No, the House GOP Isn't Standing Up for Kids With Cancer & Sen. Angus King: Far-right Obamacare opponents 'guilty of murder' 3OKT&30SEP13

THE repiglicans and tea-baggers don't give a damn about cancer patients, children or adults, if they did they wouldn't be opposed to the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, which makes insurance available to these people and removes the caps on treatment the insurance companies used to be able  to impose to increase their profit margins. The repiglican / tea-bagger obstructionist are only using this as a propaganda tool to try to repair the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This from Mother Jones.......

SEE EVIL, SPEAK EVIL AND DO EVIL (my caption not the photographer)

Fang Zhe/Xinhua/ZUMA

Step aside, WWII vets; House Republicans have found their newest government shutdown prop: children with cancer. On Wednesday, having caught wind of the news that about 200 patients—including 30 children—would not be admitted for clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, the House quickly passed a bill to fund the NIH. (It passed similar resolutions for the National Park Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the District of Columbia.) On Twitter, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) synthesized the new conservative talking points as only he could: "President Stompy Feet now says he'll kill funding for children's cancer treatment. Will the media still cover for him?" On Thursday morning, House Republicans who worked previously as doctors and nurses held a press conference on Capitol Hill to call once more for full funding of the NIH.

But missing from all of this is any explanation of what the Republicans' continuing resolution would actually do: Enshrine the severe cuts imposed on the institute by sequestration. NIH lost 5 percent of its budget—or $1.7 billion—when the cuts included in the Budget Control Act went into effect last spring. It has adjusted by eliminating at least 700 research grants, and slowed down priorities such as developing a universal flu vaccine. As NIH director Dr. Francis Collins told the Huffington Post in August, "God help us if we get a worldwide pandemic." (Making a bad situation worse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it will be unable to effectively monitor flu vaccination programs and virus outbreaks during the shutdown.) In September, Collins suggested that the cuts to research could put "the next cure for cancer" on ice.

None of this should come as news to House Republicans. When Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) visited a cancer center in his district, he got alecture from researchers, who said the NIH cuts had thrown their budget into flux and made it harder to treat patients. (Ross told the researchers he'd work to restore that missing funding.)

This being American politics in 2013, there's no easy way out for NIH. House Democrats have already said they'd be okay with a "clean" continuing resolution that merely extends sequestration and preserves the steep NIH cuts, embracing the notion that reduced NIH funding is better than no NIH funding at all. Senate Democrats have also signaled that they've accept the lower funding levels in order to end the impasse.

There's another part of the shutdown fight, though, in which the differences between Republican and Democratic positions are quite clear—and the effects much further reaching. It's the Affordable Care Act, a sprawling new law that takes concrete steps to expand insurance coverage, eliminate lifetime and yearly insurance caps, and allow people (including children) with preexisting conditions to enroll in health insurance. The ACA, which in a rare moment of foresight Congress elected to fund separately from the annual appropriations process, is the reason the government is shut down—and the reason it will stay shut down for the near future. There is a battle on Capitol Hill right now over helping sick kids, but it's not the one Republicans are grandstanding about

Reporter

Tim Murphy is a reporter at Mother Jones. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | TWITTER

• Does the Government Shutdown Delay the Debt Ceiling Indefinitely?

  We're spending less money, so has the debt level stopped increasing?

• 30 Ways the Shutdown Is Already Screwing People

  The government shutdown is bad news for children, children with illnesses, and people who care for children with mysterious illnesses. Also: unemployed goats.

• House GOPer on Government Shutdown Strategy: "I Don't Know That There Is a Plan to Win"

  Rep. Devin Nunes says his fellow Republicans are like suicidal lemmings.

• 48 Ways a Government Shutdown Will Screw You Over

  Who is affected when the government doesn't show up for work? Poor people, people with immune systems…basically everyone.

• How Republicans Blocked a Key Obamacare Benefit—Without the Shutdown

  By rejecting Medicaid expansion, 22 states are leaving millions of Americans—mostly people of color—out in the cold.
  http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/10/no-house-gop-isnt-standing-kids-cancer
  

  Sen. Angus King: Far-right Obamacare opponents 'guilty of murder'

  

  Sen. Angus King

  Sen. Angus King (I-ME) has some harsh words for those who would tell young people that a political principle is more important than having health insurance.
  

