GOP tone-deafness: Americans rank health care as ‘most important issue’ as party fails to deliver Obamacare repeal

(National Sentinel) Healthcare Uninformed: As the GOP establishment in the Senate failed in its latest attempt to unravel a law that is destroying the American healthcare industry as we know it, Americans for the first time this year have ranked “health care” as the issue most important to them.

Talk about tone-deaf.

As reported by the Washington Examiner:

Healthcare and the economy were seen as top priorities for Congress by 24 percent of those polled in a Sept. 22-24 survey by Morning Consult/Politico.

Healthcare has been a leading focus for the Trump administration since January, but congressional Republicans made another unsuccessful attempt to reform Obamacare this week.

Despite the setback, 40 percent of voters still want lawmakers to undo former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, while 52 percent disagree.

Regarding the 52 percent, we’re not sure where the figure comes from; in the four questions where “Obamacare” is mentioned, none of the “opposed” or “somewhat opposed” figures add up to 52 percent.

Nevertheless, the fact that Americans now consider “health care” to be a top issue is important in and of itself. And historically, Obamacare has never been popular with a majority.

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GOP liars flub the LATEST attempt to roll back Obamacare [again]

(National Sentinel) Healthcare Reform: Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Republicans who once universally voted (several times) to repeal Obamacare are now refusing to do so, consigning the latest legislative effort to the ash heap.

If you’re beginning to think that the GOP is incapable of governing, don’t fall into that trap. The GOP is refusing to govern. Or, at least, too many of them are.

As Politico reports, the latest effort to repeal major swaths of Obamacare contained in legislation proposed by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., won’t even make it to the floor for a vote because three Republican liars are refusing to sign on.

Who are they, you ask? Great question. They are:

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is still so pissed off that Trump dissed him about his Vietnam POW status that he’ll take his Trump hate to the grave with him — which probably isn’t going to be long now, given his aggressive brain cancer. [Sorry; we didn’t want to go there, but McCain is receiving excellent, paid-for care thanks to taxpayers subsidizing his fantastic government insurance while the rest of us pay an extra mortgage every month just to buy shitty coverage that comes with a massive deductible.]

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, because the proposal doesn’t rip Obamacare out by its roots. Hey, Dr. Paul, you of medicinal education and background, are you saying that applying federalism principles to Obamacare via block grants to states so they can decide how best to spend the money is not worth supporting — even as your colleagues continue to wade through mountains of Obamacare red tape and pay exorbitant compliance costs? The bill would have ditched the employer and individual mandates as well, and ended the tax on medical devices, which everybody (except Democrats) used to want.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who isn’t happy with the fact that her state, under the bill, might lose a dollar of taxpayer funding so she’s going to ensure that any “repeal” legislation continues to be so expensive it bursts an already bursting national debt, now well over $20 trillion. Our grandkids and great-grandkids, whose lives will be destroyed for a generation when the debt implodes, thank you, Susan. We’re sure they’d much rather live in poverty than in the lap of luxury like you.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office says the Graham-Cassidy bill would lower the debt by $133 billion, the Free Beacon notes.

Oh, and Dennis Smith, senior adviser for Medicaid and health care reform for the Arkansas Department of Human Services said the legislation would stabilize the health care marketplace [meaning an end to the massive rate hikes] by combining Medicaid populations with younger, healthier individuals. You know, so there was that.

But no. We can’t have any of these benefits because three Republican liars who one voted universally to repeal Obamacare now are finding any reason they can to not support repeal.

With any luck, Alabama voters will begin the nationwide process of replacing RINOs, liars, and establishment types via the primary process when they vote for Judge Roy Moore over former lobbyist and incumbant GOP Sen. Luther Strange in today’s election.

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Last-minute changes to healthcare reform bill seek to lure GOP holdouts

(National Sentinel) Healthcare Reform: The latest effort to repeal portions of Obamacare and reform other aspects of healthcare law and policy is meeting resistance again from Republican holdouts who continuing finding reasons not to vote in favor legislation they once universally supported.

That said, Republican leaders in the Senate are looking at changes to a bill co-sponsored by GOP Sens. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and David Cassidy of Louisiana in the hopes that they may win enough backing from Republican holdouts to finally pass.

As reported by Newsmax:

The changes would give more federal funding to the states represented by Sens. John McCain (Arizona), Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska.) All three states would have seen a decline in federal dollars in the original version of the bill.

The opposition would likely have sunk the bill as first written.

The measure abolishes a large portion of President Obama’s signature healthcare “reform” law. In addition to sacking the individual and employer mandate to purchase health insurance, the bill sends federal tax dollars earmarked for healthcare to states, along with decision-making power as to how those dollars are spent.

President Donald J. Trump is holding out hope that the last-ditch effort is successful before the end of the legislative session Sept. 30.

Republicans in the House, however, are already lining up to opposed the measure. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has said he opposed the bill because it does not repeal enough of Obamacare.

The president has said that voters will hold congressional Republicans responsible if they don’t pass healthcare reform and at least a partial repeal of Obamacare’s expensive, restrictive mandates.

He may be right, and we may be about to find out. Populist voter revolt is driving the insurgent candidacy of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, who is presenting a serious challenged to incumbent U.S. Sen. Luther Strange.

