adjective…never done or known before…I am so sick of hearing this adjective referring to trump…referring to what he’s done…referring to what he’s said…the last straw…it seems we haven’t gotten to the last straw that breaks the back of Democracy…I don’t know what that straw is…we continue to hear nothing from Senate Republicans or House Republicans…they are so intent on getting their donors millions of dollars in tax breaks…they don’t care about the American people…trump continues to bully…to intimidate…to threaten…and Republicans stand silent…they only want trump to sign whatever they put in front of him…damn we the people…today Senator John McCain returned to the Senate to a standing ovation…he called for the return of regular order back into the Senate…to get back to public hearing…and more importantly, to discard passion for reason…evil Mitch McConnell has been chipping away at the rule of order… no one could stop him and he succeeded in his agenda…encouraged like trump, they, little by little, both chip away at our democracy…unprecedented…Bill Maher says the Democrats bring a knife to a gun fight…however, I’m bolstered by the crowds of people protesting…like what happened in Poland…I’m hoping that once and for all these zombie bills will die…and will we see the Republicans step up to the plate when trump appoints a new Attorney General who will fire Special Counsel Mueller…trump continues to dip his foot into the unprecedented pool…to test he water…he wants to see if the lifeguards will do anything for breaking the rules…unprecedented…
I wonder how much McCain’s operation cost…he has health care…as do all the senators and congressmen…they don’t have to worry about paying their health care bills, and yet they think it’s a great idea to take away health care for millions of Americans just to keep a “promise to the American people”…calling your attention to the famous deli scene in When Harry Met Sally…when Rob Reiner’s mother ordered…”I’ll have what she’s having.” from an article in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Frank titled On Health Care, We’ll have What Congress Is Having:
“In the fall of 1994, the Clinton Administration’s much debated comprehensive, and complicated, health-insurance bill—known derisively as Hillarycare—died quietly on Capitol Hill. It was a moment that, the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr later argued, would “go down as one of the great lost political opportunities in American history.” But, before the end, talk of another approach kept bubbling up: to allow those Americans who couldn’t get insurance elsewhere to buy a policy that was just as good, and inexpensive, as what members of Congress got. When Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, said that Americans should get “exactly what we have,” he meant the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.”
“The F.E.H.B.P., as it’s known, was started in 1959, a few years before Medicare, and was meant to cover some nine million government employees—civil-service workers, the courts, the Post Office, members of Congress, and more. It wasn’t a single plan but, rather, as a Times story put it, “a supermarket offering 300 private health plans.” (Even the right-learning Heritage Foundation called it “a showcase of consumer choice and free-market competition.”) One may get a sense of its scope and inclusiveness—its supermarket-ness—in the way that the Office of Personnel Management, which administers the program, explains it to federal employees. Much of the program—for instance, the idea that no one can be refused, or charged more, for a preëxisting condition, or that dependents under twenty-six are covered—will sound familiar to anyone conversant with the most attractive parts of the Affordable Care Act.”
“In the summer of 1994, when the Clinton Administration struggled to win approval for its proposal, there were some signs of actual good will in Congress, along with the predictable determination to dynamite the whole idea. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, wanted any insurer who sold policies to federal workers to offer the same thing to “civilians,” at a reasonable price. Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican and the Minority Leader, favored a scheme in which self-employed individuals and small businesses (employers of up to fifty workers) could buy the federal policy “at the same premium price.” There were several variations of this approach.”
“Then it all went bad, as it had gone bad since the days of the New Deal. Newt Gingrich, who was then the deputy Minority Leader of the House, warned President Clinton that he was endangering his entire agenda in the pursuit of health-care reform—in particular, Gingrich insisted that Clinton was risking a global trade agreement that was probably never in danger. (Someone probably can still explain that era’s excitement over the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or gatt.) Dole by then had given up, and so had Congressman John Dingell, of Michigan, a Democrat, who had been pushing health-care reform since 1955 but eventually said that it was “time to give health-care reform a decent burial and provide for its rebirth.” Two months later, in the midterm elections, Democrats, although they managed to cling to the Senate, lost the House by the widest margin since the midterms of 1946; Gingrich was elected Speaker on the strength of his “Contract with America,” which made a number of promises that were impossible to keep, and in the process launched an era of rabid partisanship. The failure of health-care reform showed mostly that Democrats were a pushover party, with few sounding like Senator Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, who said, “I’m not elected to read the polls and say the public wants me to give up.” The “rebirth” for which Dingell hoped would only come a decade and a half later, with the passage, in 2010, of the Affordable Care Act. For all its flaws, bumbled launch, and absence of Republican support, the A.C.A. has provided health insurance to some twenty million Americans who didn’t have it before. Republicans have been venomously eager to dismantle it ever since. Late last week, the Senate took a big step in that direction by passing a budget “blueprint” that will make it easy for Congress, controlled by Republicans, to repeal the act.” ( this was in January, 2017 )…
“If it’s sometimes hard to understand what makes Republican legislators so angry, here is a theory: their fury may not stem from some ungraspable principle, or hatred of President Obama’s historic victory (or of Obama himself), but, rather, from something personal, and selfish. Under the A.C.A., members of Congress, and congressional staff, among other Capitol Hill employees, were no longer eligible for the F.E.H.B.P. In the chilly language of government directives, the Office of Personnel Management Web site said that “Section 1312 of the Affordable Care Act requires that Members of Congress and their official staff obtain coverage by health plans created under the Affordable Care Act or coverage offered via an Affordable Insurance Exchange.”
“Ouch! In other words, the comfortable choices that were available for more than fifty years were suddenly transferred to the slightly murky passageways of Obamacare. And it follows that, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, members of Congress would be able to return to the federal plan that they, like millions of federal employees, were so fond of. Twenty million other Americans won’t.”
“A better idea, though, might be to find a path (it won’t be easy, but it’s certainly easier than anything else that might be effective and that hundreds of legislators could ever agree upon) to finally offer the beloved, and by most accounts well-administered, federal plan to the rest of the uninsured nation. We can almost hear America demanding, “We want what they’re having.” If Congress is serious about repealing, and replacing, the act, then that’s the sort of replacement that almost anyone could live with.”
today…two of my nieces are having a birthday…first cousins…Abby and Janice…tomorrow is my niece Janae’s birthday…she is celebrating in Chicago…I send a hardy and warm Happy Birthday to You ( All )…Doris flew to Vermont…to visit Patty and Gary…to their “camp” near Burlington…Bernie Sanders country…and Pam is in New York, house and cat sitting for John and Mare…they are in Italy…still and all, I guess everyone is where they should be…even though we are living in unprecedented times…
Art Salazar 