  “That’s a scandal—those people are guilty of murder in my opinion,” Sen. Angus King, a Maine Independent who caucuses with Democrats, told me in a Friday interview. “Some of those people they persuade are going to end up dying because they don’t have health insurance. For people who do that to other people in the name of some obscure political ideology is one of the grossest violations of our humanity I can think of. This absolutely drives me crazy.”

  King speaks from experience.
  

  Forty years ago, when King was 29 years old, he was provided health insurance as a staffer for then-Sen. Bill Hathaway, D-Maine, and for the first time in a decade went to a clinic for a checkup.

  “I had a health policy that included in it a free annual physical as a part of the policy and they had evening clinic hours. And I wouldn’t have taken the day off — and if that hadn’t been covered under the insurance there’s no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t have gone to have the checkup,” King said.

  “It was a routine checkup and the doctor found this mole, and I went in a week later to have the stitches out. The doctor told me I’d better sit down and that I had melanoma…. A month later I found myself having every cancer test you could imagine. Ultimately I had a fairly major surgery. The point of the story is that without the surgery I would have died.”

  You know that none of the guys at Heritage Action or FreedomWorks would tell their own children to go without health insurance. They know as well as Sen. King that it's foolish to go without that protection when you can afford otherwise. But. They. Don't. Care.
  

  As far as they're concerned, the people they're telling to burn their fake Obamacare cards could live or die. It doesn't really matter. They're not likely to be voting Republican any time soon. That's why they don't particularly care about the people who they would allow to go hungry with their massive food stamp cuts. They're not voters.  And they sure won't be campaign contributors. As far as Republicans are concerned, most of America is expendable.

  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/30/1242668/-Sen-Angus-King-Far-right-Obamacare-opponents-guilty-of-nbsp-murder?detail=email

Republicans had a plan to replace Obamacare. It looked a lot like Obamacare. 25JUL13

repiglicans and tea-baggers in the US House continue to hold meaningless votes to repeal Obamacare. These are a total waste of time, their only purpose is to keep support of their obstructionist policy (obstruct and defeat anything proposed by the Obama administration) going, no matter the harm it does to the nation, to their constituents. Here is a look at what the gop has proposed, in the past, to replace Obamacare with. From the Washington Post's Wonkbook....
 

By Dylan Matthews, Published: July 25 at 2:30 pm

Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), first and third from left, introduce the Patients’ Choice Act with Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), second and fourth from left. (Burr’s office)

Remember “repeal and replace”? That was the Republican party’s 2010-vintage response to the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t that they opposed the idea of universal health care; they just thought that the Obama administration and their allies in Congress went about it the wrong way. They wouldn’t just repeal the bill. They’d replace it with something better.
But what? The Romney campaign was very vague on this point, and the few points of commonality Congressional Republicans have on the issue don’t add up to a full replacement. Four years ago, however, they did. It was called the Patients’ Choice Act, it was proposed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), two of the most influential Congressional Republicans on the issue, and it was a credible way of covering almost all Americans; the House bill got 13 co-sponsors (nine of whom are still in office) and the Senate bill got seven (six of whom are still in office).
Here’s how it would have worked:

• States would open health insurance exchanges where individuals and small businesses could buy coverage.

• Insurance plans on the exchanges would have to provide a base level of coverage set by the federal government.

• Insurers couldn’t turn down customers, including because of preexisting conditions (guaranteed issue).

• Individuals and families would get a refundable tax credit to pay for insurance.

• That tax credit would be financed in part by limiting the tax exemption on employer-provided insurance.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Those are all sentences that accurately describe both the Patients’ Choice Act and the Affordable Care Act. There are plenty of differences, of course. Obamacare expands Medicaid; the Patients’ Choice Act restricts it to low-income disabled people, moving the rest of its beneficiaries onto private insurance. Obamacare cuts Medicare provider payments; the Patients’ Choice Act mean-tests premiums and does competitive bidding for private Medicare Advantage plans.
Obamacare has individual and employer mandates; the Patients’ Choice Act instead auto-enrolls people in state exchanges when they do stuff like get driver’s licenses or register their cars (Duke economist Donald Taylor calls this a “soft individual mandate”). Obamacare limits the tax exemption on employer-provided insurance by taxing expensive employer-provided plans; the Patients’ Choice Act eliminates it for income taxes while keeping the payroll tax exemption.
Those are real differences. But they aren’t huge ones; the Patients’ Choice Act actually credits the idea of converting the employer health exclusion into a refundable credit — a hugely progressive shift —  to Jason Furman, now chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, who was involved in the health reform process at the National Economic Council. The Patients’ Choice Act and Obamacare are both operating within the same basic framework.
That isn’t a coincidence. Obamacare bears a heavy resemblance to basically every real universal health-care plan that Republican legislators have proposed in the past half century, including the Patients’ Choice Act, Sen. John Chafee’s (R-R.I.) plan offered as an alternative to Hillarycare in 1993, and the universal plan Richard Nixon offered at the end of his presidency.
All four provide new subsidies for low-income families who make too much to get Medicaid. All use either a nudge (the Patients’ Choice Act’s “auto-enrollment”) or a push (Obamacare and Chafee’s individual mandates) to get universal coverage. All but Nixon’s feature state exchanges, include guaranteed issue provisions, and limit the employer health exemption in some way:

Embracing the Patients’ Choice Act now, then, runs into a tricky PR problem. Republicans could look like they have a plan to replace Obamacare, as they’d likely frame it. But it could just as easily be pitched as a right-leaning fix to the act that doesn’t muck with its overall approach. That could be an awkward sell.
The Patients’ Choice Act also runs into a problem in that its coverage provisions cost significantly more than Obamacare’s. According to the Tax Policy Center, swapping the employer tax exclusion for a $2,300 per individual, $5,700 per family refundable tax credit, as proposed by the Patients’ Choice Act, would cost $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Obamacare’s coverage provisions, by contrast, cost about $1.2 trillion over 10 years. You’d need to make up that revenue somehow, or else accept bigger structural deficits, for the plan to work.
I asked Ryan and Coburn’s offices if they’re still on board. A Ryan spokesman said he is: “You’re right to note that Republicans put forward alternative solutions and Democrats ignored them (well, except Wonkblog) before they jammed Obamacare into law. Chairman Ryan believes the Patients’ Choice Act would have actually addressed the main drivers of health-care costs. Going forward, he believes similar common-sense solutions would be superior to the Obamacare trainwreck.”
I haven’t heard back yet from Coburn — or from Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) or Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who also backed the legislation — on his current views. But Ryan’s support suggests this idea has at least some purchase in the conference. We’ll see whether future repeal-and-replace efforts reflect that.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/25/republicans-had-a-plan-to-replace-obamacare-it-looked-a-lot-like-obamacare/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm 

The GOP's rude awakening on health-care repeal from WASHINGTON POST 21JAN11

TEA-BAGGERS and right wing fanatics are finding out actually being responsible for governing is more difficult than just running their mouths.....



This whole health-care thing isn't quite working out the way Republicans planned. My guess is that they'll soon try to change the subject - but I'm afraid they're already in too deep.
Wednesday's vote to repeal President Obama's health insurance reform law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident GOP predictions that cowed Democrats would defect in droves, generating unstoppable momentum that forced the Senate to obey "the will of the people" and follow suit. The Democrats' biggest domestic accomplishment would be in ruins and Obama's political standing would be damaged, perhaps irreparably.
What actually happened, though, is that the Republican majority managed to win the votes of just three Democrats - all of them Blue Dogs who have been consistent opponents of the reform package anyway. In terms of actual defectors, meaning Democrats who changed sides on the issue, there were none. This is momentum?
The unimpressive vote came at a moment when "the will of the people" on health care is coming into sharper focus. Most polls that offer a simple binary choice - do you like the "Obamacare" law or not - show that the reforms remain narrowly unpopular. Yet a significant fraction of those who are unhappy complain not that the reform law went too far but that it didn't go far enough. I think of these people as the "public option" crowd.
A recent Associated Press poll found that 41 percent of those surveyed opposed the reform law and 40 percent supported it. But when asked what Congress should do, 43 percent said the law should be modified so that it does more to change the health-care system. Another 19 percent said it should be left as it is.
More troubling for the GOP, the AP poll found that just 26 percent of respondents wanted Congress to repeal the reform law completely. A recent Washington Post poll found support for outright repeal at 18 percent; a Marist poll pegged it at 30 percent.
In other words, what House Republicans just voted to do may be the will of the Tea Party, but it's not "the will of the people."
"The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By this standard, House Republicans are geniuses. To pass the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," they had to believe that the work of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is both authoritative and worthless.
The CBO, which "scores" the impact of proposed legislation, calculated that the health-reform law will reduce federal deficits by at least $143 billion through 2019. Confronted with the fact that repeal would deepen the nation's fiscal woes, Republicans simply claimed the CBO estimate to be rubbish. Who cares what the CBO says, anyway?
Er, um, Republicans care, at least when it's convenient. Delving into the CBO's analysis, they unearthed a finding that they proclaimed as definitive: The reform law would eliminate 650,000 jobs. Hence "Job-Killing" in the repeal bill's title.
One problem, though: The CBO analysis contains no such figure. It's an extrapolation of a rough estimate of an anticipated effect that no reasonable person would describe as "job-killing." What the budget office actually said is that there are people who would like to withdraw from the workforce - sometimes because of a chronic medical condition - but who feel compelled to continue working so they can keep their health insurance. Once the reforms take effect, these individuals will have new options. That's where the "lost" jobs supposedly come from.
The exercise in intellectual contortion that was necessary for the House to pass the repeal bill will be an excellent tune-up for what's supposed to come next. "Repeal and replace" was the promise - get rid of the Democrats' reform plan and design one of their own. This is going to be fun.
It turns out that voters look forward to the day when no one can be denied insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions. They like the fact that young adults, until they are 26, can be kept on their parents' policies. They like not having yearly or lifetime limits on benefits. The GOP is going to have to design something that looks a lot like Obamacare.
Meanwhile, Obama's approval ratings climb higher every week. Somebody change the subject. Quick!
eugenerobinson@washpost.com