Trump campaigned for Strange on Friday, but instead of giving the GOP Establishment favorite a full-throated endorsement, he said he “might have made a mistake” in supporting him.

Should the GOP fail in a core promise to deal a death blow to Obamacare, more Republicans are certain to face tough primaries that many will likely lose.

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Sen. Graham on Obamacare repeal: ‘Melt Congress’ phone lines’

(National Sentinel) Obamacare: GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is pushing a new Obamacare repeal plan that he hopes will generate enough support among Republican constituencies to “melt” lawmakers’ phone lines and “insist that we have the vote.”

In an interview with Breitbart Radio, Graham said it’s either back his new legislation or be faced with an almost certain “single-payer” healthcare system that is full-on government controlled.

He said:

It’s either this or we’re going to Obamacare and Bernie-Care. Now, Bernie-Care is full-blown single-payer socialism. It is his dream and that’s where Democrats are going. We’ve been stumbling around trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. The McConnell approach was better than Obamacare but it wasn’t transformational. Let’s get back to the basics of being conservative. We take the money that we would spend on Obamacare in Washington, and we block grant it to the states. There are four states under Obamacare that get 40 percent of the money: New York, California, Massachusetts, and Maryland. They get 40 percent of the money, and they’re 20 percent of the population.

So we repeal the employer mandate, which is going to kick in in October and destroy job creation. We repeal the individual mandate, we repeal the medical device tax, we take the other revenue streams from Obamacare taxes and we block grant it to the states. By 2026, every patient in every state regardless of where you live will get the same basic contribution from the federal government.

We achieve parity. No longer will four blue states get 40 percent of the money. A state like Mississippi, they get a 900 percent increase. South Carolina gets 300 percent. So the goal is to get the money and the power out of Washington. This is not about repealing and replacing Obamacare. This is about stopping a march towards socialism.

At the end of the day, Matt, this is the last best chance we will have to act and end Obamacare and stop Bernie-Care.

Graham said several GOP governors — “approaching 20” — were already on board with the changes.

“Let’s just get to the heart of the matter: If you’re not for this, then you really got to wonder whether or not you’re a Republican because the Republican philosophy is the government closest to the people is the best government. Under Obamacare, if you don’t like your healthcare, who do you complain to? You can complain to me in South Carolina, but I don’t run Obamacare. It’s some damn bureaucrat that you will never meet who could care less about you,” he added.

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These three things got Trump elected but will get Republicans thrown out of office if they don’t help him pass them

(National Sentinel) Republican World: The Republican Party is in a rare historic position to completely dominate the American political scene for the next three decades at least, but too many GOP lawmakers have a serious case of #trumphate that is preventing them from taking advantage of the situation.

Without question, the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the extreme Left, as evidenced by the fact that lawmakers like Rep. Maxine Waters of California and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who are far to the Left of Che Gueverra and the Castros in Cuba, are now the party’s stars. Granted, Sanders has gone back to being an “Independent” since getting screwed out of the party’s presidential nomination by the lying cheaters who run the party, but his ideas — socialized medicine, high taxes on the wealthy, out-of-sync social policies, and financially unsound wage increases — now dominate the Democratic Party’s principle political objectives.

Now, the dishonest mainstream media wants us all to believe these kinds of policies are the norm, not the exception among the electorate — and they are in certain regions of the country. But they’re not the norm for the vast majority of Americans for if they were, Democrats and not Republicans would be in the congressional majority, and Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders) would be president and not Donald J. Trump.

Speaking of Trump and Republicans — and the opportunity to dominate politics for the foreseeable future — there are three things that the GOP should help Trump get done that would lock in Republican control of government for decades to come. But if Republicans don’t, those who thwart the president and keep him from keeping his pledges will pay for it the next time they come up for reelection. Oh, and they’ll lose control over the reins of power.

The three things are: Building the border wall; tax reform; and repealing Obamacare (and replacing it with…nothing).

Border Wall. Trump began building his unwavering base on the broader issue of immigration — enforcing immigration laws already on the books, deporting people in the country illegally, and building a “big, beautiful wall” along the U.S.-Southwest border. When he descended Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidency, he opened his campaign with a pledge to crack down on illegal immigration. Twice now the GOP-controlled Congress has blocked all efforts by the president and the White House to get funding for the proposed wall, which actually could be very cool and self-sustaining if it’s built with solar panels. Republicans who continue to put donor cheap immigrant labor concerns ahead of what’s best for the country — and Trump’s wall pledge — will pay the price electorally.

Next, tax reform. Trump wants to lower the corporate tax rate from its current level of as much as 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Entire corporations have moved their operations overseas to places like Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is less than half our rate at 15 percent, and they’ve taken jobs (and income) with them. Corporations are said to have parked something like $3 trillion overseas that could be repatriated to the U.S. if the tax rates were lower. Imagine how many jobs and new growth opportunities that kind of money would create. Trump also wants to lower personal income tax rates as well, which would be a welcome relief for all Americans who are now paying more in taxes than ever.

