What’s the GOP plan in case the Supremes actually do axe the Affordable Care Act? It’s contained in this box.
Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.
House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Thursday said Congressional Republicans would not unite around specific legislation to replace President Obama’s national health care law this year, but would instead present an alternative market-based “vision.”
In their 2010 “Pledge to America,” Republicans vowed to “repeal and replace” Obamacare if they gained power. Though the GOP-controlled House has voted to repeal the law since taking power in January 2011, it has not yet offered replacement legislation. If the U.S. Supreme Court were to strike down the law next month, Republicans would receive increased scrutiny about their lack of a plan to replace it.
“We do feel obligated to articulate our vision for replace,” Ryan said when asked about the matter during an editorial meeting with the Washington Examiner. “Now, we’ve got nine weeks of session left. Do we want to cram through our own 2,700 page vision? No, that’s what the country hated. But do we believe in patient-centered health care and market-based medicine? A lot of us have put time and effort into this, yeah.”
Luckily Paul Ryan doesn’t actually have to do anything to give us a “market-centered approach” should the law struck down, because that would be called “America before the Affordable Care Act was passed.” You know, where death panels full of insurance claims adjusters and approvers would simply declare people too sick for insurance and medical care would become unaffordable and retroactively deny valid coverage they didn’t feel like paying for through rescission or imposing lifetime plan coverage limits. And if you somehow believe Republicans will make insurance companies pay for the “popular” parts of the ACA without the mandate to spread around risk and cost, you probably do need medical attention.
Of course, if Ryan’s previous plan was passed, we could just turn everyone over to these market solutions, including Medicare, Medicaid and VA patients. They’ll end up as what’s in the box too.
jrg
Oh, fuck no! It’s only socialist if people in industry have to deal with it. Every good conservative knows that leprechauns pay for VA care, and Medicare, also, too. Do you hate America?
MikeJ
Does anybody really think that 2700 pages[1] is too much for comprehensive reform of the health care industry?
[1] 2700 pages of legislation, which tend to be very short on actual text. Reformatted it would be shorter than Infinite Jest, which many people seemed to enjoy[2].
[2] Although the footnote count might be similar.
dr. bloor
It occurs to me I’ve spent a career loathing assholes who think patient care is nothing but another fucking widget out of their Econ 101 texts.
S. cerevisiae
And Nixon had a secret plan to get out of Vietnam.
jl
Whenever I start getting really nervous about the election, I read something like this and I breathe easier for a day or so.
I will put 2700 pages against ‘wonderful market magic you already know and love’ for the election.
They are zombied out, absolutely zombied out to the max.
Edit: instead of watching corporate media campaign filler, I’ll just watch Living Dead flicks. It will keep my BP down and be more soothing. And I will learn more.
gbear
Well then you’re lying, you worthless sack of shit. You do not feel obligated to articulate your vision. You got nothing.
Helen
@S. cerevisiae: Kinda OT but I am in the middle of Nixonland. And Holy Shit.
That is all
Zifnab25
I’m honestly not sure we’d want any legislation the Republicans actually wanted to pass. It would probably have a few amendments to repeal the Voting Rights Act and impeach the President stapled somewhere in the middle.
JPL
Market center approach works because it did in the past. Remember in the good old days when insurance companies were knocking on the doors of retired folks to insure them…
Neither do I.
mclaren
@Helen:
In more ways than one, Helen. You’re living in Nixonland. Take any headline out of that book and you can put it in a newspaper today.
To the Republicans, having no plan to replace the ACA is not a bug: it’s a feature. As William Graham Sumner put it: “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.”
If you’re out of work and sick in America and you can’t afford health care, that’s a good thing to the Republicans, because it’s nature’s way of “removing things which have survived their usefulness.”
Just Some Fuckhead
We can only hope Ryan someday winds up on the wrong side of a health outcome decision. It would be awesome if his epitaph read “Killed By The Free Market.”
JPL
@Just Some Fuckhead: Won’t happen cuz our tax dollars give him insurance for life. Look at Santorum’s baby who is lucky to be alive because of us but wants to restrict what care we get.
stickler
@Zifnab25: Zifnab — this.
When I see someone carrying a box and then a comparison is made to the Republican plans for our future, I must shamefacedly admit that I don’t picture an empty box, so much as a box containing …
well, everyone remembers the SNL skit from last year. Baby, it’s my gift to you …
BGinCHI
Repeal, replace, bankrupt the economy, blame minorities.
VICTORY!
