through Congress six years ago.
Ryan said the GOP will offer its own proposal this year for replacing the law, saying it would lower costs and “restore the doctor-patient relationship.” Republicans have struggled unsuccessfully for years to coalesce behind a replacement plan.
If you believe that the GOP will offer a proposal for replacing Obamacare later this year, I have a Trump casino to sell you.
I also don’t think it’s popular to take away health insurance from over sixteen million people. I know that defunding Planned Parenthood is unpopular.
So, really, this messaging isn’t helpful to the Republicans.
But, considering that Cruz and Rubio are in the top tier of Republican candidates for the presidency, and that both of them want to ban abortion with no exceptions for health, rape, or incest, I guess the GOP just doesn’t care about what’s popular or helpful.
If the GOP is anti birth control, then they are objectively PRO ZIKA VIRUS.
drops mic
The American people have a gargantuan capacity for cognitive dissonance. They voted in droves for Matt Bevin who told them to their faces he was going to take away their health insurance.
People say they don’t want to defund Planned Parenthood, or that they support gun control, or that they like their obamacare (just so long as the pollster is VERY careful not to call it that.) but when they vote, they vote for the people who want to kill PP, kill Obamacare and kill gun control.
Errr…just for the record, that was the people of Kentucky who elected Bevin.
What people say to pollsters (allegedly) and how they vote appears to be worlds apart.
It’s not just conservatives, either, but they are champs are exhibiting cognitive dissonance.
I’m not thrilled with ACA, myself, but really the incessant votes against it are giant wastes of time, which, of course, is the GOAL. These do-nothing parasites are simply upholding the Status Quo, which is what their 1% Masters – this time in BigIns, BigPharma, BigHospital, etc – have ordered.
The rubes get played once again.
In a further development, General Francisco Franco is still dead.
Reagan too?
We’re keeping an eye on Reagan. There have been significant advances in fetal tissue research since his death.
More news at Six on 6.
And at the same time
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/paul-ryan-gop-tea-party-heritage-action-speech
One expat
We can’t promise that we can repeal Obamacare when a guy with the last name Obama is president. All that does is set us up for failure . . . and disappointment . . . and recriminations,” Ryan pleaded.
We can’t do what we just did!!
Occurs to me that this pattern goes all the way back to at least the early 1930s. 1) Democrats capture the WH and Congress. 2) Democrats propose major to minor legislation that directly impacts/improves the lives of some or many ordinary Americans. Republicans in Congress do whatever they can to water down and obstruct the legislation. 3) Legislation passes. 4) Congressional Republicans obstruct and slowdown the implementation though a variety of funding mechanisms. 5) Republican candidates for any office use their opposition to the legislation in their campaigns. 6) Republicans file lawsuits against the legislation. If they win at the Supreme Court — Democrats have to win more elections, recraft the legislation and wait for SCOTUS deaths and retirements. If Republicans lose at the Supreme Court, they have a hissy fit. 7) Republicans capture the House and/or Senate and spend the term repealing the legislation while a DEM is in the WH. If a GOP wins the WH and the GOP gets/retains control of Congress, the move on to repealing really old liberal legislation and passing new legislation that benefits their patrons. 8) GOP policies and governance puts the country in deep doo-doo, return to #1.
Why the continuing lurch to the right in the US is that when Democrats have the power they DON’T repeal the crap GOP legislation (ie. Taft-Hartley) and way too often enable the passage of GOP crap legislation.
(Similar process wrt SCOTUS confirmations — Scalia is only a little bit to the right of his predecessor, Rhenquist; so, he’s okay. Alito is only a little bit to the right of O’Connor. On the other side of the aisle, been a long time since a nominee was a “little bit to the left” of the predecessor. (A bit of a mix-up with Sotomayor replacing Souter and Kagan replacing Stevens; but combined, definitely not to the left.) Of course Thomas was the biggie in moving the SCOTUS to the right; a rightwing, legal lightweight replaced a liberal, legal lion. But DEM Senators couldn’t reject him without being labeled racists.
The GOP has some built-in advantages:
The GOP advantage is they sell greed and individual exceptionalism. Have been doing so since shortly after the founding of the party. Collectivism/socialism is a harder sell because people more fear that some poor slob is going to get something they don’t deserve at the personal expense of the fearful than they are concerned that income/wealth is stolen from them every day by some elite or con-artist.
I’m sure that it is coded language, but I have been wondering just what “restore the doctor-patient relationship” means. I live in New York, I have received benefits on the New York exchange, and I had a “doctor-patient relationship.”
I am educated, consider myself to be informed, I follow politics and policy, and, at 65 years of age I’ve “been around the block.” But what the hell does that mean?
The 1950s fantasy that everybody had a “Dr. Welby” that they saw for all their medical needs.
To be fair, in 1950s (employed) working class America those Dr. Welbys did exist and they had privileges at community hospitals for all the basic and standard in-patient medical care of that time.
It is a fairy-tale statement. It is designed to make you feel a certain way, and to make you believe that the government has inserted itself between you and your doctor, and is going to abort you children, and send grandma off to a death panel somewhere.
It is one in a long line of focus group tested soundbites that the GOP trots out with a high degree of synchronization across the vast media apparatus of their party.
The amazing thing about these little pieces of word-art is how well they seem to work for the GOP.
Their fantasy is that the government has stepped in between the doctor and patient restricting your treatment. Like maybe, no Laetrile? Of course, if a woman is pregnant, THEY want to step in between doctor and patient with forced vaginal ultrasounds and a whole lot of non-medical restrictions.
OTOH, both my wife and I went to doctor this month. The office staff apologized saying that because it’s January, we have to sign that HIPAA crap all over again. The authors of that bill must have hated trees and loved lawyers.
As a result of the commodification of medicine, doctors have to deal out care on a factory basis, strictly limiting the amount of time they can give to any particular patient, and no decision can be made without the implicit presence of a third party, the insurance claims adjustor. American doctors are now essentially contract employees of the insurance companies working on a piecework rate instead of a salary, as alienated as any other proletarian, and it’s largely their own fault for fighting against a better delivery system for the past century.
They did it because of conservative propaganda. Republicans/conservatives have been saying for decades that a situation like this would arise if government “took over” health care (even as it was actually evolving, out of the normal operations of badly regulated capitalism), that’s what the secret code alludes to, and they’re using it now to suggest that the situation is government’s, specifically Obama’s, fault. (In fact some of the less famous bits of the ACA, the encouragement of experiments in alternative payment models and the limits on insurance companies’ medical loss ratio for instance, are the first serious efforts in the US to do something about the problem.)
Goldman Sachs Says It May Be Forced to Fundamentally Question How Capitalism Is Working
Lol, I think someone at Goldman Sachs needs an education on what “capitalism” means. This is it, baby. In the flesh.
CNBC (Sorry CNBC uses CapsLk)
(Did Lloyd cry foul when Harry Reid went after the Koch brothers? I must have missed that.)
Very dangerous. Billmon responds:
Lloyd sounds a little nervous. He should be.
Not at all. Probably doesn’t even rise to a slight degree of indigestion for Lloyd. These guys have been shooting down the left for over a hundred years. They know what they’re doing.
Remember, Lloyd was the guy that kept his cool in 2008 when he scared the crap out of Paulson and Bernanke. Forcing Paulson to demand a blank check from Congress to “save US banks.”
63 times…and counting.
what was einsteins definition of insanity again?……oh…yeah…doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
and on groundhog day no less.
can you say dysfunctional?