Merry Christmas from Donald Trump

[Unregistered]

Signups for ACA 2018 enrollment were nearly equal to 2017, despite "shortening the enrollment period by half, the administration cut by 90 percent federal spending on advertising and other outreach activities to urge consumers to sign up. It cut funding for enrollment “navigators” by about two-fifths. "

The unexpected popularity of the ACA's marketplaces at a time of intense political turmoil surrounding the 2010 law drew swift praise from its proponents. The enrollment tally so far “makes it crystal clear that Americans demand and support the quality, affordable health insurance and consumer protections the ACA offers,” said Robert Restuccia, executive director of Community Catalyst, a large grass roots health-care advocacy group.

“This is a remarkable result given the Administration’s efforts to sabotage enrollment by gutting outreach, creating chaos and confusion, cutting off subsidies for low-income families and shortening the enrollment period,” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement.


Go figure. People want healthcare. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.9c45960e36fa

" Health care " or " Health Insurance " ?
Easy fix for Obama, just put 7 million, many able bodied , on Medicaid. What a con man !

[Unregistered]

What geniuses those Russians are ! All of that , and only spending $ 100,000 . Hillary spent tens of millions. TENS of millions !

Actually HRC and team (superpaks) spent hundreds of millions, more like $620M, more than double what DT and team spent. She would have managed the government the same way, with failing results.

[Unregistered]

" Health care " or " Health Insurance " ?
Easy fix for Obama, just put 7 million, many able bodied , on Medicaid. What a con man !

Not all, and now these people are covered. They get preventative care (which saves more in the long run) and they don't have to rely on the ER for basic care. ACA also gave self employed people a venue to purchase coverage they didn't before. Decent healthcare shouldn't be a privilege but a right.

More importantly ACA brought about changes that impact people who have employer sponsored plans, making them much better (like eliminating pre-existing condition clauses, got rid of garbage plans, guaranteed coverage of certain conditions like pregnancy, keeping kids on parent's plans until 26 etc). The Dems did a very poor job of selling these key components and the GOP did a great job of calling it Obamacare (with a sneer when they said it). Once voters started to realize what other things would disappear if ACA was total repealed they started to revolt.

Key provisions do the following, effective Jan. 1, 2014, unless otherwise noted:

-Require employers to cover their workers, or pay penalties, with exceptions for small employers.
-Provide tax credits to certain small businesses that cover specified costs of health insurance for their employees, beginning in tax year 2010.
-Require individuals to have insurance, with some exceptions, such as financial hardship or religious belief.
-Require creation of state-based (or multi-state) insurance exchanges to help individuals and small businesses purchase insurance. Federal subsidies will limit premium costs to between 2 percent of income for those with incomes at 133 percent of federal poverty guidelines, rising to 9.5 percent of income for those who earn between 300 percent and 400 percent of the poverty guidelines.
-Expand Medicaid to cover people with incomes below 133 percent of federal poverty guidelines.
-Require creation of temporary high-risk pools for those who cannot purchase insurance on the private market due to preexisting health conditions, beginning July 1, 2010.
Require insurance plans to cover young adults on parents’ policies, effective Sept. 23, 2010.
-Establish a national, voluntary long-term care insurance program for “community living assistance services and supports” (CLASS), with regulations to be issued by Oct. 1, 2012.
-Enact consumer protections to enable people to retain their insurance coverage (see next section).
-Increase Consumer Insurance Protections
-The ACA enacted several insurance reforms, effective in 2010, to accomplish the following:

-Prohibit lifetime monetary caps on insurance coverage and limit the use of annual caps.
-Prohibit insurance plans from excluding coverage for children with preexisting conditions.
-Prohibit insurance plans from cancelling (rescinding) coverage, except in cases of fraud.
-Establish state-based rate reviews for “unreasonable” insurance premium increases.
-Establish an office of health insurance consumer assistance or an ombudsman program.
-Establish the share of premiums dedicated to medical services (minimum medical loss ratios).

http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/...f-summary.aspx

[Unregistered]

" Health care " or " Health Insurance " ?
Easy fix for Obama, just put 7 million, many able bodied , on Medicaid. What a con man !