Obamacare. This one should have been a slam-dunk, considering that Republicans en masse have been promising for years this awful, grotesque, debilitating piece of legislation would be repealed and replaced with free-market solutions. GOP leaders said in January when the new Congress convened that it would be the first thing they would send to Trump’s desk after he was inaugurated later in the month. Not only did it not happen, now it doesn’t even appear to be on anyone’s legislative radar. This is a HUGE mistake for Republicans; Obamacare is not that popular and even if it were, it’s destroying the healthcare and health insurance markets, making them prohibitively expensive and practically useless for the majority of Americans.

Republican establishment types don’t want to see Trump, the outsider, succeed. That’s why they’ve resisted him so far and continue to do so today. But unless they help him pass these three things, they will be the ones who suffer politically, not the president.

And if they do, they might just find the party in the political catbird seat for at least a generation, and maybe longer.

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Dems lining up behind full-on push for SOCIALIZED medicine, which was the plan ALL along

(National Sentinel) Medicare For All: One of the political issues that has been simmering quietly under the national radar has been Sen. Bernie Sanders’ push to “fix” health care by imposing a “single-payer” system to “fix” Obamacare.

For those who aren’t really sure what “single payer” means, it’s 100 percent government-controlled health care. The “single payer” part of the equation is where the federal government pays for all the care; there aren’t any more private health insurers to speak of because everyone would be in enrolled in a sort of “Medicare-for-all” program.

What’s to hate about that? Everything. More on that in a moment.

At first, not many Democrats were lining up behind Sanders’ plan, but now, right on cue, more of them are jumping on board. In addition to legislation he’s planning in the Senate, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has introduced a single-payer bill in the House that has 117 co-sponsors.

“The growing momentum for Medicare for all is a remarkable turnaround for an idea that was deemed too radical to even debate eight years ago. However, it’s really a testament to the political clarity of the policy and the steadfast work Sen. Sanders has put into organizing support for it inside and outside the halls of power,” Charles Chamberlain, a progressive activist and the executive director of Democracy for America, wrote in a statement Tuesday.

Uh, whatever.

This was the plan all along.

It might be a shock to some, but despite all of the promises Democrats and President Obama made about the Affordable Care Act being the end-all, be-all of health care reform, it’s a disaster. None of what Democrats promised has come true.

Care isn’t cheaper.

Monthly premiums are only cheaper for a few million people who get subsidies.

E.R. visits aren’t down.

Out-of-pocket expenses are higher for just about everyone.

Employer-sponsored health insurance didn’t drop “by $2,500 a year.” And so on.

For anyone who was listening, former Senate leader Harry Reid, the one-eyed Jack from Nevada, spilled the beans back in 2013. When he was asked by a PBS host if the long-term goal was to implement full-on, government-run, single-payer health care, Reid said, “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.” He then hinted that Obamacare was never going to work in the first place when he added, ““What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.”

Fast forward to July of this year. In an interview with a national radio host, Sen. Lindsey Graham said the plan all along was to design Obamacare in a way that it would fail.

“It was designed to make sure that employers would drop coverage because it’s too expensive, that exchanges would fail and the government would come in and take over and you’d have single payer healthcare,” he told host Mike Graham.

And now, with the GOP in control of Congress and the White House, here come Democrats charging forth with ‘their own version of health care reform’ — right on cue. The same party that handed us the disaster that is Obamacare now wants Uncle Sam to have even more control over our health care delivery systems.

That’s why “Medicare for all” is a lousy idea. Medicare for Some doesn’t work now; it’s inefficient because there are too many rules for providers to have to follow — all of which are expensive and help drive up costs for providers (and, hence, patients).

But beyond that, this “single-payer” push is all part of a well-thought-out plan concocted years ago to strip Americans of health care control and health care choice even more than Obamacare already does.

The one thing all of us need is health care (which is why the Democrats want to control it). The last people we ought to trust with it are government bureaucrats.

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Thanks, Democrats: Get ready for another year of double-digit insurance premium increases

(National Sentinel) Healthcare: As every single member of Congress and their staffs continue to receive even more generous taxpayer-supported subsidies than the relatively few buying health insurance via an Obamacare exchange, the vast majority of Americans will once again have to endure double-digit health insurance premium increases in the coming year.

And we’ve got Democrats to thank for it.

As reported by in the San Francisco Chronicle, the increases will only further inflame passions for repeal, though the comfortably non-afflicted Congress remains all too willing to allow the rest of us to suffer:

Millions of people who buy individual health insurance policies and get no financial help from the Affordable Care Act are bracing for another year of double-digit premium increases, and their frustration is boiling over.

Some are expecting premiums for 2018 to rival a mortgage payment.

What they pay is tied to the price of coverage on the health insurance markets created by the Obama-era law, but these consumers get no protection from the law’s tax credits, which cushion against rising premiums. Instead they pay full freight and bear the brunt of market problems such as high costs and diminished competition.

On Capitol Hill, there’s a chance that upcoming bipartisan hearings by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., can produce legislation offering some relief. But it depends on Republicans and Democrats working together despite a seven-year health care battle that has left raw feelings on both sides.

“We’re caught in the middle-class loophole of no help,” Sharon Thornton, a hairdresser from Newark, Delaware, told the paper. Her small employer does not provide insurance; she said she’s currently paying about $740 a month in premiums, and is anticipating that her monthly bill next year will rise to about $1,000, a 35 percent increase.

