Why Democrats secretly want an Obamacare repeal vote

[DonViejo]

House Democrats think they could seize the majority in 2018 if Republicans are on the record backing the controversial health bill.

By HEATHER CAYGLE 05/03/17 05:19 AM EDT

House Democrats think they’ve finally found their path back to power: Republicans voting to repeal Obamacare.

Yes, the best thing to happen to House Democrats since they pushed through the sprawling health care law — and lost the majority as a result — could be the Republican drive to dismantle it.

“I think the Republicans are playing Russian roulette with this vote,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “There’s no question in competitive districts where you’ve got a potentially vulnerable Republican incumbent, this could make or break you.”

Democrats don’t actually want the law repealed. Under their dream scenario, House GOP leaders would muscle through their controversial health care bill only to watch it die a long, painful death in the Senate, where it has already received a lukewarm reception from Republicans. Obamacare would stay intact while the House Republicans who voted to gut the law have a big shiny target on their back heading into the 2018 midterms.

“I think there will be a political price to pay at the ballot box in 2018,” Rep. Linda Sánchez of California, vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus, told reporters Tuesday.

more
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/03/obamacare-repeal-democrats-237882

[TNLib]

1. I don't think Trump cares about their political futures either

He wants that investment tax cut for himself and his cronies.

[Kirkwood]

2. They still have to give people a reason to vote for them.

It only be, 'we're not as bad as the other side'.

[exboyfil]

3. I pointed out to my Representativ

that he will be held accountable for his vote irrespective of what ultimately happens to the legislation. I have also been baiting the No's because it is too draconian that voted Yes for the full repeal in 2016 on WSJ etc.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. Rick Wilson says Chump Care has only 25 votes in the Senate!

[Wellstone ruled]

5. That will change,

and that is all predicated on the size of the Graft checks cut by Cigna,Allina,and United Health.

[NewJeffCT]

8. A month ago

Trumpcare supposedly would have lost by 50 votes in the House when it was pulled.

[Hortensis]

6. I'm one of them and not secret. Those who'll suffer from

repeal of the ACA will suffer less and for a shorter period and the less damage will be done the sooner we can get those serving anti-government zealots out of power.

They are busy gutting all government programs and sabotaging their ability to function from the inside while very few people are aware it's happening. "The people" come into this as they are invited to witness that the government programs they really want just "can't" work and are doomed to always fail.

Notice how taking care of our "boys" in uniform is no longer a big mantra for the right and hasn't been for a long time? That's because billionaires who resent paying taxes for services they don't need have slated the VA for destruction ("privatization&quot as surely as the ACA, just not as openly. But no coincidence that right wing media have stopped waving the "our boys" pompoms. The attack has been in as high gear as they think they can get away with for several years now, with the result that most people believe it runs poorly, instead of wonderfully well--considering, and blame the effects of massive underfunding and other sabotage to intrinsic "government" incompetence.

Medicaid being planned for major gutting right now of course. Medicaid is why hundreds of thousands of grandparents aren't sleeping in their kids' former dining room, while hundreds of thousands of "lucky" family members haven't had to quit their jobs to provide the 24/7/365 care they must have.

[Ms. Toad]

7. Shame on you. Dead is pretty much an infinite suffering - so no I will not suffer less

because by the time we repair the damage my daughter will be dead. So no, my suffering will not be less or for a shorter period of time if they get their way.

Don't play political football with my daughter's life, and the lives of those like her. As the party that purports to care about people, we need to be fighting tooth and nail to make whatever we cannot stop the least harmful to those who cannot afford the repeal of the ACA - and political optics be damned.

Anyone hoping, secretly or otherwise, for the repeal of the ACA is hoping for my daughter to die - and that is not acceptable.

[m-lekktor]

9. I can't believe people would think this is actually a good thing.

To hell with people's healthcare and lives as long as a bunch of politicians can get re elected because of it. jesus fucking christ.

[Ms. Toad]

13. Yup. The smilie is appropriate -

It makes me physically ill when I hear Democrats or other liberal/progressives hoping the ACHA will be enacted to make the Republicans "own it," so we can use it as a political weapon - ignoring the people who will die because of it - rather than doing whatever we have to do to salvage whatever we can, regardless of the political consequences..

Republicans play games with people's lives for political gain. Not liberals.

[Hortensis]

10. Perhaps you could get off the computer and go get a part-time job,

or full-time if the hours are available, or whatever you need to do to meet this possible crisis?

Attacking people who are trying to save the many lives at stake, not just those right now but the far larger numbers that are on the line for several decades into the future, does not strike me as a good use of your precious time.

