Obamacare and Choice

There are 3,142 counties and equivalents (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs, three States each have an independent city, Virginia has 38 of them, and State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations does things entirely differently) in the US.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects that 40 of those counties will have no health care coverage plan providers at all in 2018, and 1,332 of those counties—over 40% of them—will have only one such provider.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but this is not choice.  This also drives home the lie of “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; if you like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan.”

Obamacare’s implosion is in full swing, it’s happening rapidly, and Republicans are fiddling.  They can bleat that it’s all Progressive-Democrats’ fault, that the Progressive-Democratic Party owns Obamacare to their heart’s content.  It’s irrelevant.  The Republican Party has been running on repeal and replace for the last four election cycles, and they now have majorities in both houses of Congress, and they have the White House.  The Republicans own repeal and replace—and they own the failure to make even the first syllable of progress toward that worthy end.

Timid Republicans need to find their courage and get on with the business.  Along these lines, others who demand that it all be done at once—both right damn now and in a single bill—need to recall the lessons of Obamacare as a single, all-at-once, almost right damn now bill, and they need to keep in mind political realities: Republicans in the Senate don’t have the filibuster-proof majority the Progressive-Democrats had for most of the time they were putting together their bill.

Repeal and replace can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t happen in a single bill.  It’ll need to occur as a series of bills, although those bills need to be passed in quick succession as politics go: over the course of a couple of Congressional sessions, or at most over two Congresses.

Senators Susan Collins (R, ME) and John McCain (R, AZ) are desperate to return to “regular order,” to negotiate with Progressive-Democrats and to hold hearings.  Fine.  Do that.  Those hearings need not take longer than a couple of weeks—especially if the Senate (read: Republicans) get rid of the ridiculous 2-hour per day limit on hearings—and the negotiations can be done similarly quickly, particularly since the Progressive-Democrats have shown they won’t seriously negotiate.

But get after it.  Republicans need to stop dithering, stop playing with their…fiddles…and get on with the business.  They have their own choice to make regarding their place in Government and in the nation.

YGTBSM

Yet again.  This one is from Watts Up With That.

A bloke bought a sheep property of half a million acres in western Queensland for $2.0 million. Instead of running sheep on it, he now gets $350,000 per annum under the federal government’s Direct Action scheme for not using the grass on his property. The idea being that the grass locks up carbon and reduces Australia’s carbon emissions. A neighbouring property gets $600,000 per annum.

I have no idea what the second guy paid for his property, but the first guy will have recouped his investment in three years of doing nothing.  I’m torn between the waste of taxpayer money and wishing I could beat feet to Australia so I could get in on this kind of deal.

Sanctions and Wariness

Congress has passed and sent to President Donald Trump a bill that increases sanctions against Russia, particularly its energy sector, and against Iran and northern Korea.  It also adds limits Trump’s ability (and State’s) to ratchet those sanctions up or down in real time in response to Russian—or Iranian or northern Korean—behavior, a fillip that adds a question to whether he’ll sign it (his veto likely would only delay the thing; the bill was passed with veto-proof majorities in both houses).

Germany is “wary” of those sanctions.

The German Committee on East European Economic Relations said US plans for tighter sanctions against Russia had the potential of harming EU firms with energy interests in their giant eastern neighbor.

It went as far as to say that the latest US move appeared designed to stimulate US energy exports to Europe.

Because nothing Evil United States does is good for anyone else.  It couldn’t possibly be that any offers to sell liquified natural gas, for instance, to Europe (a small target of our global market for LNG, and for oil) might be to free Europe—and Germany in particular—from Russian extortion.  It couldn’t possibly be, either, that our increasing exports of hydrocarbons—having as they do a depressing impact on the global price of energy—would be good for Germany or for Europe as a whole.

And this bit of nefariousness:

The committee said it expected German exports to Russia to grow by 20% this year…despite all the EU and US sanctions in place right now over Russia’s perceived role in the Ukraine and Syria conflicts.

And this threat from the German government:

[German Economics Minister Brigitte] Zypries warned against a trade war over this latest round of US sanctions against Russia, saying such a situation would be “very bad.”

Nice piece you got there.  Be too bad if something happened to it.

That’s OK, though.  We’re wary of German timidity in the face of Russian energy blackmail capability, or of their active collusion with Russia.  At least there is symmetry.

The Betrayal of Lisa Murkowski

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.

Republicans and Obamacare

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.