“It’s like buying two new iPads a month and throwing them in the trash,” said Thornton, whose policy carries a deductible of $6,000. “To me, $1,000 a month is my beach house that I wanted to have.”

Or money for a better car. Or for savings to help put a kid through college. Or about a thousand other things that would improve quality of life.

Thornton is far from the only one being hurt by Obamacare. Millions of Americans who do have employer-provided insurance are still paying astronomically high monthly premiums and deductibles.

Meanwhile, the president who gave us this disaster (and lied repeatedly to do so) along with Democrats who voted for it have little to worry about. Their health care is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, so their out-of-pocket is negligible.

Republicans of course now share some of the blame for Obamacare, having failed after seven years of promising to repeal and replace the law with something more akin to a free-market economy. But we can never, ever forget that it was Democrats who gave us Obamacare in the first place, and most of them still refuse to even discuss repeal and replace.

So much for the “party of compassion.”

That didn’t stop the Left-leaning Chronicle from trying to lay some of the blame for the law’s destruction of American healthcare at the GOP’s feet:

It would guarantee coverage regardless of health problems, provide tax credits and other subsidies for people of modest means, and generate competition among insurers to keep premiums in check for all. The overhaul sought to create one big insurance pool for individual coverage in each state, no matter whether consumers bought plans through HealthCare.gov or traditional middlemen such as insurance brokers.

But an influx of sicker-than-expected customers drove up costs for insurers, while many younger, healthier people stayed on the sidelines. Political opposition from Republicans complicated matters by gumming up the law’s internal financial stabilizers for insurers.

That is a bald-faced lie. Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare — not a single one. And let’s no forget that the Obama administration repeatedly tweaked the law — unconstitutionally delaying parts of it while changing others, all for political gain.

There are no Republican fingerprints on Obamacare. So there can’t be any blame assigned to Republicans for the law’s abysmal failure.

But the GOP will be blamed if they fail to deliver on repeal-and-replace. And there is no better time than before the next round of unaffordable insurance premium increases come.

Correction: This story originally stated the source article was published by the San Francisco Chronicle; it was published in the Chronicle but it was an Associated Press story. We regret the sourcing error.

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Taxpayers set to take it on the chin AGAIN as lone insurers swoop into “bare” Obamacare counties to charge higher rates

(National Sentinel) Healthcare: The economic raping of taxpayers via Obamacare is set to enter its next phase as smaller insurance companies move into regions of the country abandoned by the bigger providers.

As misleadingly reported by the Washington Times, every county in the United States save one will have “Obamacare options” in 2018, though obviously the paper’s editors and reporter Tom Howell Jr. have no clue what “choice” actually means.

The paper noted:

Enticed by local monopolies and leverage to charge high rates, a crop of insurers has stepped in and all but erased Obamacare’s “bare county” crisis heading into 2018, allowing state regulators to breathe a little easier ahead of a sign-up season that will still be marked by uncertainty and scarce choices.

As it stands, customers in every U.S. county except one — Paulding County in Ohio — will have at least one insurer on their web-based exchanges set up by the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

It’s a stark turnaround from earlier this year, when nearly seven dozen counties covering over 90,000 people had at some point faced the prospect of having zero options next year, fueling President Trump’s claim the law was “imploding” and needed to be replaced.

Later in the article the paper further noted that insurers who are moving into abandoned counties are requesting high double-digit rate increases, some as high a 57 percent.

What’s more, in virtually all cases, there will only be one insurer moving into those previously abandoned counties — and one insurer does not make a “choice,” unless of course, you’re defining “choice” as between a single company and nothing at all.

Plus, there’s that “leverage to charge high rates” thing going on. While most Obamacare enrollees won’t feel the pinch because their premiums are subsidized, the American taxpayers who are doing the subsidizing will be taken to the cleaners again because insurance companies know that “subsidies rise with premiums for benchmark plans on Obamacare’s exchanges, even if that means taxpayers as a whole end up paying more to blunt higher rates.”

Do you see this perfect storm of corruption, graft and taxpayer abuse that is building — and all because some hypocrite Republicans in Congress refused to make good on their previous pledges to “repeal and replace” the Obamacare disaster?

“Under Obamacare Americans were promised access to a wide variety of high-quality, affordable coverage options. Obamacare has failed to deliver — an unfortunate reality for the American people who are required to buy Washington-approved health insurance or pay a fine,” Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Matt Lloyd told the Times.

It’s disheartening to see a conservative publication so badly spin this story; there are no additional “choices” for millions of Americans seeking health insurance coverage. Besides that, Obamacare’s anti-free market provisions and requirements are continuing to skew the health insurance industry, leading to dramatically higher prices, higher deductibles, and higher out-of-pocket expenses for the vast majority of Americans.

And all to “insure” about 2 percent of the U.S. population (9 percent still don’t have health insurance, though Obamacare was supposed to cover everyone 100 percent). (Related: Obamacare system in ‘insurance death spiral’ warns Texas Governor; total implosion now inevitable)

The sham of Obamacare lives on and continues to destroy American health care — delivery, coverage, and costs — because the law was set up to do just that so Marxist Democrats could usher in full-on government-controlled health care (also called “single-payer”). It was designed to fail, as one of its principal benefactors, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, once said.