Voices of Health Reform: Cathy’s Story 18JAN11

HERE is the story, in her own words, of a self-employed business woman who has gone without health insurance because she has Systemic Lupus, a preexisting condition. The Affordable Care Act changed that and she has purchased health insurance through the Ohio High Risk Insurance Pool. Listen to her story......

For too long, too many Americans struggled in the health insurance marketplace. Double digit premium increases with no recourse or accountability made it difficult for families to afford the cost of care but also left them with no other option. Americans could be denied coverage if they had a pre-existing condition or have their coverage cancelled or capped when they got sick. And high costs were making it difficult for businesses to expand and create jobs, and to compete in a global economy. 
If you haven’t struggled in the health care system yourself, you’ve probably met someone who has – seniors who struggled to pay for their prescription drugs, families whose children were denied coverage for a pre-existing condition and business owners who wanted to provide high benefits to their employees, but just couldn’t afford it.
Thankfully, the Affordable Care Act is already changing all of this.  And over the coming days, you’ll have a chance to hear directly from some of those Americans who are already benefiting through a new online feature, Voices of Health Reform. Every day, you can hear from average Americans about how the new law is making the health care system better for them. 
Today, we’re highlighting Cathy Lynn Howell Allen from Marblehead, OH. Cathy is a healthy and energetic small business owner, but before the Affordable Care Act became law, she couldn’t get insurance because she had a pre-existing condition. Considered “uninsurable” because of a history of Systemic Lupus, Cathy had been denied private insurance several times though she has required very little medical treatment over the last two decades.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Cathy recently purchased private health insurance for the first time in many years. She is now enrolled in the Ohio High Risk Pool – a new program created by the health reform law that provides affordable private insurance options for people with pre-existing conditions between now and 2014. And in 2014, discriminating against ANYONE with pre-existing conditions like Cathy will be illegal.

Health Reform by the Numbers & Bill Frist: Health Care Is 'Law Of The Land,' GOP Should Drop Repeal And Build On It from MOTHER JONES 19JAN11 & HUFFPOST 18JAN11

NOT only are the gop / tea-bagger congress people who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act hypocrites because they are keeping their government subsidized health insurance (taxpayers pay approximately $700 a month per policy for their health insurance), these politicians, a majority Christians, think nothing of spreading lies about the Affordable Care Act to spread fear and anger about Pres Obama and the government.   From Mother Jones & HuffPost.....