Helen
@mclaren: Yeah. there’s some crazy shit in there. Like citizens and National Guardsmen saying “If they have long hair – Kill them”
Also? This was news to me. Roger Ailes was Nixon’s media guy.
BGinCHI
@MikeJ: Infinite Jest is funnier, but ACA has a happier ending.
danimal
Um, Mr Ryan, you say you have nine weeks, but in reality you have had about 16 months for hearings, writing legislation, etc. And you promised you would do so.
Damn you and your GOP liars to the netherlands. You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass.
Baud
So what I think you’re saying is that it would behoove people to support the Democrats in this upcoming election.
If so, I concur.
Joseph Nobles
@stickler: Oh, yeah, that’s a much better example of the Republican plan to replace the ACA. Perfect.
danielx
@Helen:
Small world, innit? It’s not by coincidence that a lot of thuggish Republicans made their political bones in the Nixon-Ford era, including the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
The only difference between them and today’s crop is that Paul Ryan and his ilk are crazier than the old breed; for meanness it’s pretty much a tossup.
JPL
If and when the Supremes overturn ACA the only hope the dems have, imo, is using Santorum and how lucky he is that he has government health care for life.
Personally, I don’t think his daughter is lucky to be abused to be kept alive, but that’s just me.
WereBear
The real difference is Faux News running 24/7. It’s like a PhD in propaganda.
Cassidy
@Zifnab25: In crayon
BGinCHI
@WereBear: After an MA in Asshole.
mainmati
This makes it all the more important that Obama gets re-elected. We already know that for lots of reasons (gerrymandering, voter suppression, low information voters, Super PACs, etc.) the HOR will definitely remain Gooperville and even more Tea Party. So, forget about any progress in Congress and if the Senate tilts to the GOP, it will be total stalemate (assuming Obama gets re-elected) at least for two years.
Of course, in the Gooper Congress vs. the Democratic Executive then the post-election Taxamegeddon becomes very interestng.
Mark S.
I would bet their plan is something along the lines of tort reform and letting insurance companies sell across state lines. That way we can all enjoy the same regulations they have in Alabama.
JPL
@Mark S.: well that worked
rightwrong…JPL
Maybe it would help if they tightened bankruptcy laws further because we must protect the job creators like trump and not the others.
bemused
Of course, they never planned to replace it and I doubt their base cared. The GOP and the base would just blame any rising costs/cuts in healthcare, cuts to Medicare, etc on the Dems anyway.
Redshift
Shorter Paul Ryan: Let them eat “vision”!
Fluke bucket
@Helen: Helen I sure hope you have read “Before the Storm”. It takes this shit all of the way to actual conception. You will better understand the Republican party today by reading about how they came to be. Hell Reagan was with the fuckers from the start. They have always been batshit crazy and for a time I was crazy with them like our peerless host.
Maude
OT, AP has a headline story with a photo of Zimmerman with an injury on the back of his head. It also says Martin had pot in his system.
It looks like someone is trying to sway the jury pool. I find this very upsetting.
Peter
@mainmati:
No, we most certainly do not know that. Fuck your defeatist nonsense.
jl
@Redshift:
‘ Shorter Paul Ryan: Let them eat “vision”! ‘
They could use this slogan,
“Enjoy our healthcare vision while you have it!”
I bet they’ll pay me the big big bucks for that idea.
I shoulda gone into political consulting, I coudda been a contender I tell ya.
Raven
@Maude: Also that his father said the voice calling for help was not Trayvon.
“n a statement, Detective Christopher Serino of the Sanford police department said he played a recording of the calls to Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father.
“In the background I could clearly hear a male’s voice yelling either ‘help’ or ‘help me’ 14 times in an approximately 38-second time span,” Serino wrote.
“The voice was determined to be that of George Zimmerman, who was apparently yelling for help as he was being battered by Trayvon Martin.
“I asked Mr Martin if the voice calling for help was that of his son. Mr Martin, clearly emotionally impacted by the recording, quietly responded ‘No’.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/18/trayvon-martin-post-mortem-drugs
Frankensteinbeck
@Peter:
We have a real chance. It’s all in voter enthusiasm. Ours is likely to be very high, and theirs very low. Obama could have some looooong coat tails, in the sense that Romney will have negative coat tails and suck winners out of the GOP pool.
At the moment that’s just speculation. We’ll know better closer to the election. I have a lot of hope, and I’m sure as Hell voting and voting straight D, and most likely volunteering again for the GOTV efforts.
mclaren
@Helen:
And did you know that Karl Rove started out as a protege of Nixon’s dirty tricks operative Donald Segretti?