Democrats know this. Republicans know this. So why do even those who say they support repeal and replace continue to punish Americans by refusing to do so?

“That, ironically, may have been the design. By making private insurance unaffordable for everyone, it will become available to no one. All that will be left is government-centered, government-run, single-payer health care,” former U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D., R-Okla., said in 2013.

Every lawmaker — Democrat and Republican — who refuses to repeal this monstrosity should be voted out of office, no questions asked.

This story originally appeared at NaturalNews.com.

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Trump rips McConnell for failure on Obamacare and comment about ‘excessive expecatations’

(National Sentinel) Politics: It should be fairly obvious by now that Donald J. Trump did not run for president just to come to Washington and “go along to get along.”

According to sources who spoke to Fox News, the president ripped into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., during a 10-minute phone call Wednesday for his failure to win enough support for Obamacare repeal and replace, like he and other GOP senators and congressman have been promising, many for as long as the Affordable Care Act has been the law of the land.

Trump also had some choice words about Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has been a nonstop a-hole to Trump since the president, as a GOP candidate, criticized him for spending six years as a captive in Vietnam:

The source said Trump was reacting angrily to McConnell’s remarks at a Rotary Club speech Monday in his home state of Kentucky in which he suggested that the president, given his lack of political experience, suffers from “excessive expectations” about what both chambers of Congress can get done.

During the approximately 10-minute phone call, the source said, the president curtly told McConnell he did not appreciate the criticism and still expects Republican leaders to push for repealing ObamaCare, even though that has largely been shelved for now.

The source added that Trump also told McConnell he is unhappy with U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who cast a decisive vote against repealing ObamaCare without a replacement in place. McCain, who is battling brain cancer, also slammed the president’s aggressive rhetoric on North Korea this week.

The source said the president mused to McConnell that he does not understand why the majority leader is allowing McCain to keep his powerful chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee after bucking the party.

Later, Trump softened his McConnell criticism in a tweet:

Senator Mitch McConnell said I had "excessive expectations," but I don't think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2017

“Senator Mitch McConnell said I had ‘excessive expectations,’ but I don’t think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?”

Yes, why not? Trump is absolutely right to put McConnell and the other Senate RINOs in the hot seat over this — especially McCain, who has put his Trump hate above doing what he knows is right for his state and his country.

When they knew Obama was going to veto it, they sent him repeal measure after repeal measure, and now McConnell and Co. want to act as though Trump and the American people supporting him are the unreasonable ones.

The president isn’t accepting that, and neither should any of us.

Granted, it took Obama and the Democrats more than a year to pass the Affordable Care Act. But after years of being told, “Give us the House, the Senate and the presidency and Republicans will repeal and replace it,” and voters giving the GOP carte blanche control over the lawmaking apparatuses of government, why shouldn’t we expect them to come through for us?

Maybe it will take a fraud lawsuit to get Republicans “motivated” enough to do what they promised to do. Now there’s an idea…

Memo from WE THE PEOPLE to Congress: Get rid of Obamacare and pass tax reform or lose your seats in 2018

By J. D. Heyes, editor-in-chief

(National Sentinel) Memo to Republicans in Congress:

Subject: Broken campaign promises

Ladies and gentlemen of the GOP, first and foremost, let me thank you for your service to our country. Being a political leader does not come easily nor is it without sacrifice, both in time and, for many of you, in terms of your earning potential in the private sector. So for that, I thank you.

However, it has become apparent to tens of millions of Americans who played a role in handing your party the majority in both chambers of Congress as well as well as the presidency, there are some serious issues with your inability to deliver on key campaign promises the majority of you made during your most recent campaigns.

While accounting for the fact that sincere people can honestly disagree about issues, there are at least two of which Republicans, prior to winning control of the entire lawmaking and policymaking processes of government, were in near-universal agreement: Repealing the health care “reform” disaster known as Obamacare, and rolling back job- and economy-killing taxes on corporations and individuals.

To the first issue, Republicans have been promising, unequivocally, to repeal Obamacare and replace it with free-market reforms that would establish competitive health insurance and healthcare delivery markets that resulted in far greater choice for American consumers at far lower prices. These principles are not abstract or theoretical, but rather time-tested and proven effective.

And yet, repealing and replacing Obamacare, after seven years of promises and at least a dozen successful votes that were thwarted by the law’s namesake, President Obama, suddenly there is not enough GOP support for clean repeal-and-replace. Where did it go? More importantly, whydid it dissipate? What has changed?

Certainly, the law hasn’t, nor has the law’s downward economic pressures on the healthcare industry in general, consumers, and the U.S. Treasury. (Related: Reality check: Obamacare is KILLING people right now.)

As to the second issue, Republicans have for years complained that our country’s corporate tax rates, among the highest in the industrialized world, are one of the primary reasons why American companies relocate overseas to places like Ireland, whose corporate trading income tax rate at 12.5 percent is less than half of our top rate of 38.9 percent. Since 2015, Ireland’s economy grew 26.3 percent as corporations from the U.S. and around the world flocked there to set up their headquarters.

The Republican Party platform used to have, as one of its central conservative planks, a policy of low taxes and especially low taxes for businesses and corporations. The party knew from its experience during the Reagan years that lower taxes result in more income for the federal government because such tax policy leads to higher growth.

