Trumpcare is dead, or in a coma, and Sen. Ted Cruz’s amendment to the bill was one of the nails in its coffin (or the rubber mallet to its head if you prefer the coma analogy). But our Senator Jeff Flake, who usually plays a moderate in the media, decided to embrace Cruzcare in his attempt to court Arizona’s right wing in the run-up to the primary. On a radio talk show he joined Cruz to voice his support for the most hated man in the Senate, his new bff. I didn’t have to search for the talk show segment. Flake is so proud of it, he put it at the top of his latest constituent email. It landed in my inbox hours before two more Republican senators stated they wouldn’t vote for the most recent version of Trumpcare which included the Cruz amendment, ending its chance of passing in its current form.
Cruz calls his plan the “consumer freedom amendment.” It means insurance companies can go back to providing the kind of subprime, low cost health care packages forbidden by Obamacare. So, for example, if Senator McCain had purchased one of the “consumer freedom” insurance options, he might only have coverage for high cost care, like his recent surgery. People are estimating that his total bill, if he had to pay it, comes to about $70,000. His “consumer freedom” insurance would say he’s covered for hospitalization, but when he opens his bill, he may discover hospitalization coverage is for the room and board portion of his hospital stay but not the cost of the surgery and doctors’ visits. And he might also find that his coverage will be canceled at the end of the year, which couldn’t happen under Obamacare, leaving him without insurance and nowhere to go for affordable coverage. That’s what Cruz and Flake call “freedom.”
Flake’s email also spotlighted a News 12 story on his Cruzcare stand. I’ll bet he loves the first sentence of the segment.
“Is Arizona Senator Jeff Flake backing the most conservative Obamacare repeal plan?”
Flake’s response:
“If you define the most conservative Obamacare repeal plan as the plan that restores Arizonans’ freedom to purchase more affordable health insurance of their choosing – rather than the federal government mandating what exactly coverage they must purchase – and still guarantees federally-subsidized coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions – then yes, I support the most conservative Obamacare repeal plan.”
He put “conservative” at the front and back of his statement to make sure no one missed the point.
Trump is reaching out to candidates to attack Flake’s right flank, so Flake is running hard to the right, because he’s running scared. In case he weathers the primary, I hope people are taking notes.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2017.
“If you define the most conservative Obamacare repeal plan as the plan that restores Arizonans’ freedom to purchase more affordable health insurance of their choosing …… then yes, I support the most conservative Obamacare repeal plan.”
A mere shibboleth!! Flake has Health Insurance second to none at Government expense. ALL US Citizens should have the same…at Government expense. Insurance Companies and the Health Care Industry should not profit when US Citizens need medical attention. Price controls need to be in place to control their GREED!!!
Flake is a self centered hypocrite and must be booted out of the US Senate!!!! We need a person in the US Senate that represents the best interests off ALL Arizona Citizens.
I want McCain and Flake on Obamacare like the rest of us. Then they will fix it.
He has insurance at government expense? No, it’s at taxpayer expense. The government makes nothing and has no money without taxes.
Flake will pander to the extremists in his party to win the primary, to the moderates to win the general, and to the funders (whose policy preferences match neither those of the extremist voters nor those of the moderate voters) to get the money needed to advertise himself to the voters so he can get re-elected. No surprise there. That’s how our system works, for Flake and for other candidates, including Democrats.
I too hope people are paying attention, or “taking notes” as Safier puts it. But what I hope they will note is the mis-match between the funders’ and the voters’ policy priorities on both sides of the aisle.
Why didn’t Obama’s efforts to enact universal health care yield a single-payer system? What is the role of insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies in forming health care and health insurance policy in the US? Where and how are they influencing both Democrats and Republicans? Those are the sorts of questions that should be asked and answered. But you won’t get that kind of analysis in Safier’s blog. Just standard-issue attempts to serve the party agenda by pouncing on every Republican mis-step and feeding Democratic voters’ belief that REPUBLICANS (AND THIS PARTICULAR REPUBLICAN WHO IS THE TARGET-OF-THE-MOMENT) ARE THE VERY DEVIL AND ALWAYS NEED TO BE REPLACED BY DEMOCRATS AND THEN THERE WILL BE RAINBOWS IN THE SKY AND POTS OF GOLD AT THE END OF THEM.