Please remember, if the people determined to destroy all government programs get people on SCOTUS who rule that compulsory taxation for them is unconstitutional, we will become the planet's most advanced "third world" nation, or at very least most red states will, and it will take decades to rebuild to what we have right now.

[Ms. Toad]

12. Nice assumptions

I guess you thought I was being hyperbolic, and could fix my itty bitty health care issues with a few extra hours of work. I am literally talking about her ability to stay alive.

My daughter's health care costs $60,000/year each and every year and will cost $.5 million in the year she needs a liver transplant, and $100,000/year every year therafter. In addition to the liver disease that can require up to 5 liver transplants in a lifetime (at least that is the most I am aware anyone has had), she is at risk for a half dozen cancers that are so aggressive that she has to have very costly screening (specialized MRIs) every six months to have any hope of catching them in time for her to survive them. [If you were around DU when Andy Stephensen died very quickly from cancer - that is only one of hte cancers my daughter is at high risk for.] We have lost between a half-dozen and a dozen friends to this disease (or the related cancers) in the past 5 years. I'm not really in the mood to check exactly how many because it is too depressing wondering if my daughter will be the next one - but I can name 5 off the top of my head, and can name an equal number who are on their 3rd or more liver transplant.

My daughter currently has health insurance through her work, but because of her liver condition she cannot work beyond 32 hours a week. If she loses her job because she is unable to work - or loses her insurance when that crap that was passed takes effect and employers can again impose lifetime limits, or can skip essential health benefits like prescrptions (hers cost abotu $30,000/year) or screening (that's the other $30,0000/year), or hospitalization, or transplants, she will have nothing because she is too old to be put on my insurance. So she is SOL.

All the money in the world will be unable to buy access to health insurance under the plan you are hoping will succeed.

You may have $60,000 a year just sitting around, or the ability to generate it on a whim, and on top of that to save enough up so that when she needs one or more transplants you have a half million saved up. My daughter doesn't. Nor does she have time or resources to wait while Democrats play political tiddly winks with her life, hoping for the ACA to be repealed so that those other guys get the blame and sometime a decade from now (the length of time it has taken for each of the last 3 significant changes to health care law), we can get a pale shadow of the ACA.

As for my own work, I work more than 12 hours a day, 7-days a week. I arrived at work at 9:00 AM this morning. If I'm lucky I'll leave before 3 AM this morning. I left last night at 5 AM (so yes, I'm functioning on 2 hours of sleep - usually I get around 4). The last day I was not physically present in my office was New Year's Day. I keep up that schedule with my own significant health issues - I was diagnosed with breast cancer just about a year ago, and worked a minimum of 60 hours a week through treatment, including the week I had surgery and the weeks I had radiation.) I don't think there are enough hours in the day for me to add another job - even a part time one. Not that it would solve anything, becuase the repeal of the ACA means that insurance may not be available at any cost - becuase it is pretty likely that there will be a very long waiting list for insurance through the high risk pools.

So yes, shame on you - and anyone else - who is hoping the ACA will be repealed in order to make the other political party look bad enough to get voted out of office. Because that is a hope my daughter will die for the sake of political gamesmanship - or at the very minimum an assetion that you are willing to sacrifice her and others like her who cannot live through the decade it will take to recover.

Instead we should be fighting tooth and nail to ensure that as many people stay covered as possible - even if it means the other political side doesn't look quite as bad. After all we're supposed to be the party that cares for people, and doesn't sacrifice people for politics. But I guess my daughter, and others like her who don't have a decade they can go wtihout care, are cannon fodder in this political war. It just pisses me off that my side is helping line her up to be shot at.

[Hortensis]

14. You introduced a daughter whose death I will

presumably be responsible for, and that was extremely out of line. The more so now that I learn she's an adult with her own job and her own insurance through work that is not dependent on ACA subsidies or Medicaid.

I happen to know the name of the disease that will kill me, if some accident doesn't take me first, and expect to before too long begin to need a great deal of medical care as it progresses. It attacks many organ systems, but for most of us destruction of lung tissue finally puts an end to it.

One thing you need to realize is that right now WE CANNOT PROTECT THE ACA as it is. A bill will be passed. And since those behind it intend to destroy the ACA completely, it WILL remove coverage for many who need it. Some will die, many will suffer, be unable to work, fall into poverty, and lose their homes. This first bill will then be followed by other bills and other actions from within the executive branch that continue the destruction.