Health care. People want affordable and safe health care.

The rest of the world has it figured out. We don't.

Here, we worry about giving free stuff to the "takers"

[Unregistered]

About regulations.....

President Donald Trump’s administration has been on a deregulatory bender, particularly when it comes to environmental regulations. As of January, the New York Times counted 67 environmental rules on the chopping block under Trump.

This is not one of Trump’s idiosyncrasies, though. His administration is more ham-handed and flagrant about it, but the antipathy it expresses toward federal regulation falls firmly within the GOP mainstream. Republicans have been complaining about “burdensome” and “job-killing” regulations for so long that their opposition to any particular health, safety, or environmental regulation is now just taken for granted.

For instance, why would the Environmental Protection Agency close a program investigating the effects of toxins on children’s health? Is there some evidence that the money is wasted or poorly spent? Why would the EPA allow more unregulated disposal of toxic coal ash? Don’t people in coal regions deserve clean air and water? Is there any reason to think coal ash is currently well-regulated?

These questions barely come up anymore. Republicans oppose regulations because they are regulations; it’s become reflexive, both for the party and for the media the covers them.


One of Trump’s many executive order ceremonies, reversing Obama climate regulations. Ron Sach-Pool/Getty Images
As it happens, though, we know something about the costs and benefits of federal regulations. In fact, Trump’s own administration, specifically the (nonpartisan, at least for now) White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), just released its annual report on that very subject.

The report was released late on a Friday, with Congress out of session and multiple Trump scandals dominating the headlines. A cynical observer might conclude that the administration wanted the report to go unnoticed.

Why might that be? Well, in a nutshell, it shows that the GOP is wrong about regulations as a general matter and wrong about Obama’s regulations specifically. Those regulations had benefits far in excess of their costs, and they had no discernible effect on jobs or economic growth.

OMB, more like OMG, amirite?
OMB gathered data and analysis on “major” federal regulations (those with $100 million or more in economic impact) between 2006 and 2016, a period that includes all of Obama’s administration, stopping just short of Trump’s. The final tally, reported in 2001 dollars:

Aggregate benefits: $219 to $695 billion
Aggregate costs: $59 to $88 billion
By even the most conservative estimate, the benefits of Obama’s regulations wildly outweighed the costs.


According to OMB — and to the federal agencies upon whose data OMB mostly relied — the core of the Trumpian case against Obama regulations, arguably the organizing principle of Trump’s administration, is false.

Environmental regulations have the highest costs and highest benefits
At least since Reagan, conservatives have had particular and growing hostility toward environmental regulations. This has proven a source of great anguish to (older) environmentalists, who lament that such regulations used to be bipartisan.

But the right-wing turn against environmental rules is no great mystery. The OMB report reveals the core reason: Of all the regulations passed from 2006 to 2016, it is environmental regulations, specifically air pollution regulations, that had both the highest costs and the highest benefits.


OMB
EPA rules, OMB writes, “account for over 80 percent of the monetized benefits and over 70 percent of the monetized costs” of federal regulation during this period.

For example, new fuel economy standards for medium- and heavy-duty engines had (in 2001 dollars) between $6.7 billion and $9.7 billion in benefits. But they cost industry $0.8 billion to $1.1 billion.

The MATS rule, aimed at reducing toxic emissions from power plants, had between $33 billion and $90 billion in benefits (in 2007 dollars, for some reason), but it cost industry $9.6 billion.

In short, air quality rules secure enormous health benefits for the American public, but they also ask a great deal of industry.

To frame the same point another way: Air quality regulations serve as a downward redistribution of wealth, out of the pockets of industrialists and into the pockets of ordinary Americans, particularly the poor and vulnerable Americans (African Americans and Hispanics in particular) who tend to live closest to pollution sources. They shift costs, from the much higher health and social costs of pollution remediation to the comparatively smaller costs of pollution abatement.

