Surprise! First Trump said he supported it, and then he didn’t. We’ll see:
Less than a week after President Trump said he is cutting off subsidies to health insurance companies, lawmakers say they have a deal to restore the money and take other actions that could stabilize insurance markets for next year.
Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., say they have a tentative agreement to appropriate the subsidies for the next two years, restore money used to encourage people to sign up for Affordable Care Act health plans, and make it easier for states to design their own alternative health care systems.
Alexander said the idea is to stabilize the markets in the short term while Congress continues to debate long-term changes to the ACA.
“Over the next two years, I think Americans won’t have to worry about the possibility of being able to buy insurance in the counties where they live,” he said in a conversation with reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday.
He said he spoke with President Trump over the weekend and that Trump said he supports the idea. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would not commit to bringing the bill up for a vote, as Murray and Alexander seek enough support to ensure it could pass. The bill would need 60 votes to get across the finish line and would require at least a dozen Republicans to take a difficult political step in voting to shore up parts of Obamacare.
Here we go again with the “market stabilization” nonsense.
What role do health insurance companies play, other then creating and maintaining “the market?”
Why do we allow health insurance companies to make a profit? Isn’t it pretty cold bloodied to profit off people that require medical care?
Aren’t Medicare and Tricare both single-payer systems?
Aren’t administrative and treatment costs of the Medicare and Tricare systems far lower then those generated by the market based system currently being used?
Canada has a single-payer system and it hasn’t bankrupted Canada. Nor has it bankrupted England, Germany, France and a hundred other countries.
Nor do any of these countries routinely “ration care.”
The Capitalists are liars.
It’s not gonna happen. Republicans who support it get a primary opponent. Democrats who support it probably should also. The event horizon at two years is a pure repeal.