The Obamacare hot potato

Most of us have played hot potato at some point in our childhood. It's a game where players sit in a circle and toss a small object like a beanbag to each other while music plays. When the music stops, the player holding the bag is eliminated. Our adult children, aka Congress, are playing a variation of this game. Their beanbag is Obamacare and they're frantically tossing it around trying to stay in the game.

Speaker Paul Ryan lost the first round. Poor thing couldn't get the votes to pass the bill on to the Senate, so he was left holding the bag.

In the second round, the speaker handed off to Mitch McConnell, but alas, the Senate couldn't get the votes, either, and now the Senate is out.

The senators don't love their odds, so they brought in a new player: the states.

The Graham-Cassidy plan proposes distributing some federal funding currently available under the Affordable Care Act directly to states in the form of block grants. From 2020 to 2026, states would receive a set amount of federal funding to be used at their discretion for health care coverage, but cost-sharing subsidies the federal government pays to insurance companies to lower the cost of some plans on the individual insurance markets and money some states receives to expand their Medicaid rolls would go away.

So they're going to temporarily shift funds to states to manage, take away insurance subsidies that lowered the cost of plans, and cut Medicaid expansion.

A necessary part of the federalism of the Constitution is the doctrine of delegated powers. The federal doesn’t even have lawful power to block grant money to the several States, it is no where listed among Congress’ powers.

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President Donald J. Trump and the Free Republic of the United States of America
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I didn’t play that game either. We stood in a circle and threw Boy Scout knives between one another’s feet.
If you hit someone you were out. Of course, if you got hit you were out too.
Since then I have heard it called mumbleypeg but we just said `Wanna play Chicken at recess?’

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