And therein lies the source of industry and GOP rage toward EPA. It’s why EPA delayed and delayed air rules under Bush. It’s why the GOP Congress worked so furiously to block air rules under Obama. And it’s why EPA is weakening or repealing air rules as fast as possible under Trump.

The GOP is opposed to downward redistribution of wealth. If one policy goal has unified the right above all else, it is upward redistribution. Even as its base drifts further into a fog of xenophobic, reactionary ressentiment, its moneyed interests and policy leaders remain laser-focused on reducing taxes and regulatory burdens on the wealthy. Upward redistribution is what unites GOP health care policy, tax policy, financial sector policy, and environmental policy.

That is why Republicans hate EPA and its rules: They are a burden to industry, but worse, they are a burden to industry that is very obviously worth it. Industry makes a small sacrifice, public health improves, and economic growth continues apace. EPA rules are a living demonstration of the good that government can do.

The “job-killing” thing is also nonsense
Okay, environmental regulations produce enormous health and social benefits, but don’t they kill jobs?

Not really. This is another myth that conservatives have simply repeated with such tenacity that no one bothers to scrutinize it anymore.

The OMB report has a long section looking into the employment effects of environmental regulations, assessing several studies and literature reviews. Mostly it is devoted to explaining how complex and vexed such analysis is. Jobs may be eliminated in one place/industry and created in another. Jobs may be eliminated in the short term but a larger number created in the long term. Effects on employment must be disentangled from contemporaneous social and economic trends, many of which have much larger effects. And so on.

The conclusion — which is in keeping with the broader literature, as I described in this post — is that there may be local and temporary employment effects from environmental regulations, either positive or negative, but at the aggregate national level, such regulations simply aren’t a significant factor in employment. Their effects are lost amid the noise of demographic shifts and macroeconomic drivers.

They don’t “kill jobs.” From the perspective of the overall economy, they don’t do much of anything to jobs, other than shift them from certain regions/industries to others. As it happens, those shifts are often unfavorable to GOP constituencies, but that’s not a license to, you know, lie about them.

There is no coherent policy justification for Trump’s deregulatory frenzy
If the GOP wants to explicitly align itself behind the interests of particular polluting businesses and against the broader public interest, well, it can. If it doesn’t think the costs to industry of reducing pollution are worth much larger benefits to public health, it can say so. If it wants to transfer wealth back from the public to industrialists by reversing all of Obama’s rules, that is its right as the party in power.

But GOP lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to simply burp up the words “burdensome” and “job-killing” and move on. The OMB finds no evidence that federal regulations have any noticeable impact on aggregate national employment or economic growth. There is evidence that they produce public benefits well in excess of their costs.

If EPA head Scott Pruitt wants to say that defending children from toxics or rural communities from coal ash pollution is burdensome, he ought to offer some numbers, or evidence, or ... something. Goofy homilies are not enough. (His latest claim is that the Bible recommends the deregulatory agenda.)

Believing in the inherent costliness and ineffectiveness of federal regulation is not a religious matter. It’s not an article of faith. It’s an empirical assertion, an argument, and the available evidence indicates that it is incorrect.

It is certainly not a belief to which journalists owe any particular deference.

Until Trump’s administration makes a case that its own OMB and agencies are wrong — not just by a little, but by tens of billions of dollars — the presumption of every journalist and politico in Washington should be that there is no coherent policy rationale for Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

It is, like his health, tax, and infrastructure initiatives, simply the polar opposite of populism: the targeted transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, at the public’s expense.

[Unregistered]

President Donald Trump’s administration has been on a deregulatory bender, particularly when it comes to environmental regulations. As of January, the New York Times counted 67 environmental rules on the chopping block under Trump.

This is not one of Trump’s idiosyncrasies, though. His administration is more ham-handed and flagrant about it, but the antipathy it expresses toward federal regulation falls firmly within the GOP mainstream. Republicans have been complaining about “burdensome” and “job-killing” regulations for so long that their opposition to any particular health, safety, or environmental regulation is now just taken for granted.