This message, when considered as a description of what is actually going on in 2017, is so shoddy that it is hard to believe that fully educated adults keep buying it. What a shame that, as Nader has pointed out, this kind of voter distraction continues to allow politicians to avoid directly and successfully addressing the important citizen- and consumer-advocacy policy issues in the U.S.
” Insurance Companies and the Health Care Industry should not profit when US Citizens need medical attention.”-Francis Saitta
That is a ridiculous statement. What is everyone’s motivation for anything, but income? Come on. What is next, hungry people should not be forced to pay for food? Competitive market conditions while maintaining profitable ventures is the recipe for success. This is not Greece.
Do you even understand WHO the health care industry includes?
I had thought of Flake as somewhat moderate until he started touting his A+ ratings from some of America’s farthest-right organizations, beginning with the NRA, in his fear of a primary challenge from the wingnut right, aka Kelly Ward for one. Every true independent voter in Arizona better be ready to go to the polls in November 2018, dragging along a lazy Democrat, to vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.
Gov’t Healthcare is Not Right: “….What is everyone’s motivation for anything, but income? Come on. What is next, hungry people should not be forced to pay for food? …”
Such a Barbaric Statement reflective of a Lack of a Fundamental Understanding of the very nature of Human Society; that the very nature of our Democracy creates a Complementry/Interactive, Mutual Dependent Social System with the Requirement to provide Assistance to others when Assistance is Necessary; that the primary focus of Government is the development of Citizens primarily through Public Education and Health Care; both should be provided at Public Expense and NOT through a “Free Market, Profit Based Economic System” where maximizing Profit and Salaries are the primary motivations and not First Rate Systems of Public Education and Health Care!
Sorry but the primary focus of the government is not the development of it’s citizens….you may be reading the wrong Constitution.
Citizens are born with God given rights to pursue freedom, liberty and success. Government dependence always ends poorly for all affected.
The top seven hospitals combined revenue went up by $4.5 billion per year after the ACAs coverage expansions kicked in, a 15 percent jump in two years. Meanwhile, their charity care already less than 2 percent of revenue fell by almost $150 million per year, a 35 percent plunge over the same period.-Politico July 18
So how did hospitals become so flush with cash? The ACA forced rate payers to fund charity cases, and yet the hospitals maintained their tax exempt status. I thought the Democrats were all about taxing the wealthy, yet these wealthy pay no taxes at the hands of the Democrats. One might think it had something to do with campaign contributions.
As of this writing, Republicare is dead. And Nero is content to fiddle while the only US backed healthcare program burns. In fact, Orange Caligula is not only fiddling, he is actively advocating for the ACA to die a slow death for which he, as POTUS, feels no responsibility. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Republicans have blown their own cover. They have demonstrated a level of incompetence never before equaled in legislative history. A level of disdain toward the poor, sick and dying unparalleled in any modern democratic nation. An ability to huff and puff and nothing more. This crowd of bomb-throwers- hasn’t a decent bone in their collective skeletons.
And then we have the Democrats huddled in their caves, planning for an electoral juggernaut in ’18 that is little more than a pipe dream. We are deep in the weeds hoping it all goes away. Desperately seeking a hero or heroine. Any nominations?
Elizabeth Warren? At least she frequently seems to be able to keep her eye on the ball of who benefits and at whose expense — and, even rarer among politicians — she not only tracks that ball, but speaks honestly with the public about its progress down the field.
I agree, Rick, an imperfect universal healthcare system is better than no universal healthcare system or a universal healthcare system the current administration refuses to fund. Better still would be a public that was well-informed enough and well-organized enough to be effective in requiring their elected representatives to give them a clean, single-payer health care system, a public savvy enough not to be diverted from that purpose by the ongoing bottom-feeding soap opera of non-stop partisan BS the media feeds us.
Why do we not have a public that is prepared to do that? Whose fault is it?
The Republicans have not betrayed their natural role in the American dialogue, as I understand it. If we have a capitalist system, someone has to represent the interests of capital. Who has betrayed their role as an effective communicator with and organizer of labor, taking on a portfolio of business interest donors, lying to the public and concealing their real (donors’) motives on almost every major policy issue? Who has allowed and / or facilitated their opponents’ plutocratic descent into unbridled contempt for the common man, as they themselves have left the common man’s interests defenseless, though they pay these interests lip service and pretend to defend them?
