GOP goes quiet on ObamaCare

[QueEx]

GOP goes quiet on ObamaCare

House Republicans have no scheduled votes or hearings on
ObamaCare, signaling a shift in the party’s strategy as
the White House rides a wave of good news on the law


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Not a single House committee has announced plans to attack the healthcare law in the coming weeks, and only one panel of jurisdiction commented to The Hill despite repeated inquiries.

GOP campaign committees also declined to say whether they will launch any new efforts on the law.

The lack of action highlights the GOP’s struggle to adjust its message now that enrollment in the exchanges beat projections and the uninsured rate is going down. Insurers also report that 80 to 90 percent of new policyholders are paying their premiums, contradicting a frequent criticism from the GOP.


This dynamic was laid bare last week as Republicans failed to land punches against the healthcare law in a hearing of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. In a rare display, Democrats began to control the message as witnesses from health insurance companies rebuffed several lines of GOP questioning.

Republicans are conscious of the need to keep a drumbeat going against the law.The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a memo on Friday that said the law remained deeply unpopular and that “liberal media elites” touting the idea it was a success were beginning to influence beat reporters desperate for a new story.

The memo noted that Democratic candidates aren’t touting their support for the law, a sign of their uneasiness.

But The Washington Post reported Friday that three major groups allied with Democrats will launch public advertising campaigns about ObamaCare.

The Service Employees International Union, Planed Parenthood Action Fund and MoveOn.org are each launching campaigns that highlight popular parts of the Affordable Care Act. The ads are meant to boost the law and officials who backed it.

Republicans remain confident the reform won’t work, and that the party’s opposition to it will be rewarded in elections to come.


Hitting a new record, 55 percent disapproved of ObamaCare in the latest Pew poll, a finding that bolsters GOP confidence that the law’s unpopularity will help them in this year’s elections.

At the same time, Republican aides and strategists said the party is taking the opportunity to broaden its portfolio of issues ahead of November amid a changing landscape on healthcare

“They are now recognizing that they need to be more than a one-trick pony,” said Ford O'Connell, a veteran of Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign and chairman of CivicForumPAC.

This is evident in the new energy House Republicans are putting into a probe into the Benghazi attacks, and a range of pocketbook issues that dovetail nicely with the past criticisms of the healthcare law.


“The two go hand in hand,” GOP pollster Glen Bolger said. “[Voters] are just worried about the quality of their healthcare declining. They're also worried it’s going to cost them more money, and generally more money for less is not a winning proposition.

The change in focus is also evident in what Republicans are not doing.

Last fall, the GOP tore into ObamaCare around the clock, and criticisms of the law became a huge story amid the enrollment website's woes. Now, major news events related to the Affordable Care Act barely draw a Republican response.

Republicans virtually ignored the final release of ObamaCare's enrollment numbers and a report that healthcare spending jumped in the first quarter of 2014. Mentions of the law have dwindled in press conferences by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), where they were a mainstay earlier this year.

And on the Senate side, the usual partisan rancor was almost completely absent during last week’s confirmation hearing for the next Health and Human Services secretary. Only a few GOP senators mentioned ObamaCare in their questions, and three Republicans failed to attend the event at all.

The House has no plans to vote on ObamaCare legislation in May, according to a memo from Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) released late last month.


It is also unclear when the party's replacement proposal for the law will come to a vote.

Despite pressure from conservatives, Cantor has not committed to put a bill on the House floor by August recess.

Democratic leaders have long insisted the law would boost their electoral hopes in the fall, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) predicted this week that GOP opposition would haunt Republicans.

“The Republican position of repeal has become increasingly problematic for GOP Senate candidates, so it’s no surprise that they’re beginning to abandon their failed strategy of wasting millions attacking Democrats on ObamaCare,” said DSCC spokesman Justin Barasky.

On the campaign trail, it is clear that some candidates and groups are starting to pivot.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently launched its first major ad campaign looking toward the general election.

While all the ads touted GOP lawmakers’ and candidates’ work to boost the economy and create jobs, only a handful made mention of ObamaCare.

Looking toward his general election fight, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) released an ad last week that also focused on job creation.

McConnell and others are sure to highlight the unpopular law in the coming months. But it remains to be seen how much, and that will largely depend on whether ObamaCare-related premiums increase this summer.

Republicans argue the transition is natural for this stage in the campaign cycle.“There is absolutely zero evidence that any Republican is talking about ObamaCare less,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Brook Hougesen in a statement.


