How Republicans Quietly Sabotaged Obamacare Long Before Trump Came into Office
By Thom Hartmann A...
Donald Trump suggested that the Affordable Care Act was a clever ruse by our first black president and his Democratic friends to have a successful health-care system in place for his own presidency, but was set up to fail in the first year of the next president's term.
Trump said (on 3/10/2017) that this year "would be a disaster for Obamacare. That's the year it was meant to explode, because Obama won't be here. That's when it was supposed to be, get even worse. As bad as it is now, it'll get even worse."
While most people are rolling their eyes (why would President Obama do that, particularly when everybody expected the next president to be Hillary?), there's actually a substantial grain of truth to Trump's assertion. However, he has identified the wrong culprit as the person who poison-pilled Obamacare for 2017. That distinction would go to Marco Rubio (and his Republican helpers in the Senate).
Let's step back to 2015 for the entire story, which is bizarre and fascinating.
Read more here
Comments
#2
How is it that this country continues to be so blinkered to all the corruption and keep putting people like Rubio in office and back in office? It's like a huge sewer has backed up, flooded everywhere, everyone is neck deep, yet no one notices. When do we collectively wake up, after everyone has died of typhoid?
#3
Rubio is a religious fascist of the type who helped Musollini, Hitler, Franco and the Ustasha come to power before they embarked on their genocides. His behavior fits perfectly with these villians.
#4
We now have a schizoid govenment where the checks and balances
allow the minority party to destroy the programs of the majority party.
Time to let the party in power execute their policy uncompromised.
If the electorate finds the results ineffective, then the electorate will
vote the bums out.
ct
#5
Yes, the Republicans should quit blocking absolutely everything Obama and the Democratic Senate are trying to pass. Oh wait, are you talking about 2009 or 2017? Or when McTurtle blocked Obama's Supreme Court nominee for a whole year?
If you want to know how a minority party can really disrupt our system of checks and balances, read Robert Draper's book, "When the Tea Party Came to Town." Republicans make Democrats look like choir boys.
BTW, do you really want to let fascists implement their pogroms ...ah, programs... against the poor, the sick, the elderly, the workers, the minorities, and just about everybody else not in the top percentiles?
By the time another election rolls around, it might be too late to re-rail the train. 100 years of progressive legislation that created the largest middle class in history will be in the ditch. With Mensa Man in the seat, the pile of twisted wreckage will be a helluva lot worse than the last time Republicans derailed the economy with a village idiot driving, when the Democrats had to pick up the pieces.
Make Amerikkka great again!
#6
Thom: Why do you keep repeating this Rubio lie? Have you never read the facts surrounding the NY times article you so fervently want to believe, or is it you know better but who cares because it fits the meme?
#7
Unrelated questions. WHY is Ivana Trump getting security clearance and moving into the White House AND Why is Secretary Tillerman NOT going to the NATO meeting?
#8
Diane #6: "Thom: Why do you keep repeating this Rubio lie? Have you never read the facts surrounding the NY times article you so fervently want to believe, or is it you know better but who cares because it fits the meme?"
...a classic case of projection ...a dog with a bone. Too bad it's plastic.
The first link below demonstrates that, yes, Rubio is a worthless liar (like most Republicons). The rest of the links (a small sample) definitively support Thom's contention in his Alter Net article that, yes, Rubio was indeed the main worthless Republican liar who inspired the anti- "risk corridor" legislation inserted into the larger budget bill, even though he may not have been an actual sponsor-liar or a member of the gang of final sausage-maker liars.
But, by all means, slobber away on your fake bone:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/428706/did-rubio-kill-obamacares-risk-corridors-yuval-levin
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/261244-rubio-budget-win-is-dealing-heavy-blow-to-obamacare
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/263396-spending-bill-includes-rubio-ban-on-obamacare-bailout
#9
So let's all help poor Thom get the facts straight. Since the election he and most of the Democrat party seem a bit shell shocked. Other leftie/socialists even further out on the ledge, just resort to making jackasses of themselves.
From your links,
"A little-noticed health care provision that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law
As written, this is not correct. Rubio did not slip the provision into last year’s giant spending law. Like this year’s giant spending law, last year’s omnibus bill was the result of a leadership-driven process that drew on substantive expertise from the relevant committee staffs but did not much involve most members of either house. Rubio does not appear to have had any role in its drafting. The risk-corridor provision, like most similar policy riders in the bill, was produced by key committee staffers, in this case (because of the unique expertise of two or three specific individuals) Republican staffers on the Senate Budget Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee."
#10
No, that particular quote is the bone you are slobbering over, which was taken from a WaPo fact-checker link that you also posted in an earlier thread. Try to take an old bone away from an old dog, and they'll growl!
However, when one actually takes the time to read into it and crosscheck it with other sources, your chewed-up, splintered bone does not disprove the well-documented fact that Rubio was absolutely the initial Republican liar who first tumbled onto the complicated risk-corridor angle of the dangle way back when, who falsely termed it as a "bailout, and who then inspired all the other Republican liars to run with it, flesh it out, and codify it into their sleazy legislation.
Sure, he may not have been the stooge who physically "slipped" it into the final omnibus bill that passed, but he certainly deserves the most infamy, despite how many other Nazis are falling all over themselves to take credit for sabotaging the ACA that resulted in the insurance companies' mass exodus.
BTW, your quick response indicates that you spent more time struggling to type words into some semblance of cognizance than bothering to study the other sources provided, before firing from the hip ...unless you are an amazing speed reader who can retain full comprehension.
Nah, no thanks; "alternative facts" are best left to sad little Trump trolls, who love to chew on the green, slimy bones they dig out of the swamp.
#11
I called in to discuss Trump & China & trademarks...I wanted to share the link to the article I referenced. I hope you see this: https://qz.com/930896/a-curious-timeline-of-trademarks-granted-to-donald-trump-by-an-increasingly-helpful-china/ AND https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/517458/
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Thousands will eventually go broke and die because of Republicans actions. Yet their priority is to ban Muslims from 7 countries that have not carried out 1 attack on us.