It Looks Like Donald Trump Still Wants To Repeal Obamacare

Donald Trump says he is still interested in repealing the Affordable Care Act, which means health care for tens of millions of people would be in jeopardy if he becomes president again next year.

Trump said Saturday on his website Truth Social that he was “looking at alternatives” to the 2010 health care law, also known as “Obamacare,” which has reduced the number of Americans without health insurance to historic lows and established basic guarantees of coverage for all Americans regardless of pre-existing conditions.

8.8 million sign up for ObamaCare, nearly matching last year

Democrats declared victory Thursday after the Trump administration announced that nearly 9 million people signed up for health insurance through the federal ObamaCare exchanges.

Last year, 9.2 million people signed up for coverage during an open enrollment period that was twice as long.

Approximately 8.8 million people enrolled during the six-week open enrollment period in the 39 states that use the federal healthcare.gov website, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said.

ObamaCare proves surprisingly resilient

ObamaCare is showing its resilience after a year where it took a beating but survived.

A surprisingly high number of people signed up under the law in the enrollment period that ended last week: 8.8 million, just short of the 9.2 million from last year.

And that was despite the Trump administration’s attacks on the health-care law, cutbacks on outreach and an enrollment period that was half as long as previous ones.

Obamacare Becomes Popular Again

In Donald Trump’s America, government-run health care isn’t in retreat—it’s on the march.

Voters in Maine on Tuesday decisively chose to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to more than 70,000 additional residents, overruling a conservative governor who vetoed similar measures five separate times. In Virginia, health care buoyed Democrat Ralph Northam to a nine-point victory, with exit polls showing the issue was far and away the most important for voters. And across the country, early indications are that consumers are enrolling in insurance plans on the Obamacare exchanges in record numbers, confounding expectations that sign-ups would plummet following attempts by the Trump administration to dismantle the law.

Dems pivot to offering ObamaCare improvements

House Democrats are poised to advance a flood of proposals designed to address the problems dogging President Obama's signature healthcare law — a move that puts pressure on Republican and Democratic leaders alike.

The strategy marks a pivot for the Democrats, as party leaders have throughout the year discouraged members from offering improvements to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), fearing they would highlight problems with the law and divert attention from the Republicans’ months-long struggle to repeal and replace it.

Obamacare Saved This Woman’s Life—and Her Farm

Not many people have jobs that are as physically demanding as Tina Hinchley’s. With her husband and four children, Hinchley, 51, milks 130 cows twice a day and works the corn and soybean fields on her family’s 2,500-acre farm in southeastern Wisconsin. To keep things running smoothly, Hinchley says the whole family needs to be healthy and strong. But like everyone else, sometimes farmers get sick.

Obamacare Is Alive Because It Has Made Life Better For Millions

The Affordable Care Act has survived yet another effort to snuff it out. And one reason is a simple reality that Republicans have rarely been willing to admit ― to their supporters, to the general public, and perhaps even to themselves.

It turns out “Obamacare” has made life better for a great many people.

Millions of Americans now have health insurance because the law has put it within financial reach. They are enrolling in Medicaid, or buying private insurance with the help of tax credits ― and taking advantage of laws that prohibit insurers from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Millions more have insurance that is cheaper, better, or more comprehensive than what they could get before. They are more financially secure, they have better access to care, and they are probably getting healthier, too.

Trump whines about filibuster rule after Obamacare repeal goes down in flames

President Donald Trump complained about Senate rules after the Obamacare repeal failed to pass hours earlier.

The measure failed 49-51 after three Republican senators — Susan Collins, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski — broke with their party, and Trump called for an end to the filibuster rule to pass it later.

“If Republicans are going to pass great future legislation in the Senate, they must immediately go to a 51 vote majority, not senseless 60,” Trump tweeted shortly before 10 a.m.

“Even though parts of healthcare could pass at 51, some really good things need 60. So many great future bills & budgets need 60 votes,” he added a few minutes later.

Original Article
Source: rawstory.com
Author: Travis Gettys

Exclusive: House Democrats introduce new plan to fix Obamacare

A small group of Democratic legislators will do something unusual Wednesday morning: hold a press conference to talk about the parts of Obamacare that are broken.

Ten House Democrats will unveil a new plan to fix Obamacare, highlighting the parts of the law that have struggled to work and offering modest steps to improve them. The proposal includes more funding to help insurance plans cover the sickest patients, along with possibly changing the timing of the open enrollment season in hopes of attracting more Americans to sign up for insurance.

GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham

It is hard to overestimate the role of the Affordable Care Act in the Republican resurgence.

Over the last seven years, the GOP has won successive elections by highlighting problems with Obamacare, airing more than $235 million in negative ads slamming the law, and staging more than 50 high-profile repeal votes. In 2016 every major Republican presidential candidate, including Donald Trump, campaigned on a pledge to quickly get rid of it.