—Alexandra Jaffe and Russell Berman contributed.
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Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/205752-gop-goes-quiet-on-o-care#ixzz31Yi5YfNG

 

[trstar]

Once it was implemented, the play was lost.

They should have come up with a real alternative, but no, they suck.

 

[thoughtone]

GOP goes quiet on ObamaCare​

...and the Democrats are aiding and abetting them.

The so called mainstream media is allowing the republicans to pivot away from Obamacare to Benghazi.

Next thing you'll know, the ill informed public will claim that Obamacare has been repealed because the media hasn't mentioned it in a while.

 

[muckraker10021]

Letter From Summersville Hospital

May 11, 2014<table border="2" width="850" height="2400" bordercolorlight="#FF9933" bordercolordark="#FF9933" background="http://st4.divshare.com/launch.php?f=25540932&s=092&i=normal">
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My Dear Fellow Americans

Sitting here in a hospital room in Summersville, West Virginia waiting to find out if a combination of genetic Calvinism, environmental toxins and my own mistakes have finally caught up with me, I heard playing on my roommate’s television an advertisement for some politician whom the announcer told me would “go to Washington and fight against Obamacare.” I am furious at a time when I probably shouldn’t be, but I may as well make the best of it.

Seldom do I pause to answer in writing the mad, hateful ravings of a right-wing, self-absorbed, Republican candidate for elected office; for if I did, I would never be able to get to the microphone to do it via radio every night. But since the question of healthcare is a matter of importance to Americans of good will across this once-great nation, and since I’m sitting in a hospital bed instead of behind the mic anyway, I feel compelled.

I think I should explain why I am here in Summersville, since so many Republicans, Tea Partiers, Birchers, and Libertarians have wasted so much time, energy, good will and MONEY to keep me from being here.

I am here because it has been made possible for me to be here. Men and women across this country have marched, pled, bled and died for me to be here. Forty thousand uninsured Americans died every year before enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Politicians have paid with their careers, thrown out of office by infuriated, unintelligent, frenzied citizens played like a whorehouse piano by the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, the Republican National Committee and right-wing talk radio goons like the Junkie Rush Limbaugh.

But more basically, I came here because I was enabled to come here by what has been derided, but I now sing hosannas to, as “Obamacare.” I am here, because like thousands of other Americans every year, my chest hurts and I hope to not die right yet. I am here because, like MILLIONS of other Americans now, when they NEED medical care, they can GET medical care. I am here in the fond hope of someday seeing my grandchildren reach adulthood. I am here, like loving partners across this country, because I want to grow old with my beloved. I am here because Obamacare makes all that possible.

Yet even as I lay here, wondering at the future, questioning every twinge, waiting in reconnaissance of my own body’s missteps, I hear some fool talking in a campaign ad and promising to “Fight Obamacare in Washington.”

Brothers and Sisters, I tell you it is not Obamacare she wants to fight, but you. It is me. It is We, the People. It is your beloved struggling to remain with you yet a little while longer. This is the fight the TeaParty maniacs want to wage. They wage war against the weakest among us in deference to the strongest. They campaign against grannies and aunties, against choir members and convenience store clerks. They campaign against America, itself, and every good impulse that has ever motivated us.

Living as I do in Appalachia, this issue is of tremendous import to me. I live in West Virginia’s Third Congressional District. It is the single most physically ill congressional district in the United States. It is also one of the poorest. Every year, we vie with Hal Rogers’ district in Kentucky’s Mountaintop Removal zone for the sorry title we hold.

We get sick here for a lot of reasons. Poverty. Lack of education. An economy predicated on brutality and hard physical labor. Mountaintop Removal. It’s the last one that hits home the hardest. We know that people living in communities near Mountaintop Removal get sick at demonstrably higher rates than people who don’t. We know that mothers awaiting the birth of precious children are more likely to give birth to babies with birth defects than mothers who don’t live with the daily horrors of Mountaintop Removal.

The brutality of healthcare deprivation and division strikes extra hard in the hollers of Appalachia. People in Kentucky and West Virginia’s Mountaintop Removal communities have access to the Medicaid expansion. Our friends and neighbors and kin in Tennesessee and Virginia do not.