We can slow and limit the damage, and are, but the only way to stop it is at the polls. As soon as possible. To limit the destruction taking place right now throughout government. To limit the devastating effects of that on society. And before they get more of their kind of hard-core conservatives, already chosen, on SCOTUS.

And the most powerful way to cut through the decades of lies they've hid behind is to let their actions reveal their horrific goals to the electorate for what they really are. Now that they are so close to achieving what they want, that's the huge problem: HOW to accomplish these last steps without causing an uprising against them.

[Ms. Toad]

16. When disaster is headed your way, there is a difference between mustering everything you can

head it off, or at least minimize it's damage,

and hoping for the disaster (which you said you did).

There is no shame in trying, yet failing, to avert a disaster - but there is shame in hoping for it at the cost of real lives so we can regain political power. That is what I find offensive in this thread and every other thread that treats my daughter's life as collateral damage in a big political game.

As for being less concerned becuase she is an adult with employer based insurance, she is an adult living at home, at nearly 27, because her disease limits her ability to work. She can (currently) manage to work just barely enough hours at a minimum wage job to be eligible for the ACA-mandated insurance coverage. So she will be directly and immediately impacted by the elimination of the requirement for employers to provide insurance to anyone working at least 32 hours. When they take that away there will be no alternative for her.

It is shameful for any Democrat, liberal, or progressive to hope for the AHCA to succeed, because that position treats those hurt or killed by that success as acceptable collateral damage for political gain. I will not apologize for pointing that out, or for putting a face to one of those being treated as collateral damage.

[Hortensis]

17. You need to be smart about it. Your daughter is doing okay

now while she has a job with insurance, but that may not be the case in future. Any course of action that promises to result in a series of cutbacks in healthcare over the next seven years, and possibly beyond, with ACA, Medicaid, and VA effectively eliminated, federal grants to state programs eliminated, Medicare gutted and "privatized," Social Security gutted and "privatized," etc., is a very bad choice for people like her.

We need to get control of the house in 2018, and hopefully the senate, and the key to that is a lot of conservative voters being very rudely awakened from their delusions before that -- BY BETRAYAL FROM THOSE THEY STILL CURRENTLY TRUST.

[Ms. Toad]

18. Being smart does not include treating the lives of people like my daughter as expendable

for the sake of political gain.

I agree we need to get control of the house in 2018 - but not if the price paid is hoping for a big enough disaster to strike the lives of my daughter and others like her to wake up folks who have not been awakened in the nearly 4 decades I have been intensely watching health care legislation - and the lives of people with chronic illnesses.

Moderate protection for anyone with pre-existing conditions didn't arrive until the late 90s, and then only for people whose insurance came via work - people who were forced to pay thousands of dollars in premiums a month in order to prevent the dreaded pre-existing condition bar HIPAA. There was no big outcry prior to that time - no big awakening that it was unfair to people with pre-existing conditions. The ACA, once enacted, was implemented too slowly for it to gain enough traction before this election to be truly embedded in people's psyche (one of my main complaints about the ACA was that people would not have had enough time to get over the knee-jerk reaction before we faced an elected body that could actually repeal it). And then key provisions (like the unified cap for prescription and medical care) were delayed another year - so they've barely been in place at all. There's still too much tension between knee-jerk anti-Obama reaction (compounded by high premiums and few insurance choices in states that did not fully implement the program) and the (proportionately) few people who have every year costs like my daughter. The result is that there are not enough people for whom even teh AHCA disaster would be an effective wake-up call.

So you fight like hell for the best you can do now. You certainly don't sit back and watch - and advise progressive legislators to not lift a finger, hoping for a disastrous failure - because (1) the disaster you're hoping for won't wake these idiots up anyway and (2) that failure is not a political game but the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

[Hortensis]

19. I believe that weakness now, caving and scrabbling to

hold onto everything possible for the short term, is an investment in big future losses. But go your own way. Your daughter will do the same, whatever that is.

Republics are supposed to be about people who disagree strongly nevertheless somehow coming together enough to make it work.

It seems that we have a big start on consensus--that a very wealthy nation of over 300 million people owes it to themselves to develop a system that provides the great benefits of modern healthcare to all. From my viewpoint, the fact that we can creates a moral imperative to do.

[ecstatic]

11. Repubs regularly cheat during elections. So it's a risk

I don't think we should take.

[Bengus81]

15. Just because Dems are saying that ACA repeal could be political sucide doesn't mean they want this..

bullshit being played out on C-Span nearly every day and now passed in the House. They would encourage days or weeks or REAL discussion on how to make the ACA better but we know Repugs will never do that.