For instance, why would the Environmental Protection Agency close a program investigating the effects of toxins on children’s health? Is there some evidence that the money is wasted or poorly spent? Why would the EPA allow more unregulated disposal of toxic coal ash? Don’t people in coal regions deserve clean air and water? Is there any reason to think coal ash is currently well-regulated?

These questions barely come up anymore. Republicans oppose regulations because they are regulations; it’s become reflexive, both for the party and for the media the covers them.


One of Trump’s many executive order ceremonies, reversing Obama climate regulations. Ron Sach-Pool/Getty Images
As it happens, though, we know something about the costs and benefits of federal regulations. In fact, Trump’s own administration, specifically the (nonpartisan, at least for now) White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), just released its annual report on that very subject.

The report was released late on a Friday, with Congress out of session and multiple Trump scandals dominating the headlines. A cynical observer might conclude that the administration wanted the report to go unnoticed.

Why might that be? Well, in a nutshell, it shows that the GOP is wrong about regulations as a general matter and wrong about Obama’s regulations specifically. Those regulations had benefits far in excess of their costs, and they had no discernible effect on jobs or economic growth.

OMB, more like OMG, amirite?
OMB gathered data and analysis on “major” federal regulations (those with $100 million or more in economic impact) between 2006 and 2016, a period that includes all of Obama’s administration, stopping just short of Trump’s. The final tally, reported in 2001 dollars:

Aggregate benefits: $219 to $695 billion
Aggregate costs: $59 to $88 billion
By even the most conservative estimate, the benefits of Obama’s regulations wildly outweighed the costs.


According to OMB — and to the federal agencies upon whose data OMB mostly relied — the core of the Trumpian case against Obama regulations, arguably the organizing principle of Trump’s administration, is false.

Environmental regulations have the highest costs and highest benefits
At least since Reagan, conservatives have had particular and growing hostility toward environmental regulations. This has proven a source of great anguish to (older) environmentalists, who lament that such regulations used to be bipartisan.

But the right-wing turn against environmental rules is no great mystery. The OMB report reveals the core reason: Of all the regulations passed from 2006 to 2016, it is environmental regulations, specifically air pollution regulations, that had both the highest costs and the highest benefits.


OMB
EPA rules, OMB writes, “account for over 80 percent of the monetized benefits and over 70 percent of the monetized costs” of federal regulation during this period.

For example, new fuel economy standards for medium- and heavy-duty engines had (in 2001 dollars) between $6.7 billion and $9.7 billion in benefits. But they cost industry $0.8 billion to $1.1 billion.

The MATS rule, aimed at reducing toxic emissions from power plants, had between $33 billion and $90 billion in benefits (in 2007 dollars, for some reason), but it cost industry $9.6 billion.

In short, air quality rules secure enormous health benefits for the American public, but they also ask a great deal of industry.

To frame the same point another way: Air quality regulations serve as a downward redistribution of wealth, out of the pockets of industrialists and into the pockets of ordinary Americans, particularly the poor and vulnerable Americans (African Americans and Hispanics in particular) who tend to live closest to pollution sources. They shift costs, from the much higher health and social costs of pollution remediation to the comparatively smaller costs of pollution abatement.

And therein lies the source of industry and GOP rage toward EPA. It’s why EPA delayed and delayed air rules under Bush. It’s why the GOP Congress worked so furiously to block air rules under Obama. And it’s why EPA is weakening or repealing air rules as fast as possible under Trump.

The GOP is opposed to downward redistribution of wealth. If one policy goal has unified the right above all else, it is upward redistribution. Even as its base drifts further into a fog of xenophobic, reactionary ressentiment, its moneyed interests and policy leaders remain laser-focused on reducing taxes and regulatory burdens on the wealthy. Upward redistribution is what unites GOP health care policy, tax policy, financial sector policy, and environmental policy.