I am thus cognizant that we live in a divided nation. We live in a nation where nothing so obvious as skin color or gender may any longer be legally (or credibly) used to create lines of division and inequality. The assault on our vision of a free and equal American future is now drawn along lines economic and geographic, and those lines have proven harder to break than even the color line; for where ham-fisted application of fire hoses and dogs rallied a nation against bloodshed in Birmingham and Selma and national shame at crosses burning beneath the light of the moon, the new political line, augmented by voter suppression and re-districting reduced to farce and resembling nothing so much as an expansion of the same Old South that gave us slavery, lynching and a war founded in treason, has victims who die quietly in ditches, who freeze in cold weather, who suffocate alone in summer heat, who die, in short, for nothing more than want of access to a healthcare system that the right-wing insists upon calling “the best in the world,” and to which it struggles mightily to limit access.

This is the reality, you may recall, that Republicans cheered in 2012 when one of their candidates asked “What do you want to do, just let them die?”

I write through this long, nerve-wracking evening because I do have Obamacare here in West Virginia as the result of a humane decision made by a government which has proven as often as not inhumane to its own citizens. I would be a badly self-centered, though, if I did not recognize that this same night in Alabama, a baby will lose its Mama because Alabama refuses to allow the Federal government to provide healthcare to poor Americans inside the boundaries of that state. Little girls who never got to be grannies died in a church in Birmingham fifty years ago. Fifty years later, their brothers and sisters die wanting the coverage that the Affordable Care Act said was by right to ALL Americans until the Supreme Court implicitly declared that Plessy v. Ferguson doesn’t apply to race, but applies in the second decade of the twenty-first century to geography and economy. A poor woman in Alabama with no healthcare is “separate, but equal” to a poor woman in Arizona who has access to the Medicaid Expansion.

The victims of healthcare apartheid will die tonight in Mississippi. They will die tonight in Tennessee. They will die tonight, black and white and every shade in between, in South Carolina, in Louisiana and god they will die and die and die in Texas and Oklahoma.

They will die because the Tea Party and the Republicans and the political monstrosities they enable call those deaths “Freedom.”

They will die because OUR work is not yet done; because OUR struggle is not yet complete. They will die until we understand that if one is cursed to die because of the accident of geography of birth in a state that denies healthcare to its working poor, the idea of American citizenship in a state without expanded Medicaid is a hateful fraud, a bitter birthright and a curse upon our future.

We are not “one nation under God,” so long as a poor man in Minnesota lives while a poor woman in Idaho must die. We will have no “new birth of freedom” until that freedom includes not having to die of absolutely preventable, treatable disease simply because one struggles for survival in Georgia instead of Kentucky, North Carolina instead of West Virginia.

It is time to get mobile . . . again. It is time to confront those who, by hating and resisting the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, sign death warrants every day, make widows, widowers and orphans EVERY day. It is time to tell John Roberts that we will not sit still while he enshrines Plessy v. Ferguson for another century, while he sits in cool, academic comfort and signs death warrants for working Americans he would as soon forget exist.

I hope this letter finds you in good health, especially in those neo-Confederate states where your good health is all that stands between you and the dust of the grave. I hope this letter finds you, in those states, seething with the righteous outrage you rightly feel at being so condemned by a cabal of millionaires, zealots and partisan ideologues beholden to billionaires.

I hope this letter finds you, in states where Medicaid has been expanded, in the flush of empowerment to experience the freedom from fear and want that comes with acknowledgment of your basic human right not to die needlessly. I hope this letter finds you willing to stand up and cry out against America’s healthcare apartheid, so that in some not-too-distant tomorrow, we may all pledge allegiance to the flag of a nation no longer rendered divisible by the hateful rhetoric of those who seek to keep American citizens from their most essential right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Yours for the real freedom that is healthcare access all across the United States,

Truly,

Bob Kincaid

<img src="http://headonradionetwork.com/files/2010/07/BobKDemNow.png" width="350">

http://headonradionetwork.com/2014/05/11/letter-from-summersville-hospital/
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[Camille]

...and the Democrats are aiding and abetting them.

The so called mainstream media is allowing the republicans to pivot away from Obamacare to Benghazi.

Next thing you'll know, the ill informed public will claim that Obamacare has been repealed because the media hasn't mentioned it in a while.

No... next they will be taking credit for it. All the while trying to defund it and pass laws to make it not work. Or try to pass some give away to the insurance companies, since now they have to spend a certain percentage of money they take in on actual healthcare.

 

[QueEx]

No... next they will be taking credit for it. All the while trying to defund it and pass laws to make it not work. Or try to pass some give away to the insurance companies, since now they have to spend a certain percentage of money they take in on actual healthcare.

- - somewhere in America, I have to believe, they've already hatched and/or initiated that strategy.