Tea Party Activists Look to President Trump to Clean Up Ryan’s Obamacare 2.0
10 Mar 2017 by Michael Patrick Leahy
Tea Party activists, while critical of the healthcare bill proposed by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), are giving President Trump the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the process of honoring his campaign promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
“We have no doubt President Trump is on our side,” Tom Zawistowski, president of the We the People Convention and long-time Ohio Tea Party leader, tells Breitbart News.
“This is between the Tea Party movement and the conservative movement, on the one hand, and establishment Republicans, on the other hand,” the veteran Tea Party activist adds.
“We’ve seen this act before,” Zawistowski notes.
“Give us the House, we need the Senate, they say. Give us the Senate, we need the White House. Give us the White House, we need 60 votes in the Senate,” Zawistowski says.
“We’re not playing these games any more,” he declares.
“They can’t pass their bill without us. We won’t pass their bill unless we get what we want, need, and deserve — full repeal of Obamacare, and free market replacement. The Art of the Deal says people who can afford to walk away from the table win. Trump needs a deal and he needs to support our position to get one,” Zawistowski concludes.
Other Tea Party activists around the country share Zawistowski’s trust in Trump.
“I certainly understand what I believe to be the strategy of a phased approach. President Trump and Speaker Ryan have talked about a three phased approach to repeal and replace Obamacare. I understand it’s a complex issue. I trust this president,” Mark Skoda, founder of America First Tennessee and organizer of the March 4 pro-Trump Spirit of America rally in Nashville, tells Breitbart News.
“My biggest concern is that they aren’t killing the regulation. If you don’t kill the regulation, then the possibility is for another president to reinstate some form of Obamacare through that regulatory structure. I’m also concerned, as Sen. Rand Paul has suggested, that the current proposal is, in effect, a de facto continuation of the individual mandate,” Skoda adds.
“I’ve been telling people to calm down and be a little bit more strategic,” Bill Hennessy, founder of the St. Louis Tea Party, tells Breitbart News.
“Donald Trump is a better negotiator than anyone in Congress,” Hennessy says.
“The establishment thought President Trump was out of his mind when he announced he was running for president. They thought he was out of his mind when he promised to build a wall. One thing President Trump has shown, he always knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting the table for negotiations,” Hennessy concludes.
“I started out as ‘Never-Trump’ and became a Trump supporter because President Trump kept his word,” Judson Phillips, founder and president of Tea Party Nation tells Breibart News.
“President Trump promised us there will be a repeal of Obamacare, and I believe he will keep his word on that,” Phillips adds.
“What Speaker Ryan and the establishment Republicans need to realize is this: they are destroying what little good will they have with the conservative movement. That is a fight they do not wish to have. It is a fight they will end up losing long-term,” he says.
“They needed the Tea Party to take the House, take the Senate, and take the White House. If they do what they do best, which is selling out the conservative base, they will find themselves in the minority in the House and in the Senate,” Phillips concludes.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/10/tea-party-activists-look-to-president-trump-to-clean-up-ryans-obamacare-2-0/
Report: Paul Ryan’s Plan Could Force 15 Million to Lose Health Coverage
11 Mar 2017 by Sean Moran
Analysis from the Brookings Institution says that 15 million people could lose coverage under Speaker Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has yet to score the Ryan plan, although the Brookings Institution’s report does not bode well for the House leadership’s bill.
The Ryan plan reports, “We conclude that CBO’s analysis will likely estimate that at least 15 million people will lose coverage under the American Health Care Act (AHCA) by the end of the ten-year scoring window. Estimates could be higher, but it’s [sic] is unlikely they will be significantly lower.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation states that the Ryan plan’s tax credits aid wealthier Americans more than lower-income individuals. Older Americans would face comparatively less aid through tax credits than younger counterparts.
American Medical Association CEO James Madara also criticized the Republican leadership’s tax credits, saying, “We believe credits inversely related to income, rather than age as proposed in the committee’s legislation, not only result in greater numbers of people insured but are a more efficient use of tax-payer resources.”
Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) has maintained that tax credits help everyone get covered. He said, “It covers more people, because it applies to those who don’t have a tax liability, and it’s advanceable, so it’s available today.”
Avik Roy, a health expert at Forbes, argued that tax credits in the Ryan plan will “price many poor and vulnerable people out of the health insurance market.”
Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, believes that the GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill will force the poor to lose their coverage. He lamented, “If the tax credits (read: subsidies) for low-income Americans are less than under Obamacare, many more low-income patients will lose coverage. Premiums will continue to rise. Republicans will take the blame for all of it, because they will have failed to repeal Obamacare, or learn its lessons, when they had the chance.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/11/report-paul-ryans-plan-could-force-15-million-lose-health-coverage/
No significant changes yet
ObamaCare repeal/replace (phase 1 of 3) clears House committees, heads for floor vote
Mar 10, 2017 By Dan Calabrese
Democrats offered a slew of amendments, all of them rightly rejected. If you already think the American Health Care Act is ObamaCare Lite or ObamaCare 2.0, the last thing you want to do is let the Democrats make it even more so. (Then again, if it really was just as bad as ObamaCare, why wouldn’t Democrats be happy to see it pass as is?)
Congressman Joe Barton offered, but then withdrew, an amendment that would have sped up the reversal of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be proposed in a Senate version – although that seems unlikely – or in the future Phase 3 that can’t be passed by a simple majority via reconciliation. It means Republicans don’t think they can get 50 votes for this phase if the include it, and with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Cory Gardner holding down the GOP’s left flank, they may be right.
So here’s where we stand:
The measure now goes to the House Budget Committee, with plans for a vote in the full House within several weeks. The House Ways and Means Committee passed its piece of the legislation early Thursday morning.
While the plan is on track to make it to the floor by the end of the month, it faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
Several Republicans have come out against the bill, including some senators from expansion states who oppose the Medicaid rollback.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said the bill is “worse” than ObamaCare.
“Insurance rates could go up and Americans could have even less control,” he told ABC News Thursday.
Asked about the criticism from Cotton that the House is moving too fast, Scalise said at a press conference after the markup that Americans can’t wait.
“American families have waited long enough for relief from ObamaCare,” he said. “We have run for years on the promise that if we had this opportunity, we would actually move forward to repeal and replace ObamaCare.”
I lean toward Cotton’s thinking on the do-it-fast/take-your-time-and-do-it-right question, but where Scalise has a point is that the calendar gets more difficult to pass anything as the year goes on – and pressure groups have more time to bear down on the Collinses and Murkowskis of the world.
Then again, if you’re going to do it in three phases, you’re going to confront the calendar issues at some point anyway.
It’s not as if the bill does nothing to roll back the Medicaid expansion. Barton’s amendment would have started the rollback in 2020, whereas the bill in its current form starts it in 2023. So you’re looking at six years down the road instead of three. Neither is right away, but the current approach gives recipients (and states) more time to make alternate arrangements. Then again, it also gives skittish politicians more time to get cold feet about it and push back the rollback or cancel it altogether.
Nothing is ever really forever in politics, although it seems like social programs and federal agencies are born with eternal life.
Barton may yet re-introduce his amendment when the bill comes to the House floor, which should be in the next few weeks. And despite Mitch McConnell’s insistence that the House bill will go straight to the Senate floor for a vote, there may be some conservative senators who insist on changes before they’re willing to sign off. The problem, of course, is that there are only certain changes you can make and still have the bill eligible for a reconciliation vote that can’t be filibustered. Hopefully serious conservatives and showboating libertarians keep that in mind.
Regardless of what you think of the replacement at this phase, one thing is clear: This phase would repeal ObamaCare. It’s true this means Republicans will own what comes next, which could be politically perilous and might not be as good as we are hoping for. Those are all serious issues, and I don’t agree that we should just support anything that’s sponsored by people with an (R) after their names. But it’s also true legislative hurdles don’t really permit you to just do everything you want all at once here, nor does the reality of the world ObamaCare has given us.
Conservatives who demand we repeal and don’t replace, but any bill at all in their minds means big government health care, are not living in the world of today. The federal government gave us ObamaCare and all its horrors. The federal government can’t just say never mind and walk away. It has to fix the mess, and it has to take further actions to steer health care back toward a real free market. I’ll be the first to say that phase 1 doesn’t do the latter. I hope they don’t think their work is done when this is passed.
http://canadafreepress.com/article/obamacare-repeal-replace-phase-1-of-3-clears-house-committees-heads-for-flo
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Marine Le Pen enters the stage at a rally. Look at the public!
RT if you think that she will be elected President of France.#PeoplePower pic.twitter.com/AQjpkZRJV6
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.@GovMikeHuckabee: "Drain The Swamp has to be more than a slogan. It has to be a mission."
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