People tend to forget that 2 months before the Kent State massacre in April 1970, the lovely kindly wonderful elder statesman Ronald Reagan said about the antiwar Vietnam protestors, “If it takes a blood bath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Then when National Guardsman started to act on Reagan’s advice and shoot down 19-year-old college students like dogs, Reagan claimed “It was only a figure of speech.”
Source: “Bloodbath `Figure Of Speech'” The Oakland Tribune, 8 April 1970, pg. 1.
Rick Perlstein’s next book is on Reagan. I can’t wait. Somebody needs to rip the rock up off that senile sociopath Reagan and show the world the vile nest of poisonous vermin swarming underneath the kindly image. (Reagan got his start in politics by acting as the enforcer for the HUAC’s red-baiting witch hunts in Hollywood. Reagan used to force actresses who’d gotten blacklisted in Hollywood for their “anti-American” affiliations like belonging to the ACLU or subscribing to the New York Times to give him head in order to get their names off the blacklist. In fact, that’s how Ronnie met his wife, Nancy Davis. She had a little trouble with the Hollywood blacklist and Ronnie unzipped his fly and the rest, as they say, is history…)
Peter
@Frankensteinbeck: Exactly. You can’t stand there and credibly tell me that in a presidential election year where our sitting president looks ready to pound his opponent into the dirt, in the year of the War On Women, when the Republicans have a million and one seats to defend, that the Democrats don’t stand a chance of taking back the House.
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that 2010 was a normal election year. It wasn’t. It was, in fact, a pretty hefty anomaly.
Helen
@Fluke bucket: Have not read it. but thanks for the rec. My first vote was in 1980; I was 2 months after 18. And I voted for Anderson. I was so scared of Reagan. He was called back then a “war monger” and I was os scared of war. My mother left her homeland because of war.
texascowgirl
@Maude:
This is America. You didn’t think a gainfully employed guy who owns his own home would go to jail just for shooting some black kid did you?
Helen
@Raven: I gave up on the Zimmermans (not that I was ever with them) when his father, the judge, called Obama’s statement “hate”
Helen
@mclaren: That is awesome. There’s pieces of Reagan in Nixonland. I want more.
stickler
@Peter: Exactly so.
The idea that an Obama win will coincide with the GOP taking the Senate and keeping the House just seems ludicrous to me. How, if Team O can win the White House, do they not help out the rest of the downticket races?
I know the wild card is going to be massive, unregulated, tides of SuperPAC ads. But still, where is the GOP ground game? And is the RomneyBot 2.0 going to gin up a huge groundswell of committed Republican base voters? Without turning off the low-information swing voters?
It just doesn’t make sense. If the Dems get enough support to keep BHO in the White House, that has to mean big gains in the Congress, too. Doesn’t it?
Raven
@Helen: It was Martins father that made the statement.
Yutsano
Watching Snooze Hour. Howie Kurtz just basically lied his ass off saying that Obama lost 23 million jobs. The lie went unchallenged. They want their horse race sooooo bad.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Maude: @Raven:
I don’t normally follow details in state prosecuted trials, but there is something about this case that is rotten to the core, with a rapidly increasing stench of cover up. And like you said, a likely state sanctioned effort to leak details favorable to the defense, before the trial begins and prosecutors can rebut in real time during the trial.
Pot can stay in the system for up to six months as trace metabolites, and the voice screaming was already found to be not Zimmerman by some world renowned audio experts.
And the injuries to Zimmerman’s head were not recorded until a day later by his personal physician, and did not seem to exist shortly after the incident at the police station.
Maude
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Thank you.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Maude:
Welcome :)
Helen
@Raven: No. Maybe both. But it was Zimmerman’s father – behind the curtain, who said it
eemom
@Yutsano:
Another example: all they ever talk about is national polls.
National polls don’t mean shit — unless the Constitution has been amended to eliminate the electoral college and nobody told me. The ONLY polls that fucking matter are the ones in swing states — and as I have mentioned repeatedly, even here in the fucking capital of the Confederacy, the polls show Obama mopping the floor with Romtron’s sorry ass.
And yes, I’m looking at YOU, Nate Silver, you sellout little shit.
burnspbesq
@danimal:
What have the Dutch done to you, that you hate them so?
Yutsano
@eemom: Nate has an editor to suck up to now. In other words he did exactly what he said he wouldn’t do, which is let editors ruin his credibility. But hey sweet sweet NYT cash and all.
eemom
@stickler:
Not just that — but the idea of the republicans re-taking the Senate with one state primary after another falling to the teatards is just ludicrous. It fucked them over EVEN in 2010, and it’s sure as shit gonna fuck them over worse in 2012.
