An Obamacare repeal is back in play as McCain Signals He’s Now a ‘Yes’, provided the governor of Arizona agrees.
Senate Republicans have only until the end of the month to repeal Obamacare under a special legislative process, and there were new signs Monday that the GOP is getting closer to the magic number of votes.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona told an MSNBC correspondent he might “reluctantly” vote for the measure offered by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, both Republicans. Their bill gets rid of the individual and employer mandates and the 2.3% tax on medical devices, and block-grants money to states, leaving reform up to governors.
McCain said he wanted to determine if the concerns of Arizona’s governor were “taken care of.” Monday afternoon, Gov. Doug Ducey called the bill “the best path forward to repeal and replace Obamacare.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has reportedly told Republicans that if the bill has the support of at least 50 of the 52 GOP senators, he’ll bring it to the floor. Under the reconciliation process, it would need 50 votes to pass, assuming Vice President Mike Pence breaks the tie.
But even if McCain supports it, Republicans may not quite be at the needed number of votes. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has said he’s a “no.” Meanwhile, Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins says she “has concerns.”
That may leave the bill’s fate in the hands of Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. Earlier Monday, she told a CNN reporter she was undecided. In July, Murkowski, Collins and McCain voted against a different Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, scuttling that bill. Paul voted “yes” on that bill.
Poll – Repealed This Year?
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
No to managing any repeal. Just another flailing attempt to cover themselves for 2018.
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Is it really all that mean of me to hope that McCain leaves office soon? I mean, I don’t wish him any harm because he is somewhat human-like but hasn’t he caused enough problems for the world in his lifetime? How many poor foreigners have taken dirt naps because of war policies and spending that he has not only supported but actively championed.
Maybe he should just bow out of politics now and we could see how it would be without him.
Just sayin’.
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I love McCain. FU for to all the republicans that are willing to take our healthcare away.
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No one wants to take away “healthcare.” Doing away with mandatory insurance lacking any needed reforms is about to get the axe. If you don’t like that, FU whatever your political affiliation.
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The time for repeal to be an electoral winner is over. It is now single-payer time. It has all the momentum.
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They have single payer………..We earners pay and the leeches on Medicaid get free insurance.
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You want the best example if how single payer will work you need to look no further than the VA.
NUFF said.
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Single Payer would be the best option. It will never happen due to the pharma lobbyist. Insurance companies would be toast and Pharma would not have the upper hand.
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Okay, but we can do that now. No need to scuttle the ship because we’re in unfamiliar waters. Toss Big Pharma overboard. Let them flail about before throwing them a lifeline.
In other words, rein in costs. True affordability can be done via competitive forces. Away with crony connections!
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Go to France and ask about their “single payer” system. It is wonderful for some things. I had to have emergency open heart surgery this past July, The best cardiac surgeon did the work. But because I’m not a citizen it cost me some $50,000. I am a senior so I got a discount of almost 50%. Because I own property, the ambulance ride was free. But for the ordinary individual seeking the routine care the service tends to suck. Not everything is covered. In the small towns and villages there may not be a doctor. If there is, there is a wait. If you need blood work, a nurse will come to your house and draw it for about 10 euros. You pay her directly and the laboratory that does the work. There is a lot you don’t know about single payer and its costs, bot monetary and otherwise.
Oh, I should mention that France still has private hospitals and doctors. wonder why?
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The VA issue is not because it is single-payer. It is because the program is inadequately funded while we start more and more wars that result in the need for extensive care for the troops.
Taiwan has single-payer. Why doesn’t it make negative news headlines? That is because they have ensured it is funded properly.
(Besides, VA is NOT single-payer. It follows the Beveridge system.)
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My, what a generous, big-hearted person you are. Instant karma just might bite you in the ass for all the care and concern you have for your fellow Americans that don’t have it as good as you do. Perhaps you will come back as an African-American female living in 1920s Alabama or Mississippi. In any case, the Lord is listening,
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This is a good way to do it. By turning it over to the states, they can both call themselves conservatives by believing in federalism, and blame state governments when people lose their health insurance. And they can cut taxes. Perfect solution for a federal politician. I say it passes.
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Trump is working with the House Problem Solvers Caucus. He may bypass the GOP leaders to get a deal on his own. #FixNotFight. @nolabels Trump will probably run against both the GOP right wing and DEM left wing after building a centrist coalition that is actually getting something done.
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I like what you’re saying but I think The Swamp is much too strong to stand by and allow it.
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So if the bill gets rid of the individual and corporate mandates – who pays for all the sick people?
Does this mean that the premiums for those who continue to purchase insurance goes up 50%?
Has anyone in Congress thought this through?
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#1 I think that the answer is: You.
#2 That sounds like the premium for a state’s high-risk pool 12 years ago.