Now, we hear that in addition to whiffing on Obamacare repeal, Republicans may also whiff on tax reform. While it’s true that President Donald J. Trump campaigned on both of these issues, it’s also true that the majority of Republicans did as well. So what has happened?

These are positions that Democrats hold — retain and expand Obamacare and continue to tax and spend our country into oblivion. But Americans don’t want to be governed by Democrats, otherwise, they would be in the majority in Congress and Hillary Clinton would be president.

Which brings me to my point: If Republicans fail to deliver on these two key promises, they are going to pay a price, electorally speaking, come November 2018. Not all but certainly some, namely those who we identify as standing in the way of Obamacare repeal and serious tax reform. Remember Eric Cantor? No one thought a nobody from Cantor’s Virginia district could beat the party’s majority leader in a primary — until he did.

This story originally appeared at NewsTarget.com.

Here are some truth bombs about CBO estimates, GOP repeal of Obamacare, and ‘loss of coverage’

(National Sentinel) Healthcare reform: Pollster Scott Rasmussen of the firm Rasmussen Reports is the latest person to demonstrate why you can believe almost nothing coming out of the mouths of some hypocrite Republicans (and all Democrats) on Capitol Hill who say it would just be horrible — horrible!! — if they voted to repeal Obamacare and replace it with free-market solutions (like they promised for seven years they would do), namely because doing so would throw tens of millions of Americans off health care coverage.

In a column published Thursday, he explains why such claims are not only purely political by highly overblown (and purposely so) and serving as an impediment to giving Americans back some semblance of control over their healthcare coverage and delivery.

He writes in his “Number of the Day” column:

If the individual mandate were to be repealed and Americans were no longer required to purchase the Obamacare-mandated levels of health insurance coverage, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) believes that 15 million Americans would no longer purchase such coverage.

Some, including Jonathan Gruber, believe that the CBO is overestimating the impact of repealing the mandate. Gruber was one of the architects of the healthcare law.

Politically, the impact of these projections is significant since the individual mandate has long been the most unpopular part of Obamacare. Recent polling shows that two-thirds of Americans would like to see it repealed. For many, the idea of the government forcing anybody to buy anything is in conflict with America’s commitment to individual freedom.

Additionally, if the CBO projections are correct, there are 15 million Americans who would directly benefit from the repeal. Typically, when people are directly impacted by a law, their support or opposition is more intense than that of more casual observers.

On the other hand, if Gruber is correct, the Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare would have a much smaller impact than the CBO expects.

If the individual mandate were to be repealed, many Americans might be interested in purchasing less comprehensive and less expensive coverage. The CBO has offered no estimates of how many might take advantage of such alternatives. It is currently illegal for insurance companies to offer less expensive plans offering less comprehensive coverage.

Imagine that — Americans making the conscious decision not to buy a consumer product, in this case health insurance. And why? Maybe because they are young and don’t believe they need it. Maybe it’s because they would rather spend their money on something else.

Who cares? It’s their decision — or, at least, it ought to be. And what’s more, CBO — the non-partisan agency all the #neverrepeal types in D.C. are using as justification to not support getting rid of Obamacare itself says when given the choice, millions of Americans would opt out of coverage on their own.

They wouldn’t be “thrown off.” They wouldn’t be “denied coverage.” They just wouldn’t buy it.

Face it, lawmakers who don’t support repeal and replacement of Obamacare for any reason also don’t support your right to choose which health coverage package is best for you. They think government ought to be doing it for you, even if the system they imposed on us is a) too expensive; b) under-serving; and c) falling apart.

Guess who ISN’T living under Obamacare’s expensive, onerous rules? That would be Congress

(National Sentinel) Healthcare reform: Just in case some Americans didn’t know or had forgotten, a Florida Republican reminded everyone on Wednesday that, as some of his hypocritical GOP colleagues in the Senate continue to deny Americans real healthcare choice and competition, Congress isn’t playing by Obamacare’s rules because it exempted itself long ago.

As reported by Breitbart News, Rep. Ron DeSantis, in an interview with the network’s SiriusXM program, noted how incredibly unfair it was for Congress to force Americans to comply with a hideously ineffective and grossly expensive law while exempting themselves.

“Republicans have promised for years to repeal and replace Obamacare, yet this effort has seemed to stall in the Senate,” DeSantis said on the floor of the House earlier this week. “The best way to restart the Obamacare repeal process is simple: make Congress live under it. The president can make this happen.

“Make members live under Obamacare as written. If you make them live under Obamacare, my guess is that they will vote to quickly repeal Obamacare,” he continued.

On Breitbart Radio he added: “It’s frustrating because we can put our money where our mouth is in terms of Obamacare because Congress is supposed to be in these exchanges under the law. There was an amendment offered by [Sen. Charles] Grassley [R-Iowa] back in 2010 for that.”

That said, Roll Call reported in September 2013 that Grassley’s amendment originally intended for lawmakers and staff to be able to keep their employer subsidies (even though Obamacare prevents your employer from providing you subsidies to buy insurance through the law’s exchanges). Still, Grassley’s intent was to ensure that Congress and congressional staff had to comply with the very same rules and regulations the American public had to comply with under all Obamacare provisions.