That is why Republicans hate EPA and its rules: They are a burden to industry, but worse, they are a burden to industry that is very obviously worth it. Industry makes a small sacrifice, public health improves, and economic growth continues apace. EPA rules are a living demonstration of the good that government can do.

The “job-killing” thing is also nonsense
Okay, environmental regulations produce enormous health and social benefits, but don’t they kill jobs?

Not really. This is another myth that conservatives have simply repeated with such tenacity that no one bothers to scrutinize it anymore.

The OMB report has a long section looking into the employment effects of environmental regulations, assessing several studies and literature reviews. Mostly it is devoted to explaining how complex and vexed such analysis is. Jobs may be eliminated in one place/industry and created in another. Jobs may be eliminated in the short term but a larger number created in the long term. Effects on employment must be disentangled from contemporaneous social and economic trends, many of which have much larger effects. And so on.

The conclusion — which is in keeping with the broader literature, as I described in this post — is that there may be local and temporary employment effects from environmental regulations, either positive or negative, but at the aggregate national level, such regulations simply aren’t a significant factor in employment. Their effects are lost amid the noise of demographic shifts and macroeconomic drivers.

They don’t “kill jobs.” From the perspective of the overall economy, they don’t do much of anything to jobs, other than shift them from certain regions/industries to others. As it happens, those shifts are often unfavorable to GOP constituencies, but that’s not a license to, you know, lie about them.

There is no coherent policy justification for Trump’s deregulatory frenzy
If the GOP wants to explicitly align itself behind the interests of particular polluting businesses and against the broader public interest, well, it can. If it doesn’t think the costs to industry of reducing pollution are worth much larger benefits to public health, it can say so. If it wants to transfer wealth back from the public to industrialists by reversing all of Obama’s rules, that is its right as the party in power.

But GOP lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to simply burp up the words “burdensome” and “job-killing” and move on. The OMB finds no evidence that federal regulations have any noticeable impact on aggregate national employment or economic growth. There is evidence that they produce public benefits well in excess of their costs.

If EPA head Scott Pruitt wants to say that defending children from toxics or rural communities from coal ash pollution is burdensome, he ought to offer some numbers, or evidence, or ... something. Goofy homilies are not enough. (His latest claim is that the Bible recommends the deregulatory agenda.)

Believing in the inherent costliness and ineffectiveness of federal regulation is not a religious matter. It’s not an article of faith. It’s an empirical assertion, an argument, and the available evidence indicates that it is incorrect.

It is certainly not a belief to which journalists owe any particular deference.

Until Trump’s administration makes a case that its own OMB and agencies are wrong — not just by a little, but by tens of billions of dollars — the presumption of every journalist and politico in Washington should be that there is no coherent policy rationale for Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

It is, like his health, tax, and infrastructure initiatives, simply the polar opposite of populism: the targeted transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, at the public’s expense.

You guys are really good at copying and pasting. Thanks for the novel.

[Unregistered]

You guys are really good at copying and pasting. Thanks for the novel.

I am brainwashed. Must copy and paste....

You're welcome.

[Unregistered]

Not all, and now these people are covered. They get preventative care (which saves more in the long run) and they don't have to rely on the ER for basic care. ACA also gave self employed people a venue to purchase coverage they didn't before. Decent healthcare shouldn't be a privilege but a right.

More importantly ACA brought about changes that impact people who have employer sponsored plans, making them much better (like eliminating pre-existing condition clauses, got rid of garbage plans, guaranteed coverage of certain conditions like pregnancy, keeping kids on parent's plans until 26 etc). The Dems did a very poor job of selling these key components and the GOP did a great job of calling it Obamacare (with a sneer when they said it). Once voters started to realize what other things would disappear if ACA was total repealed they started to revolt.

