House Speaker Paul Ryan says that he and his fellow Republicans are just finishing up their latest Obamacare replacement deal, but the public isn’t allowed to know what’s in this bill just yet. This is exactly what happened last time, and smart money says that we can expect the exact same results for Ryan. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan assures us that the republicans are putting the finishing touches on their new piece of healthcare legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act. In fact, according to republicans they might even bring this piece of legislation up for a vote as soon as next week.
Here’s the problem. Once again, the public, the people, the voters were not allowed to really see what’s in this piece of legislation just yet, but what we do know is that there is an amendment in this thing that is going to allow states to opt out of the preexisting condition requirement of the Affordable Care Act, it’s going to let them opt out of some of the funding options, which makes healthcare care reform effectively useless and things like that that the Freedom Caucus wanted to throw into this piece of legislation.
Now the main issue with the original bill was the that Freedom Caucus and many other republicans in the House of Representatives didn’t feel like it did far enough to undo the “damage” of the Affordable Care Act. Now they didn’t ever tell us what that damage was. They just wanted the bill to be even worse than what Paul Ryan and Donald Trump and everybody else had already worked on. Effectively they wanted this bill to take more benefits away from the American public. And that’s what the republicans are working on, that’s what’s in this bill, and that’s why we’re not allowed to see what all is in it because it’s going to be something that the American public is going to despise even worse than the first draft of the American Health Care Act that republicans introduced a little bit ago.
This is not something that Paul Ryan needs to continue working on. He is already the least popular politician in Washington DC. He actually no longer holds the title of least popular person in DC because now Steve Bannon holds that title, but he’s the least popular politician and he’s working on an initiative that is not surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As it turns out, new polls show that actually a majority of republicans are now embracing the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. They like their provisions in it because now with all this talk about healthcare, they finally understand what it does and they understand that taking it away is going to make them lose their health insurance.
If Paul Ryan wants to double down or triple down on this bill like he’s continuing to do, that’s fine. You’re going to see your approval ratings continue to drop. You’re going to get huge backlash from your voters back in Wisconsin, and you’re going to lose your seat in 2018. In fact, if you do manage to get something passed, you’re still likely to lose your seat in 2018. If you don’t get something passed, Donald Trump said it himself, he’s going to make sure that you’re not Speaker of the House anymore.
Paul Ryan is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation, and to be honest, this man completely deserves it. His entire career in Congress has been spent trying to take benefits and rights away from the American public and working in favor of corporations including the Koch Brothers who have financed his campaigns. This man deserves to go. He deserves to be among the ranks of the unemployed. He should not be Speaker of the House. He shouldn’t even be a representative in the House. But he is, and he has power, and he’s tried to use that power to take away your health insurance. And that is what this latest draft of this republican healthcare replacement bill is going to do. It’s going to leave more people uninsured, more people without medication. It’s going to do nothing to control prices and premiums. It’s going to be a big giveaway to big pharma and the insurance companies.
