Lisa Murkowki is a Republican Senator from Alaska who voted against even opening debate on repeal and replace of Obamacare.
Murkowski has betrayed her constituents. She betrayed them this week by trying to block debate on repeal and replace. Or, she betrayed her constituents when she lied to them in 2015 with her vote in favor of repeal in the full knowledge that her vote didn’t matter because then-President Barack Obama (D) would veto the matter.
In a Wall Street Journal editorial about Republican Senators’ timorous attitude toward actual repeal and replace of Obamacare now that what they do matters, the editors had this remark toward the end of their piece:
One vote to watch would repeal ObamaCare with a two-year window to replace it, which is similar to a bill that 51 Senate Republicans voted for in 2015. We’ll see how many have changed their minds.
We’ll see how many have changed their minds. The rest of that sentence is this: …now that their vote has actual consequences, and they can’t hide behind their virtue signaling.
France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance. Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.
The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….
It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.
It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.
The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.
Susan Collins is the Republican Senator from Maine whose refusal to vote for the health care reform bill on offer (and any of the prior efforts) is centered on her insistence that the bill’s cuts to reductions to growth in Medicaid payments to the States—Maine in particular—are too great. Collins needs to be asked, and required to give straight, substantive answers to, a number of questions.
What is Maine’s government doing to reduce the costs to its citizens of health care and of health coverage?
What is Maine’s government doing to make health care available to its citizens in the absence of health coverage?
On what is Maine’s government spending its citizens’ tax money on instead of Medicaid? What does the Maine government consider to be more important than the health of its citizens?
On what basis does she insist that the citizens of New York, Illinois, California, Texas—any of the other 49 States—must be required to pay into Maine’s Medicaid program?
Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has a provision in the latest Senate health bill that’s on offer, one that would allow sellers of actual health insurance to sell non-Obamacare compliant policies on the condition that they also sold Obamacare compliant plans on the ObamaMart. The idea, and it’s a sound one, is that those plans, better tailored their customers’ needs, would soon have commensurately lower premiums, deductibles, and copays and thereby be more affordable.
Health plan sellers don’t like it, though.
While this setup could offer healthy people less expensive policies, insurers and actuaries say it would likely prove dysfunctional over time, pushing up rates and reducing offerings for people buying the compliant plans.
That’s a market decision, though; nothing in the provision or in the overall bill would require the plan sellers offer fewer compliant plans or at higher premiums.
Aside from that, those non-compliant plans would be better tailored—market forces would require it—have fewer items covered that a plan purchaser doesn’t want or need—market forces would push plan sellers to stop forcing contraceptive coverage on men and geriatrics or prostate cancer coverage onto women—and they would, as advertised, have much lower premiums, smaller deductibles, and lower copays.
They would also attract customers, low income and others, from those ObamaMart plans into the non-compliant market because those better tailored and cheaper plans would better suit their needs, too.
Maybe the health care coverage welfare plan providers—sorry, the health insurance companies—don’t want the noise of competition; maybe they prefer the steady, safe income of government subsidies in the form of customers trapped in their protected monopoly in the health “insurance” industry. Maybe that’s why so many of these companies are leaving ObamaMarts, leaving folks with few plan choices or no plans to buy at all—because the industry as Obamacare has changed it is so sound.
On the other hand, the Progressive-Democrats in Congress should jump on this provision with both feet. Obamacare plans are terrific, they insist. Surely, in their wonderfulness, these plans would win resoundingly in the competition of the market place. Especially with so many of those plans still subsidized through other provisions in the bill. Wouldn’t they?