Key provisions do the following, effective Jan. 1, 2014, unless otherwise noted:

-Require employers to cover their workers, or pay penalties, with exceptions for small employers.
-Provide tax credits to certain small businesses that cover specified costs of health insurance for their employees, beginning in tax year 2010.
-Require individuals to have insurance, with some exceptions, such as financial hardship or religious belief.
-Require creation of state-based (or multi-state) insurance exchanges to help individuals and small businesses purchase insurance. Federal subsidies will limit premium costs to between 2 percent of income for those with incomes at 133 percent of federal poverty guidelines, rising to 9.5 percent of income for those who earn between 300 percent and 400 percent of the poverty guidelines.
-Expand Medicaid to cover people with incomes below 133 percent of federal poverty guidelines.
-Require creation of temporary high-risk pools for those who cannot purchase insurance on the private market due to preexisting health conditions, beginning July 1, 2010.
Require insurance plans to cover young adults on parents’ policies, effective Sept. 23, 2010.
-Establish a national, voluntary long-term care insurance program for “community living assistance services and supports” (CLASS), with regulations to be issued by Oct. 1, 2012.
-Enact consumer protections to enable people to retain their insurance coverage (see next section).
-Increase Consumer Insurance Protections
-The ACA enacted several insurance reforms, effective in 2010, to accomplish the following:

-Prohibit lifetime monetary caps on insurance coverage and limit the use of annual caps.
-Prohibit insurance plans from excluding coverage for children with preexisting conditions.
-Prohibit insurance plans from cancelling (rescinding) coverage, except in cases of fraud.
-Establish state-based rate reviews for “unreasonable” insurance premium increases.
-Establish an office of health insurance consumer assistance or an ombudsman program.
-Establish the share of premiums dedicated to medical services (minimum medical loss ratios).

http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/...f-summary.aspx

The favorite and most popular tactic that a Con Man Uses is to restate the same talking points, and not address the actual cause for concern.

He put able bodied people on Medicaid, a program that with Medicare and Social Security have future liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars. he helped kick the can down the road.

He just simply rewrote the rules. similar to how he rewrote the rules for SNAP and added 10 million there.

And what about the promises? " You can keep your Doctor " What about the double and triple digit rate increases ? What about the closing down of exchanges from State to State ?

And all of this was done by adding tens of trillions to the National Debt. And the Bill to be paid down the road makes those tens of trillions look like pennies.

He was more worried about Bathrooms , and illegals. Democrat Leaders like Blumenthal are out there again, pushing for the DREAMERS, pushing for the rights of illegals Our paid for Representatives not doing the people's business, but the business of illegals. driver's licenses, in state tuition rates, and now they want financial aid. Imagine, financial aid, and incentive, given to people here illegally.

Blumenthal , up there on the podium surrounded by undocumented illegals. why aren't they r put on a bus and sent back where they came from ? Democrats just embolden and encourage the behavior. If HRC would have won, the illegals would be unchecked, open season on getting more " rights", more entitlements.

[Unregistered]

Another rat jumping off USS Trump

Gary Cohn to Resign as Trump’s Top Economic adviser

[Unregistered]

Another rat jumping off USS Trump

Gary Cohn to Resign as Trump’s Top Economic adviser

He doesn’t have the stomach for tariffs. No loss, he did his job with the tax cuts.

[Unregistered]

Wash rinse repeat, next

[Unregistered]

Stormy Daniels sues Donald Trump, says "hush agreement" invalid because he never signed.

[Unregistered]

Stormy Daniels sues Donald Trump, says "hush agreement" invalid because he never signed.

So how high must the feces pile get before it collapses under its own weight?

Can they be like cow chips and dry out and blow away?

[Unregistered]

Oooops ...Trump did it again Britney Spears.

Stormy Daniels sues Donald Trump, says "hush agreement" invalid because he never signed.

Melania heard yelling at Trump in the White House when news broke of Stormy Lawsuit , White House staff leaked Info that Trump is glued to CNN & MSNBC Watching all the Breaking News.

[Unregistered]

Snowflake MSM brainwashed Hillary emails suck obamacare Kenyan hope & change fake news Nancy Pelosi pegging Chuck deep state conspiracy Comey dry humping Chelsea rachel maddow Hollywood celebrities flying in private planes while globe is not warming.

Trump is in control, this is normal.