No tricks. We want full repeal!
The ballyhooed votes were not for full repeal. They serve as no precedent. The House and Senate did not vote for full repeal in the past. So there is no precedent to be cited in those votes.
Take what you can get, or in just a few weeks you’ll find yourself voting for a Continuing Resolution that HAS to pass, and has Obamacare funding in it, including funding for illegals. That’s what a CR is, continuation of what is presently in place.
If the FC votes for that, and they must, they are hypocrites.
Jim, you have it right. Let me add a little for those that are in a younger learning stage.
A full repeal is a bill that is a one page document with a standard header, dates and salutations, and it simply spells out that the PPACA with reference dates IS HEREBY REPEALED.
That’s it.
A full repeal is simply a one-page bill that declares a law no longer exists. It’s gone.
There have been many laws repealed in this way in the history of our United States.
Note, a full repeal bill is introducing a law to take down a law. Just like the 21st Amendment is an amendment to take down an amendment, the 18th.
A full repeal of Obamacare could be typed in less than 15 minutes and introduced on the floor in the same amount of time.
Now, because a full repeal is a LAW, it must pass the Senate as a LAW and in the Senate, they have a 200+ year-old tradition of the Senate filibuster.
So a full repeal is not going to make it through the Senate.
This is why Ryan tried to use ‘reconciliation’ to ‘repeal’ certain budget items of Obamacare, but then he relabeled it from PPACA to AHCA. It’s a gimmick but he knew it had a chance to make it through the Senate because ‘reconciliation’ bills are budget bills and they cannot be filibustered. BUT ... it leaves Obamacare aka AHCA in place to be reversed in the future when democrats control Congress, and they won’t need a filibuster to reverse it all.
Reconciliation as repeal is a gimmick, a band-aid fix that will fall off down the road.
President Trump settled for a reconciliation bill approach because he knows, he has great knowledge of what Obamacare is going to do this year to American families and businesses. He has had American citizens to the White House where he sat with them to discuss the coming disaster. He wants to help people now even though he knows reconciliation, especially the kind put forward by Ryan, is a poor design. I imagine the President wanted something to help people now while working in the background to bring out a better more permanent bill. But he also knows there are other paths that might be better.
Obamacare was due (and still is) set to detonate by design this year on Americans and cause the whole system to scramble so that single-payer could be advanced. For those that don’t know, ‘single-payer’ is where health insurers cease operations as insurance companies leaving the federal government to dictate health policy for everyone as a purely socialist system. The President sees this coming.
Now, the President has also had close advisors and leading citizens advise him to let Obamacare collapse on its own. That means health insurers will not have customers paying the premiums because the premiums are a total waste. It was the Obamacare tax that drove many people to pay less with premiums for fake insurance. By ‘fake’ is meant where an individual pays $225 per month premiums for ‘coverage’ of mostly nothing, with an annual deductible of $9600 which is in effect a monthly amount of $800 out of pocket. What that means is simply an individual pays for all their healthcare out of pocket. So the choice boils down to paying an effective $300 per month in Obamacare tax penalty for zero care versus a $225 premium for zero care.
Coverage vs. Care
This is the socialist non-logic which many American clinics have seen from Canadians who travel over the border to get treatment in the United States:
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“So what brings you to Seattle today Mr. Albert?”
“I came to get knee surgery.”
“And why could you not have the procedure done in Calgary?”
“I have the funds and I heard I can get it quicker here.”
“But certainly you could get the procedure done for next to nothing where you live, why pay out of pocket here?”
“Well, as I said, I have my own funds, and I really want to get it taken care of sooner.”
“How long have you been waiting to get it done where you live?”
“2 years”
“Do you have an estimate of how much longer you have to wait?”
“Not really.”
“So you are saying you are unable to get care for your knee condition in your home region, is that it?”
“Well, not really, I mean I am covered.”
“Oh so you’re covered, you just can’t get the care. I see.”
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Obamacare wants us to go with a Canadian style system. We are ‘covered’, but if we want ‘care’, we’re going to have to first pay heavily out of pocket if we have the funds to begin with. In effect, we get ‘coverage without care’.
The above situation has been developing here under Obamacare and is scheduled this year to go into a hell twisting maneuver as the individual mandates come into play with full force this year 2017. This is what the President sees coming and why he knows there will be many families put through a load of butthurt by Obamacare.
Now, let it collapse is what the President was advised, and he knows that advice has merit. Because he can facilitate the old insurance market to return in place of Obamacare but there will be a gap before the insurers get back on that horse. They may have it working like it was pre-Obamacare by 2018 but for 2017 there will be massive amounts of pain and agony for Americans. And while Americans hurt massively in 2017 the President told his citizen panel that the press is going to lie, lie, lie that it’s his fault. We can expect that to start happening in a few months from now, just as soon as the democrats figure out how to make the President own all the pain.
But even as the President helps facilitate the return of the old insurance model, it still remains a non-free market. So the President has got to propose legislation that mandates states to dissolve their health insurance monopolies. There’s a lot more work to do, a lot more.
Government and the Healthcare Tar Baby
The more the government involves itself in or extricates itself from healthcare, the stickier the mess becomes. The problem with trying to get the federal government out of health insurance or regulating health insurance is that there will be a transient period where people hurt, a lot. A free market can take care of them without government involvement but it may take a year or more to get to them. And in the meantime, the leftist press gets all giddy about the disasters happening all over.
The hard-core left, like communists, fear when its opposition has solidarity and a velvet glove hiding an iron fist. I still think the President should start tweeting about the illegal transfers by Geithner of enormous billions of funds from the Treasury general fund to Obamacare to buy votes and to subsidize insurance companies until Hillary could be (s)elected. Geithner resigned shortly thereafter and for good reason. It’s a crime. It’s called enforcing the law with a side benefit of intimidating the democrats and getting them to cooperate. In effect, the President needs to lead a campaign branding Obamacare as a criminal enterprise, which it actually is. A few Obama officials dragged through the mud on charges of massive embezzlement and misappropriation of funds will taint Obamacare not only as ineffective but criminal. In this way, the President can get a full repeal, and an opportunity to sign legislation that opens up healthcare markets to competition.