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Trump Finally Admits He Has No Health Care Plan

Mother Jones

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President Trump has been promising a health care plan for months now. But when will we have it? Let’s roll the tape:

January 15:It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon.”

February 5: “I would like to say by the end of the year at least the rudiments but we should have something within the year and the following year.”

February 16: “We’re doing Obamacare, we’re in the final stages. So, we will be submitting sometime in early March, mid-March.

February 27:We have come up with a solution that’s really, really, I think, very good.”

So we’ve gone from immediately to 2018 to mid-March to all done. Today, however, Politico reports that in reality, Trump has no plan at all: “His team has signaled to House Speaker Paul Ryan that they will embrace his health care bill next week, and aides hoped to get a marked-up bill ready.”

Since the House bill is apparently what we’re going to get, it’s worth repeating something I wrote a few months ago. After describing both Obamacare and Ryancare in broad strokes, I noted that their foundations were basically the same:

If you haven’t yet noticed what this all means, let me spell it out. The key parts of Obamacare and Ryan’s plan are the same. They both (a) rely on private insurance, (b) require insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions, (c) encourage people to buy insurance continuously by penalizing them if they don’t, (d) provide billions of dollars in federal subsidies to make insurance affordable for low-income households, and (e) rely on Medicaid for the very poorest.

As liberals have been pointing out forever, any kind of health care plan has to have three parts:

Protection for pre-existing conditions at a reasonable price, so everyone has access to insurance.
Some kind of incentive for everyone to buy insurance, so insurance companies have plenty of healthy people to balance out the sick people.
Subsidies so that poor people can afford coverage.

Sure enough, Ryancare has all those things, just like Obamacare. There are differences in the details, but those don’t matter very much. What does matter is the difference in cost. Obamacare provides subsidies of about $100 billion per year, while Ryancare provides…something much less. We don’t know exactly how much less yet, but certainly less than half of Obamacare, maybe as little as a quarter. This is what makes Ryancare useless, not its overall structure, which is fairly workable. The working poor and the working class can only barely afford insurance even with Obamacare’s subsidies. They won’t come close with Ryancare’s.

But the rich will get a big tax cut, and the middle class will get a nice break on their health insurance. In short order, however, interstate deregulation will almost certainly lead to individual insurance becoming all but useless, and the individual insurance market will probably collapse fairly soon after that. Alternatively, it might collapse even before Ryancare goes into effect, as insurers bail out on Obamacare (why bother with it if it’s just going away soon?) and conclude that they can’t make money on Ryancare either.

See? It’s not so complicated after all. I imagine this is what Paul Ryan has wanted all along.

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Trump Finally Admits He Has No Health Care Plan

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In Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders Turns up the Heat on Hillary Clinton

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t mince too many words during a campaign stop in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on Friday afternoon. Midway through his typical stump speech railing against the millionaires and billionaires, he broke off to explicitly contrast himself with Hillary Clinton for her history of taking money from fossil fuel interests and giving highly paid speeches to financial firms, among other topics.

“As many of you may know, Secretary Clinton has given speeches on Wall Street for $225,000 per speech,” Sanders said to boos from his crowd. “You know what I think? If you’re going to give a speech for $225,000, it must be a really fantastic speech, don’t you think? Why else would you get $225,000? It must be written in Shakespearean prose. It must be a speech that solves most, if not all, the problems facing humanity.” Clearly pleased with his quips, Sanders then called for Clinton to share the speech transcripts with the rest of the world.

Sanders ticked off a number of other points of disagreement, lingering after the punchiest statements to allow his supporters time to boo his opponent. Sanders faulted Clinton for associating with a super-PAC, and supporting trade deals that he said harmed Wisconsin manufacturing. He said she couldn’t be trusted on foreign policy, since “she voted for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of America.” Nor could she be trusted on the environment. “Secretary Clinton and I disagree on the issue of fracking. It may not seem like a sexy issue, but it is an enormously important issue,” Sanders said, pointing to her record pushing shale gas extraction abroad when she led the State Department.

But his most pointed criticism came when Sanders discussed the hubbub over fossil fuel donations that has enveloped the campaign over the past day. At a campaign event in New York on Thursday, a Greenpeace activist asked Clinton if she’d reject donations from those industries in light of her stance on climate change. “I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me. I’m sick of it,” Clinton responded, visibly angry as she jabbed her finger at the activist and argued that garnering support from individuals who work for fossil fuel companies isn’t the same as being supported by gas and oil companies.

Sanders was having none of that Friday. “Secretary Clinton, you owe our campaign an apology: We were telling the truth,” Sanders sternly said. He pointed to research from Greenpeace that highlights $4.5 million in donations to Clinton’s campaign from people tied to the fossil fuel industry. The figure lumps together contributions to Clinton’s campaign from employees of such companies (some of whom have also donated to Sanders) and donations from lobbyists working for the industry, along with money from individuals tied to fossil fuels that has gone to her super-PAC, Priorities USA. The Clinton campaign has pointed out that, as is legally required, it is not coordinating with the super-PAC, though Clinton and her staff have recruited donors for the organization.

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In Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders Turns up the Heat on Hillary Clinton

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