ABC's Jon Karl pretends that Kamala Harris wasn't for ending private health insurance and that she's changed her position despite zero evidence of that

 

That Obama guy did an outstanding job of screwing up health insurance, and raising the price of hamburger, and Biden isn't far behind him

 

Hamburger in this data series averages $4.04/lb in March 2021.

Mayor Buttplug doesn't care if private health insurance companies serving 150 million Americans fail

Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel your health insurance culture AND your income tax culture and replace them with socialism

[T]his time, a wholesale government takeover of health insurance would actually be a step toward socialism, which is still viewed more negatively than positively by Americans overall. “You don’t win with a message of socialism in a swing state like Florida,” said Bill Nelson, a former Florida senator and Biden surrogate.

More here.

Elizabeth Warren's ridiculous health care calculator has no box to check for 24 million Americans who privately buy their own health insurance off-Obamacare Marketplace and not through an employer

The trend for growth of part-time work since 1968 has been much stronger than for full-time, saving business the cost of paying benefits such as paid holidays, sick time, retirement and health insurance

PART-TIME

FULL-TIME

Note the huge jumps in the percentage working part-time due to the Clinton tax increases after his election in 1992 and after the Great Recession in 2008.

Full-time has still not recovered to the two decade experience pre-Great Recession.

Unaffordable No Health Care Act: Health insurance premium increases pre-Obamacare 10%, post-Obamacare 60%

Yes, It Was The 'Affordable' Care Act That Increased Premiums:

It turns out that across the board, for all ages and family sizes, for HMO, PPO, and POS plans, premium increases averaged about 60 percent from 2013, the last year before ACA reforms took effect, to 2017. In same length of time preceding that, all groups experienced premium increases of less than 10 percent, and most age groups actually experienced premium decreases, on average.

Treasury bonds are the most expensive they have been in over sixty years

All "asset" classes are near-record expensive: bonds, stocks, gold, housing, college education, health insurance policies . . .. 

Cliff Asness, here:

So, the bottom line is, as measured by real bond yield, U.S. Treasury bonds are really frickin’ expensive. Measured by the slope of the yield curve they are really frickin’ expensive. But, measured by the average of these two simple variables, they are 60+ year just about record-low frickin’ expensive. This result is not caused by, but is certainly exacerbated by, the (perhaps) surprisingly uncorrelated nature of slope and real bond yield, thus making both so low and at the same time considerably more surprising.

Rush Limbaugh gets more out of touch with every passing day: "People like their health care from their employer"

Talk about delusional.

In my household we haven't had employer provided health insurance since 2008, but recently a new employer offered us some. My jaw hit the floor when I saw the price: $2,033 per month for family coverage.

Currently I pay $532 a month for family coverage, because I have a plan grandfathered in from pre-2010, which I get to keep as long as I don't make any changes to it. The new employer's plan is almost FOUR TIMES more expensive than what I'm paying now.

Compared to what I'm being offered by an employer right now my current plan looks mahvelous, right?

Well guess what it cost just eight years ago?

$227 a month.

That's right. Despite the fact I'm not hostage to Obamacare or employer provided insurance, my premiums have still risen 134% in eight years. And it would be even worse had I not raised the deductible. Needless to say, my coverage is nearly useless for office visits and routine tests; that's all 100% out of pocket, too.

But look at the scale of what's happened. The coverage I had in 2011 now costs me about two and half times as much as it did then, but this new employer plan costs NINE TIMES as much as privately purchased coverage cost me eight years ago.

That is insane.

OBAMACARE IS A CURSE AND A BLIGHT ON THE NATION, WHETHER YOU HAVE IT OR NOT, and Rush Limbaugh is as out of his mind as the Democrat hucksters trying to sell us Medicare for All or some other bottle of government elixir when he says people like their health care from their employer. They do not. The LA Times in May:

Health insurance deductibles soar, leaving Americans with unaffordable bills:

The 2010 healthcare law — often called Obamacare — provided landmark protections to Americans once shut out of health coverage. But as Democrats and Republicans fought over the law, Altman said, neither focused on the rapid run-up in costs for people covered through work. ... Over the same time, insurance premiums also increased, rising at more than double the rate of inflation and outpacing wage gains.

Obamacare sucks for working stiffs: 66% making under $40,000 a year struggle to pay for healthcare

Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment:

As recently as 2006, the average deductible for individual coverage in job-based plan was just $379, adjusted for inflation, according to KFF. ... The average deductible has more than tripled, to $1,350. More than a quarter of workers have plans with a deductible of at least $2,500.

Not only will president Kamala Harris end private health insurance for every American, she'll resurrect busing

Pro tip: After forcing it on every American there is not a single Democrat left on the Obamacare bus.

Trump says tyrannical, socialist government will never happen to us

My health insurance plan costs me $15,520 a year before I even use it, and that's the cheap one.

Obamacare liar Jonathan Gruber decides it's safe to lie again, this time in The Boston Globe

Jonathan Gruber leaves out that millions of Americans already have unusable insurance right now under Obamacare, and that it already costs them tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket every year because their crappy, no-good rotten piece of shit Obamacare-era health insurance plan SUCKS, covering nada, nothing, nichts, doodlysquat.

Gruber just decides not to mention them.

Major lying asshole yesterday, today and forever.

 

Texas court strikes down Affordable Care Act, putting the health of Americans and our democracy at risk:

Millions of Americans who don’t read the fine print of their insurance contracts could once again buy insurance that leaves them with tens of thousands of dollars in uncovered medical bills.