How a secret Freedom Caucus pact brought down Obamacare repeal

Speaker Paul Ryan and House leaders had been toiling behind closed doors for weeks assembling their Obamacare repeal bill as suspicion on the far-right simmered to a boil.

So on March 7, just hours after Ryan unveiled a plan that confirmed its worst fears, the House Freedom Caucus rushed to devise a counterstrategy. The few dozen true believers knew that pressure from House leaders and President Donald Trump to fall in line would be immense and they were intent on not getting boxed in.

The Fight to Save the Affordable Care Act Is Really a Class Battle

One week after Republicans introduced their controversial “repeal and replace” legislation for the Affordable Care Act, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would result in 24 million fewer people being insured by 2026, while insurers and the wealthy would be nearly $600 billion richer. “In terms of insurance coverage, it’s immoral; in terms of giving money to the rich at the expense of working families, it is indecent and wrong,” House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters at a press conference. It is also out of touch with what the American people have come to expect since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which has sent our uninsured rate to a record low of less than 9 percent. The Obama administration was clear that the objective of the ACA was to “insure everybody, to get everybody into the health system,” as Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of Health and Human Services, recently explained on Meet the Press. Congressional Republicans have no such goal. “We always know you’re never going to win a coverage beauty contest when it’s free market versus government mandates,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in response to the CBO report.

House Obamacare repeal DOA in the Senate

Forget the House GOP's troubles passing a health care bill. The party's bigger problem looms in the Senate.

Mitch McConnell is being tasked with fixing what GOP senators and House members say is a flawed Obamacare repeal proposal — one with little to no chance of passing in that chamber in its current form — in a week’s time.

Nancy Pelosi was right: Democrats had to pass the bill so people could find out what’s in it

One of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s most infamous quotes was something she said during a 20-minute speech to the National Association of Counties’ 2010 legislative conference. Congress was considering the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the endless, breathless coverage of the contentious process, Pelosi explained, was preventing people from appreciating the significance of its contents.

“We have to pass the bill,” she said, “so that you can find out what is in it — away from the fog of the controversy.”

Thom Hartmann: How Republicans Quietly Sabotaged Obamacare Long Before Trump Came into Office

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."

Twenty-Four Million Reasons the G.O.P. Health-Care Bill Is No Good

For days, the political world had been waiting nervously for the Congressional Budget Office's assessment of the House Republicans' Trump-endorsed proposal to replace Obamacare. On Monday afternoon, when the numbers-heavy report finally appeared, one figure it contained dominated all the others: twenty-four million.

This was the C.B.O.'s estimate of how many fewer people would have health insurance if the Republican legislation—which is called the American Health Care Act—passes. In 2018, the first year that many of the bill’s changes would go into effect, fourteen million "more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law," the report said. The difference "would rise to 21 million in 2020 and then to 24 million in 2026."

Paul Ryan’s Wonk Shtick Is Getting Old

I have a very strong aversion to self-plagiarism, but House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is at it again, and so, my hand has been forced and I must remind everybody all over again that Ryan is mostly a bundle of shtick, wrapped in a suit, and topped by what must be said is a comparatively decent haircut, when you consider it alongside the combover farm from which most of the rest of Congress seems to have sprung.

GOP Rushes Forward With Its Health Care Bill

House Republicans plowed ahead with their effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, brushing aside new criticism of what their proposed legislation would do ― and ignoring protests over the hurried process they are using to enact it.

Two House committees ― Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means ― spent dozens of hours Wednesday and Thursday to advance complementary portions of the American Health Care Act, the long-awaited bill to repeal and “replace” the 2010 health care law. The Ways and Means Committee completed its work around 4:30 a.m. Thursday, and the Energy and Committee followed early Thursday afternoon.

The Fight to Save the Affordable Care Act Is Really a Class Battle

The escalating battle over the future of the Affordable Care Act—heightened now that House Republicans have released their Obamacare-repeal legislation—is revealing a fundamental fault line in American society. Even the most vociferous opponents of the ACA defend some features of the law, like parents’ ability to keep children under the age of 26 on their insurance and the ban on insurance companies’ refusing coverage for people with preexisting condition. Those defenders include Republican lawmakers, who incorporated both of those features in their repeal bill. What we rarely hear defended is the ACA’s role as an instrument of social justice. Yet, at its most basic, starting to mitigate America’s yawning class divide is exactly what the ACA did. With this proposed legislation, that is exactly what the Republicans are trying to undo.

The Republicans Did This to Themselves

Republicans spent more than seven years seeking unified control of government based on a promise to swing the pendulum of the American health care system in a more conservative direction. How they intended to accomplish this was never clear. When asked during that period of time to assess their progress, Republican leaders would insist an Affordable Care Act alternative was nearly complete, in the final stages of negotiations, and then they’d let the issue drop until another inquisitor broached the subject again.