That didn’t happen. Obama’s Office of Personal Management issued a rule in 2013 exempting the lot of them, as Roll Call reported:

“These proposed regulations implement the administrative aspects of switching Members of Congress and congressional staff to their new insurance plans – the same plans available to millions of Americans through the new Exchanges,” OPM Director of Planning and Policy Jon Foley said in a statement.

But OPM separately noted that, unlike other Americans, Members of Congress and staff will continue to keep their employee subsidies under the plan, claiming a legal loophole written into the law itself.

Now, DeSantis is trying to remind Congress and President Donald J. Trump that for years they have not had to live under the same Obamacare rules the rest of us do, which is yet another reason to be angry with GOP senators who voted to get rid of Obamacare on several occasions in the past, but won’t do so now.

CBO’s ‘projection’ that ’22 million’ would ‘lose health insurance’ under O-care repeal is BOGUS and an excuse to do nothing

 

(National Sentinel) Healthcare reform: By now you’ve no doubt heard from all Democrats and RINOs in the Senate that it’s just not possible to vote for the latest iteration of Republican health care “reform” because the Congressional Budget Office says it will toss “22 million” Americans off of health insurance.

A tweet from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, fake Indian and class warrior, is typical of the Left’s hysterical nonsense:

The @SenateGOP "health care" bill is back from the dead to rip health care away from 22 million Americans. We are a better people than that. pic.twitter.com/WQbuCf2m3s

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 20, 2017

We’ll get back to Warren’s posturing in a moment, but focus for now on the ’22 million’ figure: It’s BS.

An assessment from health care reform expert Avik Roy notes what the Left and the RINOs don’t want you to know: That the CBO’s assessment is a number without context.

Put in context, he writes in Forbes, the difference between Obamacare and the Republican legislation is that three-quarters of those who would “lose” coverage under the GOP bill would choose to do so because they’d no longer be forced to buy coverage under O-care’s individual mandate requirement.

He notes:

After Obama became president, the CBO told him not having an individual mandate would mean his health reform plan would cover 16 million fewer people. So Obama relented, and included an individual mandate in what we now call Obamacare.

Proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare from congressional Republicans and right-of-center think tanks disagreed on a number of things, but they were unanimous in repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate. The idea that Americans should be forced by the government to buy a private product, merely for the offense of being alive, is seen by all conservatives as a constitutional injury.

 

And there’s a more fundamental question: if Obamacare’s insurance is so wonderful, why do millions of Americans need to be forced to buy it? By definition, you haven’t been “kicked off” your insurance if the only reason you’re no longer buying it is that the government has stopped fining you.

He further noted that “of the 22 million fewer people who will have health insurance in 2026 under the Senate [health care] bill, 16 million will voluntarily drop out of the market because they will no longer face a financial penalty for doing so: 73 percent of the total.”

In other words, the CBO is fixated on the individual mandate, even though the requirement has completely skewed the insurance marketplace. By requiring Americans to buy something, and then further mandating they must buy a government-imposed minimum package of “benefits” (whether they need them or not), Obamacare has completely removed one of the most important cost-saving elements of the free market: Choice. Americans no longer have any choice in what kind of health care coverage they purchase, and health insurance companies no longer have any freedom to offer less expensive, tailored plans to fit individual needs.

Which brings us full circle back to Big Government advocates like Warren, along with the rest of the Democrats who imposed Obamacare on the nation and now the RINOs who have broken their promise to repeal it: The real issue here is their refusal to return freedom of choice to the American consumer — which just happens to be the most effective way of lowering health insurance and healthcare delivery costs.

And they’re using bogus CBO “projections” as their excuse to deny us this choice.

The individual mandate was always an outrage. In a republic that was built on the principles of individualism, forcing Americans to buy anything has remained an insult to the Constitution and the American conscience. Worse, the fact that Obamacare has failed miserably to deliver on its myriad of promises isn’t even in the discussion these days, and it damn well ought to be; we wouldn’t be discussing repeal if the law had worked as Obama and the lying liars of the Democratic Party had delivered us true “reform.”

But then, it was never going to work as advertised; it was never supposed to work as advertised. Obamacare was always to be a prelude to complete government-run health care in the vein of “Medicare for all” or, perhaps more appropriately, “VA care for all.”

And don’t think the RINOs don’t know this — they do, which makes their betrayal on repealing Obamacare sting that much more.

By accepting the CBO’s 22 million projection, no matter the formula or policy assumptions used to reach it, then you also have to accept the original premise of Obamacare — that government ought to mandate and control all health care in the first place.

Otherwise, why would anyone be upset if some Americans chose not to buy coverage?

We don’t accept that premise, therefore, we don’t accept the CBO’s projections or congressional excuses as to why they “can’t” repeal and replace Obamacare. This isn’t a debate about “numbers of insured;” it is about demanding that Congress give us back our freedom to choose whether or not we wish to purchase a consumer product and if so, on our terms, not those mandated by the government.

Anything else is just distracting noise.