— By Suzy Khimm

— Flickr/USACE

As Republicans seek to repeal health care reform, they have assaulted "Obamacare" as a job-killing, freedom-crushing behemoth that's pushed the country onto the path to socialism. In order to defend their landmark legislative achievement, Democrats, meanwhile, have tried to highlight the bill's most popular provisions, ones that have already gone into effect. "We can either talk about abstraction, or we can talk about real people," said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), at a hearing on Tuesday, where Democrats invited ordinary citizens to testify about how health reform has helped them personally. "None of us did a good enough job" explaining the legislation the first time around, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) admitted to reporters. And so the party has scrambled to play catch-up as the GOP has launched their all-out war against reform.
Though most of the major changes under the Affordable Care Act won't take effect until 2014, Democrats deliberately frontloaded the law with key reforms early on, in hopes of building political support for the measure. They've now trotted out those benefits as the Republicans have made health care repeal the first priority of their new House majority—even creating a map that details the benefits of reform by each congressional district. Here's a by-the-numbers rundown* of how the Democrats' health care legislation has affected Americans so far—and what the GOP is threatening to take away with Wednesday's scheduled vote on a repeal bill:
Four million Medicare beneficiaries are expected to receive a $250 rebate check for their 2010 prescription drug costs since the "donut hole" that exempted some seniors from drug discounts was closed on January 1, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
More than four million small businesses are eligible to receive a tax credit for purchasing employee health insurance in 2010, according to a July 2010 study by Families USA and Small Business Majority (both are pro-reform advocacy groups). About 1.2 million small businesses are eligible to receive the maximum 35 percent tax credit.
About 2 million uninsured children with preexisting conditions cannot be denied coverage under the current law. By 2014, everyone with a preexisting condition (as many as 129 million Americans) would receive the same insurance protections.
Nearly 2.4 million young adults can now receive coverage through their parents' health plans, under a provision that extends coverage to dependents up to age 26, according to the Obama administration. That number includes 1.8 million young adults who weren't insured previously, as well as some 600,000 who had to buy insurance on their own.
This year, about 10,700 people will keep their insurance coverage due to a provision in the bill that prohibits an industry practice known as "rescission," which entailed stripping people of their coverage when payouts grew too costly.
Pre-reform, about 18,600 to 20,400 people hit a lifetime limit in insurance coverage each year and were denied coverage for claims above this ceiling. The reform bill prohibits insurers from setting these coverage caps.
Finally, repealing the legislation would also increase the deficit by an estimated $230 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
To be sure, not all who are eligible for these benefits will end up receiving them—either because they choose not to or because they aren't aware that they can claim them. To that end, one of the Democrats' biggest challenges in both protecting the law and improving its political appeal will be to educate the potential beneficiaries about the specific aspects of reform that help them. And the Republicans can still do significant damage to health reform by impeding this effort and obfuscating the real numbers behind the law.
*Clarification: There are 12.4 million ways in which Americans have already benefitted from reform (the aggregate of the numbers cited above). But there are less than 12.4 million people in total, as some qualify for more than one kind of benefit—e.g. young people under 26 who can qualify for their parents' insurance who also have pre-existing conditions.

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  Bill Frist: Health Care Is 'Law Of The Land,' GOP Should Drop Repeal And Build On It

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/18/bill-frist-health-care-repeal-gop_n_810345.html
  WASHINGTON -- As congressional Republicans ready themselves for a largely symbolic effort to repeal President Obama's health care reform law, at least one former GOP leader is urging them to drop the charade and build on the legislation instead.
  Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who caused a stir during the construction of health care reform when he said he'd vote for the bill, said it was important to consider the bill the "law of the land" and move on from there.
  "It is not the bill that [Republicans] would have written," said the Tennessee Republican. "It is not the bill that I would have drafted. But it is the law of the land and it is the platform, the fundamental platform, upon which all future efforts to make that system better, for that patient, for that family, will be based. And that is a fact. I know the discussion of Washington is repeal and I'm sure we will come back to that discussion..."
  "[The bill] has many strong elements," Frist added later. "And those elements, whatever happens, need to be preserved, need to be cuddled, need to be snuggled, need to be promoted and need to be implemented. But how do you do it? How do you do a lot of what is in this law?"
  The comments, and rhetorical questions, came during a press conference hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), announcing a bipartisan framework for addressing reforms to the current law. And in the context of how his fellow Republican lawmakers have demonized the legislation, Frist seemed to be reading off an entirely different script. At one point, he insisted that the bill was "beautiful on paper" and that Republicans should "love" the fact it adopts a "federalism" approach to health care.
  That said, his prescriptions for changing the bill were decidedly conservative in mindset. Warning that states simply didn't have the funds to implement the law (in particular, to set up exchanges and reinvent an antiquated delivery system), he predicted that there would be "public private partnerships in ways that were never envisioned."
  "You have no choice but to bring in the private sector, and the private sector know that it's time to play," he said. "And there will be financial resources there."
  

  Story continues below

  This may be wishful thinking. As The Washington Examiner's lobbying editor Tim Carney notes, Frist "is invested, literally, in the law." He has made a fortune as a result of stock ownership from the family-founded Hospital Corporation of America, the for-profit hospital chain.