By Robert P. Bomboy
Who are these people, these cruel, eternally arrogant, and
surpassingly rich Congressmen in the House of Representatives, one of them Lou
Barletta, a millionaire from our own 11th District, who dug down deep in their
back pockets and pulled out this piece of crap they call the Republican
Unaffordable Care Act?
And what were they laughing about in President Pinocchio's
Rose Garden after they did their disgusting deed?
Was it a dirty joke they were laughing about? Did it seem
funny to Lou and the President and all the rest of the Republicans that men,
women, and children would die because of this unconscionable abomination of
mean-spirited bias and hatred?
I have a friend, a good hardworking man with a family and a
small business who could very well lose his beloved wife if this misbegotten
excuse for a devil's disciple ever actually becomes law.
Health care
experts are estimating that, if this terrible bill actually becomes law, in its first year alone 17,000
Americans will die who otherwise would have lived.
I'm MAD! And you should be too if you
have any sense of decency!
At what point will we stand up and say to these millionaires
- who don't represent us and our families and the good people we know and care
about - that we won't stand for this anymore? These Congressmen - and women
- are taking our very lives away from us.
Why is it that they can cheat and lie to 24 million of us, again
and again, and no one is standing up to them?
Well here I am boys, and I'm standing up!
They lied. They knew they were lying. They passed
this incredibly awful bill without even knowing what it would cost or how many
people it would kill. They put out garbage, called it sweet, and now they're
telling us to swallow it. Some of them even laughed that they had voted for it
without so much as reading the bill.
They flew it through the House of Representatives and
laughed about it after they passed it, knowing that if they lingered even a
moment the honest and nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office would have time
to show how many Americans would lose their insurance coverage (it was 24
million of us the first time around!), and how much "savings"
would go straight into the pockets of the one percent millionaires who have
most of the money now (on that previous miscarriage of an Unaffordable Care
Act, the richest of the rich were getting $592 billion while the 24
million lost their insurance).
If you want to see who the rich in this country really are,
and how much they have, look at my easy database on income inequality at
onepercentsearcher.blogspot. com. Among
the nearly 400 meticulously researched entries, you can see a graphic summary
in the entry for April 10, 2016. Did you know that the amount of money the rich on Wall Street get in
bonuses is twice what all the minimum-wage workers in this country, combined,
get in pay. And, as I've mentioned in a previous column,
also on Wall Street the top 25 hedge fund managers earn more than all the
kindergarten teachers in America.
This latest version of the House health care bill, reeking
to high heaven, repeals nearly all the taxes on the rich that Obamacare set up
to pay for its provisions to help ordinary people buy insurance. Those taxes on
the rich included taxes on incomes over $200,000 ($250,000 for a married
couple), which would not have affected many people in Shamokin; a tax on the
super-rich health insurers and medical-device manufacturers, who make huge
profits on what they charge sick people, and limitations on how much insurance
companies could deduct for their hugely inflated executive pay.
That was what the Republicans have meant all along when they
said they wanted to repeal Obamacare. As long as they eliminated taxes on the
rich and Big Business to the tune of $592 billion in additional tax
cuts, they didn't care what the rest of the bill did to ordinary people like
us.
A weasly section of this piece of garbage lets each state
completely repeal Obamacare on its own. Using waivers in the House bill, each
state could let its insurance companies throw away the regulations and do three
specific things: (1) charge older people more than five times what they
charge young people for the same health insurance policy; (2) eliminate
coverages, including maternity care, mental health
care, and prescription drugs, that were required under Obamacare, and (3)
charge more for, or deny, coverage to people who have pre-existing health
conditions, such as cancer, diabetes or arthritis.
It's true that the House
bill wrote a total of $138 billion into its bill over the next decade to create
other ways for people in those backsliding states to get health care, but
analyses have already shown that amount of money wouldn't be enough to provide
full healthcare coverage for the number of Americans with medical problems who
now buy Obamacare. They would be in trouble under this new bill.
Even people who get their
insurance where they work could be in trouble, because - to lower its insurance
costs - an employer could buy new policies with annual and lifetime coverage
limits, which are banned under Obamacare.
One of the sneakiest parts of this House bill gravely
damages Medicaid, which serves 70 million Americans, 20 percent of us
altogether. That's been something on House Speaker Paul Ryan's wish list - he
told a friend recently - since he was in college drinking at keg parties. And
once he's killed Medicaid, he wants to kill Medicare. He's a zealot!
Without Medicaid and its wide-ranging benefits, as Governor
Tom Wolf has pleaded to no avail, there won't be money to treat and protect the
63,000 Pennsylvanians addicted to drugs and save them from overdoses and death.
And although the death stroke to Medicaid
is one of this dog's breakfast of a bill's worst features, it's full of dirty
tricks to play on us. It throws the door wide open to roll back Obamacare's
required coverage.
The Republicans in the
House have deceived us. Not a single Democrat voted for this awful bill. Even
with their Republican majority, it passed by only three votes. Protest!
Write to this newspaper. Yell loud and clear to Pennsylvania's Republican
Senator Pat Toomey, who's also a millionaire three times over, that they can't
do this to us.
Jimmy
Kimmel, the late-night TV host, put it simply: "No family should be denied
medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they can’t afford it."
Tell that to the Senator.
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