"Ryan Care" Bill on Swift Road to Passage

This Trump Health Care bill is on the road to passage in the House and I mean later this month of March.  I guess if you call anything “American” then that makes it all right”. The congressional budget office hasn’t even “scored” this bill to determine how much it will cost or save or otherwise.  Norman believes this bill will cause a massive hemorage of red ink because this bill represents a tremendous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.   This bill will increase the number of uninsured patients Obama worked so hard to allieviate.  The American Medical Association and AARP have come out against this bill.  But even with all this bad news the bill has already cleared two key committees.  Goldman says the Republicans learned something from eight years ago when they were able to obstruct a lot of bills and turn on the whining and herranging to slow the bill down.  It took congress till March of 2010 to pass the Affordable Care Act or some fourteen months.  Congress wasn’t going to make the same mistake this time.  Their motto is to pass it before the other side knows what hit them.  They aren’t holding hearings on the bill or anything.  And Mitch Mc Connell says in the US Senate they will pass the House bill even more quickly in a rubber stamp action.   But as I said before, the democrats can make a political issue out of any health care bill that’s passed if the average American is worse off.  Also it was Marco Rubio go got some insurance gap coverage bill repealed so the government did not reimburse insurance companies they lost under Obama care so that they had no choice but to drastically raise their rates just before last fall’s election.  This hike in rates no doubt figured in their decision to vote for Trump over Obama. 

WASHINGTON — The Republican drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act advanced on Thursday as two House committees approved broad legislation to undo the law and replace it with a more modest system of tax credits and a rollback of President Barack Obama’s Medicaid expansion.  The rumor persists however that mandatory taxes and other requirements remain in the bill.  The House Energy and Commerce Committee endorsed the legislation on a party-line vote of 31 to 23 after a session that lasted more than 27 hours. The House Ways and Means Committee had approved the measure in a predawn session on Thursday. The House Budget Committee must give its approval to the measure next week before a final House vote that Speaker Paul D. Ryan plans for the week of March 20.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency- - is officially a climate change denier and doesn’t believe that CO2 causes global warming.  This assertion contracts the agency’s own web site.  Some would call it “the shadow hold-overs of Obama”.   People like Shawn Hannity insist that it’s this shadow government of Obama that’s still there as carrier beaurocrats, that are responsible for all of the massive leaking that’s been going on.  Hey, if we have the power maybe we should use it.  If you are looking for specifics here it is.  

EPA chief Scott Pruitt says carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming  8 Hours Ago | 01:02

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Thursday he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.  "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box."  "But we don't know that yet. ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis."

The statement contradicts the public stance of the agency Pruitt leads. The EPA's webpage on the causes of climate change states, "Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change."

In other amusing news arrests of illegal aliens attempting to cross the border are down fifty percent.  This one really surprises me.  I figured the Trump edit would cause the ICE officers to be more aggressive in hunting down aliens but this not the case.  Some claim it’s just the threat of deportation that scares them off.  I really don’t know if news travels that fast.  

(from Washington's blog) In order to understand the enormous magnitude of Trump’s failure (not merely of performance, but of his actual intentions), consider a poll by a top pollster, published on 18 November 2016, ten days after the U.S. Presidential election, and headlined “Support for Trump Fed by Near-Universal Frustration that Government Ignores the People”:  A remarkable nine-in-ten voters agreed that ‘Elected officials think more about the interests of their campaign donors than the common good of the people.’ …  This profound dissatisfaction with government has reached new heights in response to longstanding trend line questions. Asked whether government ‘is run for the benefit of all the people’ or is ‘pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves’ in the 1960s only a minority said that it was run by big interests. In recent years this number has risen to eight-in-ten. In the current study this leapt to an unprecedented 92 percent. …

Just one more item.  It's my policy not to go back and edit blog posts that are ten and eleven years old no matter how "expediant " such a move might be.  Those posts have been there that long and people have been reading them and have a right to expect that that's how I felt on the issues at the time, regardless how trivial I might make the edits.