House conservatives seek to bypass Speaker Ryan on Obamacare repeal

(National Sentinel) Congress: House conservatives have had enough of lousy Republican leadership and RINOs who really don’t want to repeal Obamacare, so they’re moving on their own, and that includes bypassing the hapless speaker, Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

As reported by Breitbart News, Rep. Tom Garrett and a dozen other members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus said he will file a discharge petition to bring a clean repeal of Obamacare to the floor, thereby putting the RINOs on record as now opposing a piece of legislation they claimed to support for the past seven years:

The House Freedom Caucus repeatedly argued that the best path to repealing Obamacare revolves around a simple repeal of Obamacare and then replacing the Affordable Care Act with a free-market alternative.

Congress passed a clean repeal bill of Obamacare in 2015 only to have it vetoed by President Obama. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, reintroduced the same legislation in 2017. However, Congress has not taken up that legislation.

Now, it’s time to get that clean repeal measure back up for a vote, said Garrett.

“I commend both the President and Republican leadership for working to replace the monstrosity that is Obamacare. However, we have seen discussions for replacement continue to stall and we must change our approach to reforming healthcare,” he said.

“The House should lead with an incremental approach by supporting a clean-repeal bill and then enter into replacement negotiations,” he noted further. “As such, I just initiated a seldom-used parliamentary procedure to advance H.R. 1436 through a discharge petition. The overwhelming majority of my Republican colleagues cast their vote in support of this legislation in 2015, and I have faith they will do nothing short of that now.”

Garrett’s faith may be misguided, but we’ll see. At least he’s doing something to advance a major agenda item pushed for many years by Republicans and echoed by President Donald J. Trump on the campaign trail last year.

What’s notable here is that this petition is being introduced by a rank-and-file GOP member, and not the Speaker of the House. That should tell you something about the Republican leadership’s real intent regarding Obamacare — which can only be two things: 1) They really don’t believe that Americans should have the freedom to decide, along with health providers and insurers, what care and care plans are best for them; or 2) They will do anything to deny Trump any major legislative victories, period.

Talk show legend Rush Limbaugh thinks it’s the latter. We agree.

Rand: Insurers who ‘gamed the system’ actually wrote GOP heath reform bill

(National Sentinel) Healthcare legislation: Sen. Rand Paul is no fan of the Republican health care bill. In fact, he’s not much of a fan of the way in which the GOP leadership is doing all it can to not repeal Obamacare.

On Sunday, the Kentucky Republican panned the latest iteration of GOP healthcare ‘reform,’ saying that the measure currently being bantered about in the upper chamber was largely written by insurance company lobbyists who “gamed the system” to score billions in subsidies from American taxpayers.

As reported by Lifezette:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Saturday evening that he had chosen to delay the chamber’s consideration of the Better Care Reconciliation Act until Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has recovered from surgery for a blood clot and returned to Washington, D.C. McCain’s vote is crucial for the Better Care Act because McConnell can only afford to lose two Republican votes, and both Paul and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have announced they will be voting “no.”

Paul, a conservative, contends the bill does not deliver on Republicans’ explicit promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Collins, one of the least conservative members of the Senate GOP, believes the plan cuts the expansion of Medicaid too deeply and wants to protect other Obamacare provisions.

“This bill keeps most of the Obamacare taxes, keeps most of the regulations, keeps most of the subsidies,” Paul said on Fox News‘ “Fox News Sunday.” “And [it] creates something that Republicans have never been for, and that’s a giant insurance bailout superfund.”

Later, on CBS News‘ “Face the Nation,” Paul predicted that the McCain-triggered delay will only increase the bill’s chances of dying.

“You know, I think the longer the bill’s out there, the more conservative Republicans are going to discover that it’s not repeal and the more that everybody’s going to discover that it keeps the fundamental flaw of Obamacare,” Paul said. “It keeps the insurance mandates that cause the prices to rise, which chase young, healthy people out of the marketplace, and leads to what people call adverse selection, where you have a sicker and sicker insurance pool, and the premiums keep rising through the roof.”

Further, he noted: “And one of the amazing things to me is, for all the complaints of Republicans about Obamacare, we keep that fundamental flaw. And the reason you know Republicans acknowledge this is [that] they make a giant insurance fund to subsidize those prices. Basically, they’re subsidizing the death spiral of Obamacare. So for all Republicans’ complaints about the death spiral of Obamacare, they don’t fix it — they simply subsidize it with taxpayer monies, which I just don’t agree with at all.”

“Right now, the insurance companies have gamed the system such that they get enormous profit from the group plans. And then they lose money in the individual markets and they whine and they come to Washington,” Paul said on “Face the Nation.” “They write the bill and they get bailed out. It’s a terrible situation.”

Paul noted that Republicans have been promising through four elections to repeal and replace Obamacare with free-market-oriented reforms that give patients, providers and insurers much more choice, while lowering costs and prices through stiffer competition.

“They elected us to repeal Obamacare. And now we’re going to keep most of the taxes, keep the regs, keep the subsidies and create a giant bailout superfund for the insurance companies. I just don’t see it,” Paul said.

Neither do we. But we feel compelled to remind our readers that the current disaster that is our healthcare system, with its sky-high monthly premiums, spiraling out-of-pocket costs and reduced consumer choice, was brought to us by Democrats, including many who are still in office and who, today, won’t lift a finger to help Republicans fix what they didn’t break.

That means to Democrats, politics is much more important than delivering a workable solution for all Americans — including the misguided souls who still vote for them in elections.