#3 I think that the answer is: For-profit medicine and insurance has done it for them.
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The Republicans will not do squat as usual. The states should indeed be the entities that fund and administer healthcare for their states. Many are upset with Trump crossing party lines and personally I would do the same thing if the repubs want to whine about agendas.
The President needs to get things done but neither side seems to want to budge and the RINO’s continue to block everything this administration wants to attempt. I hope the American people toss all the Repubs out of office. They will finally wake up once they lose it all once again.
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“I hope the American people toss all the Repubs out of office. They will finally wake up once they lose it all once again.”
Reject all RINOs in their primary runs and put non-RINOs in their place.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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There was a running tally of the cost to taxpayers for all the votes to REPEAL passed by the GOP during the Obama admin when there was no hope of getting it passed.
I believe it exceeded $20 million.
That’s pretty ballsy.
That said, I don’t think anyone is counting the beans being wasted on all the Russia investigations. So I guess there’s that.
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I suspect this is a minor concession brought about by the MASSIVE amount of negative feedback the Phony Opposition Party is now getting about all of their broken campaign promises.
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Of course, anything they may do will be no more than window dressing and will not address the fundamental flaws (lack of free enterprise competition due to government granted exemptions and ignoring of anti-competitive practices) because they must not violate the interests of their campaign donors who they are truly beholden to, not the useful idiots who merely vote them into office. They are owned by many of the same deep pocket lobbies that own the Dems which is exactly why most Reps are RINOs.
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McCain sez “yes, we have no bananas”
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Translation: Mc-Wanna-War talked to his constituents who told him to repeal Obamacare or clean out his desk. Read my lips Republicans: you promised to repeal that disaster and we will hold you to that promise whether Trump stays or goes.
Mc-Liar has the added problem that he, as a Congressional crook, just got surgery that the rest of us would never get under Obamacare — not at any price. Maybe McCain of Vietnam era would look out for enlisted men, but today’s McCain is a selfish coward.
There is also the disaster outside of DC… If Obamacare is allowed to stand, healthcare will get rationed (good luck boomers!) and all the wars McCain wants to start will be canceled due to lack of funding. Seal Team Six might be awesome, but they cost a lot of money.
And GASP!! Social spending will even crowd out the endless perks Congress gives itself. How are Congress members supposed to find the Capital building without a team of support staff to point them in the right direction?
Bernie just proposed an extra stupid health plan, but didn’t say how he would pay for it (MASSIVE tax increases across the board) and was too dishonest to admit a similar plan in his home state went bankrupt… as Bernie himself predicted it would.
Obamacare gets repealed, or Washington DC becomes Detroit. Its that simple. Reality may finally be dawning on the dimwits of DC.
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Obamacare Lite is not a repeal.
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Obamacare is failing whether anyone likes it or not. Only an idiot would have expected it to work.
If one is a spineless weasel in Congress (aka both parties), they would prefer the thing wither on the vine so they don’t have to accept blame when it fails.
Health COSTS must be controlled, not some financial alchemy scheme on top of a high cost system. And the federal government is singularly unqualified to control costs on any subject, from military to welfare to energy to education to healthcare — they have failed at all of them.
Rationing health care — as the UK does with its system — won’t work given US voter’s expectations, and as the UK has proven under all their political parties, their rationing scheme does not contain underlying costs. it just restricts access.
Even Bernie’s home state couldn’t make his dumb idea work — and if he wasn’t just another useless lying politician he would admit his idea will bankrupt the government.
Obamacare is failing, as any intelligent person knew it would. Its all about politicians covering their butts and deflecting blame now.
McCain knows his career is over if he becomes the face of repeal failure.
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“If you want to know why medical care is so expensive and you need the fraud called “insurance”, if you want to know why Obamacare was “sold” to people and is now going to collapse, if you want to know why Medicare and Medicaid were sold as “necessary” and yet continue to bankrupt the nation the answer is right here.
You are paying roughly five times what virtually everything ought to cost when it comes to medicine, and the reason you are paying it is because every firm and person in the business either is wantonly violating the law (and nobody ever gets indicted or goes to prison despite doing so) or even worse they’ve conspired with the government so they can enforce what is an otherwise-illegal act of restraint of trade under penalty of throwing your ass in jail instead of theirs and yet the’re still quite-arguably violating the law themselves!
Let me know when you’re ready to cut the crap, America, because until you do en-masse and descend on Washington DC to demand and enforce that this garbage stop right here and now, with every one of the co-conspirators drawing 20+ years of hard felony federal time along with each and every one of the involved firms being dismantled from the millions of dollars of fines per count, with each person harmed being a separate count, you deserve to be screwed, blued, tattooed and finally dead as you continue, each and every day, to give your consent to exactly that.” – Karl Denninger – Market-ticker.org
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It’s not – exactly – restraint of trade. It’s transfer of wealth from the productive sector.