The number of doofusses taking Hillary's recent immigration comments seriously is truly astounding

It's self-evident that Hillary's "new" view about immigration is nothing more than immigration reform as a means to an end, namely the center-left's election to power in order to defeat populism and the right.

Her response to the situation of her defeat is completely in keeping with Marx, who viewed the embrace of the free-trade doctrine of unalloyed capitalism as an accelerant for The Revolution. The important thing is not that the left is wrong about "late stage capitalism". The important thing is that they are insincere about what they say they believe in common with us. 

Yet everywhere I go otherwise sane people are talking shit about this. Ooh everyone's coming around to Trump's way of thinking, and so on.

Like Obama who lied about his own mother's health insurance in propounding Obamacare, Hillary will use anything and anyone to get where she wants to go.

 

Clintonite Mark Penn: Trump has ideas, Democrats have only attacks, investigations and impeachment

Here:

Trump has also deployed more specific issue ideas than anyone in a long time. ...

Other than investigations and impeachment, what are the Democrats running on? They have made an issue of health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions. Trump has said he too would cover them. The Democratic idea is not a health-care plan, but an attack.

Nor do Democrats have an economic plan many people can remember. Nor a plan on immigration. Nor a plan to deal with jobs migrating to China and Mexico.

President Trump taunts the Democrats, calling them the “open borders” party. And yet the Democrats have absolutely no plan for dealing with illegal immigration. In response, they attack the president personally – exactly how Hillary Clinton handled Trump in the last presidential campaign.

Did Trump voters in 2016 vote for a huge corporate tax cut, war with North Korea, and a DACA amnesty?

I watched all the rallies and never heard about these things.

The enthusiasm was all for The Wall, a symbol of the out of control immigration problems facing the country, of which we haven't gotten one inch 19 months later. We could have had 2000 miles of razor-wire by now, but for that you'll need Hungarians apparently, not Americans.

The secondary enthusiasms were for jobs and an end to Obamacare, which have been half-heartedly addressed, not in the least because rank and file Republicans are about business as usual, i.e. keeping their jobs. We still have 16.1 million total unemployed in May 2018, and (unusable) privately purchased health insurance premiums going through the roof.

They don't give a damn about us or what we need, except at election time.

I'm voting in the primaries against incumbents where possible, and third party (but no libertarians) in the general. Otherwise it'll be for Mickey Mouse, Dopey and Goofy, but never again for these fools. The cartoon variety would be an improvement.

NYT claims 2010 Obama Paygo law would require mandatory spending cuts under the Republican tax bill

From the story here:

The biggest program affected would be Medicare, the health insurance program for older people and the disabled. But the law allows Medicare to take only a relatively small cut: 4 percent. Other programs have no such protection. ... [Paygo] requires that legislation that adds to the federal deficit be paid for with spending cuts, increases in revenue or other offsets.

Good news: Trump does end run around Obamacare, expands ability of more associations to offer plans using Executive Order

From the story here:

The president signed an executive order "to promote healthcare choice and competition" Thursday morning at the White House. 

It is said to expand access to "association health plans" – group plans written by trade associations, small businesses, and other groups. Such large group plans do not have to abide by all the requirements of individual plans under 'Obamacare.' The order also tasks administration officials to develop policies to increase competition in the health insurance industry.

McKinsey analysis finds health insurance premiums shot up 279% on average, mostly because of guaranteed issue and community rating

From the story here from Sally Pipes:

The analysis was conducted by McKinsey for the Department of Health and Human Services. The consulting firm looked at rate hikes in four states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee. Premiums in each had doubled or tripled since 2013 -- the year before Obamacare went into effect. 

In Georgia, the average premium for the equivalent of a mid-level "Silver" plan for a 40-year-old male went from $94 a month in 2013 to $323 a month in 2017. In Tennessee, it went from $104 a month to $431.

Chris Jacobs for The Federalist favors the status quo on Medicaid in exchange for Obamacare repeal

It's uncanny how similar Chris Jacobs' overarching point is to the one we expressed here in June when we said that the status quo ante Obamacare was not the way forward, and that the way forward involves getting a buy-in from moderates and liberals on reform, but not repeal, of the Medicaid expansion in exchange for repeal of Obamacare root and branch.

The difference is in solving the funding problem. Jacobs admits his plan precludes "repealing all of Obamacare’s tax increases." Our idea doesn't, in exchange for a broadly based Medicaid payroll tax to democratize the costs. 50 million participants in the small group and individual markets are bearing the burden of funding "health insurance" for the poor, i.e. Medicaid, through grossly more expensive premiums and deductibles than before Obamacare.

As others have observed, the growth of the uninsured post-Obamacare is in this group because they can't afford it anymore.

The way forward is a compromise which keeps the Medicaid expansion, funds it fairly, retains state control of the program (federalism) just as now, and repeals Obamacare. 

Jacobs, here:

In both the House and the Senate, debate focused on a push-pull between two competing issues: The status of Medicaid expansion in the 31 states that accepted it, and what to do about Obamacare’s regulatory regime. During the spring and summer, congressional leaders attempted messy compromises on each issue, phasing out the higher federal match for Medicaid expansion populations over time, while crafting complex processes allowing states, insurers, or both to waive some—but not all—of Obamacare’s regulatory requirements.

But rather than constructing substantively cumbersome waiver arrangements—the legislative equivalent of a camel being a horse written by committee—Occam’s Razor suggests a simpler, cleaner solution: Preserving the status quo (i.e., the enhanced federal match) on Medicaid expansion in exchange for full repeal of Obamacare’s insurance regulations at the federal level.

A “grand bargain” in this vein would give Senate moderates a clear win on Medicaid expansion, while providing conservatives their desired outcome on Obamacare’s regulations.