The Democrats. As a member of the middle class that works for a living, not a business owner, not a capitalist, I’ve never expected the Republicans to defend my best interests, but I did, for many years, expect the Democrats to do so. And it’s their failure to do so effectively and their 2016 betrayal of two candidates that both had more to offer labor than Clinton did (Lessig and Sanders) that caused portions of the working class and middle class electorate to defect to Trump. Trump courted their votes while Hillary chummed it up with Wall Street hedge fund managers and bankers and schemed with th DNC to cut worthier candidates out of the running in the Democratic primary contests.
We need to stop chastising the Republicans for playing their natural role. It’s a waste of time and changes nothing. Instead, ask the DEMOCRATS to WAKE UP from the Clinton-corrupted dream they have been dreaming for a few decades now and reform themselves.
LTBWIB,
I agree with you on nearly every point you make. But, the public IS “increasingly savvy enough not to be diverted from that purpose by the ongoing bottom-feeding soap opera of non-stop partisan BS the media feeds us.”
Why do I say this? Because the public is increasingly fleeing the “two party system” in favor of independence and non-alignment. The sorry spectacle of Clinton vs Trump in ’16 has accelerated this trend with, today, more voters registering independent than either Democrat or Republican. In 2018, I expect to see this trend continue with independents becoming a majority, not a plurality. The duopoly is becoming irrelevant to the needs and desires of the voting public.
There ARE some Democrats I would vote for in the primaries but alas, I cannot vote in the Democratic primaries because I am not a registered Democrat and will not join the party in order to vote.
The two most popular candidates in ’16 (Trump and Sanders) frequently claimed the system was rigged. The more that message resonates, the lower the turnout will be and the more likely Republicans will continue to dominate elections at every level. Because, if nothing else, they are very good at beating Democrats in elections.
Seems like it would be necessary to influence what happens in the primaries enough to get someone worth voting for on the ballot, something Independents cannot do w/o an organization and a ground game. As long as the two parties are the only organizations able to put viable candidates on the ballot in the general they may continue to nominate people who will be, from the point of view of the ECONOMIC best interests of those who work for a living, Ms. Bad VS. Mr. Worse, candidates like Trump and Clinton who make Teresa May’s parliamentary seat opponent Lord Buckethead look like an improvement over the options offered us.
Don’t see an alternative to reforming the Democrats (good luck with that) or vigorously supporting the growth of a third party like the Greens, the menacing growth of which is about the only thing that could effectively force the Dems to start flushing out the Augean stables their party has become.
(Perhaps they are capable of looking at what went on in 2016 and drawing the right conclusions, but, if so, few signs of it are appearing in the mainstream media outlets they control, including this one.)
Obamacare collapses but yet he spent $9B giving phones to people that could not or would buy health insurance and then had rate payers pick up the medical tab for the phone users. This is what happens when government picks winners and losers.
Didn’t want to believe it until I read it.
http://www.freegovernmentcellphones.net/faq/obama-phone
Clinton Bush Obama take your pick. The next program will be PCs for all and then ISP for the indigent. Now you can see why Medicare is about to be bankrupt when they are buying transportation vehicles with medical expense money.
Social Security recently announced that they will be sending out more in monthly benefits that they collect. Neither party has found a dimes worth of cuts, so you can expect for things to get much worse before they get better. This economy need some 3-4% growth years and increase employment and wages.
You can’t run a home or a country with this type of budgeting and spending. Meanwhile the infrastructure crumbles.
What Jeff Flake wants most is some Koch money. Every organization he has listed on his web page leads back to Koch and then there is DeVos who “had him at charter schools.” She has one mission, to privatize education and more specifically to turn it over to religious schools, while a company she owns hounds college students to pay the outrageous interest rates on their student loans that have disaster in the fine print. Two TUSD schools nearby have been turned into subdivisions with houses so close together you can hear your neighbor cough as charter and private schools continue to drain education funds out of the state budget for education. California has outlawed it. Something we can learn from them along with encouraging people to use solar power instead of punishing them for it.
Francis, just in case you hadn’t noticed, what you are advocating for is already available in the US. It’s called the VA. My family knows all too well what the government can do to our healthcare. The military has been abused for decades, and now you want to include all Americans in the abuse.
FLAKE IS A CLOSET DEMOCRAP, he supported everything the traitor that lived in the while house did for 8 years. I hope he looses the next election and a real conservative is elected.
A CLOSET DEMOCRAP.
HA HA! I’m such a clever REPUBLISHIT.