The government requires that hospital treat all comers. The government requires that doctors be licensed by one guild or another (MD or DO). The predictable result is that hospitals, insurance cos. and drug patent owners raise prices (at least 5x, as Denniger mentions) on the private sector in order to treat charity cases, maximize profit and pay up for the services of the guilds. Better yet, the hospitals are governed and managed by guild members, so there’s little conflict with the guilds.
Then, to add chutzpah, the hospitals accept charitable donations and hold a gala dinner to raise even more cash for a slush fund that applies to the guilds, the profits and the charity cases.
Just load it all on the burden of the middle class, who haven’t seen a wage increase in 45 years thanks to the closing of the gold window.
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Once you read Denninger’s detailed analysis of the cause of insane medical care costs and the easy fixes you will realize what an ABSOLUTE FARCE all official “reform” schemes actually are.
But the easy fixes are only easy IF people knew the facts of the situation and demanded those fixes with an “implement these or you are OUT” threat to bought and paid for pols. Since we live in a filtered news, easily propagandized idiocracy this will never happen, of course.
The Bill To Permanently Fix Health Care For All
Karl Denninger
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231949
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A One-Sentence Bill To Force The Health-Care Issue
Karl Denninger
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=232164
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A bill that does absolutely nothing to stop my lock out from access to healthcare due to astronomical costs. Now I can just not have healthcare insurance if I choose and take the bankruptcy bailout if I have an emergency. Even this won’t last long since very quickly most emergency rooms will be closing due to un-collectable bills. Not having a small tax on medical devices is supposed to be an improvement.? The mandates were not enforced anyway so this bill is supposed to be a change.?
This is all they have after years of obamacare complaints. What about making medical costs fully deductible, What about uniform pricing and non-fraudulent billing. ? What about increasing supply of health services. ? What about verifying that treatments are effective before they can be proposed to patients. ? What about incentivizing the government to act productively on this problem by removing all government employee health coverage. ? They have had years to get these things done and still absolutely nothing.
They are rapidly creating a healthcare system that truly represents third world effectiveness at the highest cost in the world.
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–> “They are rapidly creating a healthcare system that truly represents third world effectiveness at the highest cost in the world.”
That’s called socialism.
Half the country voted for comrade Obama, and some of them still believe they can get something for nothing.
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Has anyone herd about the fate of Puerto Rico ? The next Cat 4 or 5 could be hitting Sunday night.
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When McCain departs for the other side the nation will be much better off. No idea why the Arizonans continue to reelect him. They fall for his BS every single time.The war hero crap gets old after awhile.
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“They fall for his BS every single time.”
As do Republican voters who continue to nominate for re-election incumbents who have proven themselves to be RINOs, voters who then for some reason wonder why nothing significant is ever accomplished on any voter-desired agenda which involves a real change to the corrupt status quo, those changes NOT occurring because they violate the interests of the REAL owners of governments, lobbies which provide campaign donations. It’s as SIMPLE as this – BOUGHT GOVERNMENT.
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I moved back home to Australia from the US. Single payer a much better, sustainable system.
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I continue to believe that we will have single-payer health coverage in the U.S. within the next 15 years. It is a horrifying prospect. Realize that the U.S. already HAS single-payer health coverage for the poor (Medicaid) and the elderly (Medicare). I can understand discussion around the margins of what is considered “poor”, I suppose. But this is not the proposal. The proposal is to cover EVERYBODY. The proposal is to make the lower middle class slaves of the welfare state by dangling the “free health insurance” carrot in front of them. This is utterly astounding, since there is absolutely no policy argument that could be made for government assistance to be provided to the lower middle class. And yet, this is what the single payer system will, in fact, do. And no one is acknowledging it.
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We are almost at a virtual single payer, no choice, point for medical services. The only policies available for my area will have a limited provider network. The choice of insurance company is limited to maybe two now. I am waiting for my new proposed policy to come which replaces my canceled policy. I expect it to cost twice as much for less coverage. This virtual single payer system seems to rely on the lower middle class to provide most of the funding now anyway.
The sad part is that the delivery of healthcare is so backward, inefficient, and hostile to the customers. Yet there continues to be no interest in fixing the system and upgrading its management to the point that it becomes affordable. Just follow comments on this issue here and previous Mish posts. So many good ideas have been proposed and could have been implemented even with Obamacare in place. Instead we have this symbolic gesture of repeal which leaves all the problems in place and changes nothing.
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Trump turn to democrats is making republicans look foolish and causing them to take action. This is not about McCain but pressure by trump on republicans.
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