Daniel Thomas MacInnes
The beauty of returning to the feudal state is that the ruling class never has to care about the mass of peasants. Just leave them to suffer and die. Things like medicine and education will become luxuries for the aristocracy. The peasants will have nothing. But they’re easily manipulated and controlled, so this won’t be a problem.
I wish I belonged to an intelligent species.
Peter
@stickler: It can happen – Clinton won reelection without winning back Congress – but describing the race for the House as already over is just laughable.
eemom
@Yutsano:
Yeah well, fuck him.
And fuck Ezra Klein too.
The two of them ought to start a little underage fuck-boys mutual fuck club and fuck each other until they reach the ripe old age of 30.
burnspbesq
@mclaren:
“And did you know that Karl Rove started out as a protege of Nixon’s dirty tricks operative Donald Segretti?”
False, I think. According to Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book, Rove was initially enlisted by the Republican National Committee, while still an undergrad at Utah, to run a Nixon-inspired effort to reach out to and include moderate Republican college students.
Quel ironie.
Peter
@eemom:
Oooooookay then.
eemom
@burnspbesq:
I don’t see why anybody finds it surprising or even remarkable that the master scumbags of the present day did their apprenticeships in the Nixon administration. I mean, look at how old they are — did people think they went directly from primordial slime to Fox News?
Hill Dweller
The Republicans’ internal polling must show some ugly numbers for them, because they and their buddies have been flailing about this week.
The Willard campaign decided to change their entire narrative midstream. Some republican friendly polls show some crazy numbers, especially with women voters. The hacks in the media are doing more water carrying than usual. Congressional Republicans started making ridiculous threats.
They look panicky.
rikyrah
@eemom:
bravo
bravo
bravo
Helen
@eemom: Let me make myself clear. My issue is not with the politics. My issue is with the dead babies. The babies that American servicemen as my representative killed. Read the book. I knew the facts. Read the narrative.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Hill Dweller:
Mitt can’t remember what he says one day from the next, and we are just getting started. I figure by election day, he will ensconce himself in flubber and they’ll have to tie a string to his ass, just to keep grounded long enough for campaign events.
eemom
@Helen:
Fair enough. I wasn’t actually responding to you, but rather to the mclareneese gibberish that was made of your original comment.
You and I are the same age. I voted for Carter.
kay
@Hill Dweller:
I think it’s really interesting how panicky Romney is on Bain.
I would not have predicted he’d have a nervous breakdown at the first hint of push-back on his 6 months of bullshit on that company, considering Bain is the entire justification for his candidacy.
I listened to him today and he sounded unhinged, ranting about a character attack.
danimal
@burnspbesq: You’re right, they can just go to hell.
danimal +2
stickler
@kay: Panicky on Bain, yes.
But pay attention: the poor dumb automaton is panicky on almost everything that matters. Garage with elevator? Mormonism? Offshore tax shelters? Gay marriage?
The guy is a walking glass jaw.
How the Galtian overlords manage to haul this cybertronic corpse up to the finish line will be a fascinating show.
Calouste
@stickler:
They’ll have to drag Romney to the finish line, because if it looks like it’s not going to be close on election day, there will be more than a few Baptists who are going to stay home rather than vote for a cultist in a losing cause. And they need those people for the down ticket races.
El Cid
The fact that Paul Ryan presents no actual plan whatsoever to replace the current healthcare reform given longstanding promises to propose thorough plans to replace Obama’s healthcare reform only shows what a tough-minded, sharp, detail-oriented serious planner he is, a true intellectual and policy craftsman, something which no liberal can deny, and which reporters and pundits alike will emphasize endlessly in the bizarre case that liberals are unconvinced of his supra-partisan policy genius.
Nutella
I hope Zerban, Ryan’s opponent in WI01, quotes this all over the district. Ryan is being paid an excellent salary and lavish benefits to be a lawmaker but he and his R colleagues don’t bother to make any laws. All they’ve got to show us they’ve earned their excellent salaries and lavish benefits is “articulated visions”.
Jebediah
@eemom:
And the tea party seems to be losing some of its popular support and credibility. And in 2010 they didn’t have Romney’s negative coattails. And their war on women(who are, you know, just some corrupt special interest group, after all) wasn’t yet in full swing. I’m not counting any chickens yet, but I am definitely not all doom-and-gloom pessimism.