This morning the new health care bill made it out of Ways and Means. WITHOUT the committee ever having read the report on it’s impact.
Because the report isn’t done yet. The Congressional Budget Office hasn’t had time to research and prepare it.
But that means nothing to them. Vengeance for 8 years of Obama, regardless of it’s impact on the nation is the only thing they really care about.
Sean Spicer has already begun to say that the CBO report isn’t going to be accurate. CBO is a non partisan, highly respected office.
The Republican Whip said that he didn’t want to “unelected bureaucrats in Washington” slow down the Republican promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
The report is due on Monday. So essentially they would need to wait one week to be responsible. But nope. Not gonna do that.
Likely because they know it’s going to a negative report.
So let me back up here. This is the WAYS AND MEANS committee. The entire point of this committee is to make sure a bill can be paid for with existing taxes and what kind of impact it will have on the deficit. But they don’t know. Because they don’t have the fucking report.
They obviously know this is going to a bad report. I’m not sure how it could be otherwise, even if they had written with good intention, they wrote a complex bill in a few weeks. They scrabbled together our future without even proper consideration or research. Because they want to win.
It's a Thought 
Good post. This is frustrating. The CBO exists for a reason. To measure what the politicians think up. It is quite comical that Sean Spicer is calling anyone inaccurate, since he has lied as much as his boss. He also called two hospital groups, the AMA and AARP special interest groups for being against this bill. Since older Americans will be harmed by the bill, I understand the AARP’s concerns, but they are a special interest group. The three former groups deliver care to people, so their opinion matters a great deal.
It should be noted the CBO is also accused of being biased when they do not support one side’s argument. Both parties have done this. But, to say they will be biased BEFORE they do their work, is telling.
This deserves a data driven analysis as people will be harmed by this change. The ACA deserves a data driven analysis to find out what is working and what could be improved. It is not in a death spiral and it is not a disaster. So, the party in power should stop the naysaying and do some homework. They could also confess in their role to make the ACA more expensive, by not funding the risk corridors which penalized insurers, like Humana, Aetna, etc. Keith
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They won’t take responsibility and they won’t listen to any concerns – emotional, fiscal or rational.
I find it very frustrating when leaders act without good rational sense.
And this entire things is in defiance of rational thinking. But we have only ourselves to blame. We have never given rational thinking any prominence in our culture. And so we elect people based on our emotional prejudices.
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Now that their constituents are convinced main stream news is against them, these legislators seem to care less what real data looks like. I recall Newt Gongrich siding with his gut instinct when told his data was verifiably incorrect.
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They are trying to erase any evidence of Obama. For some reason they really disliked him. It’s personal too, far beyond differences in viewpoints.
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The GOP at the state and national level has this habit of ramming through bills that haven’t been debated, have been kept hidden until the last minute, and which haven’t been properly assessed as to cost because they know that if it was properly examined even a lot of GOP politicians wouldn’t go along with it. From what I’ve been seeing so far the elimination of taxes that came with Obamacare, the elimination of the insurance purchase mandate, the tax credits, etc, is going to add hundreds of billions to the deficit while at the same time drive up insurance and health care costs.
Unfortunately this is par for the course for these people. Walker here in Wisconsin ran on a platform of reforming the state’s accounting practices because the previous administrations had been concealing years of deficits through the use of accounting tricks. Walker promised his administration would use generally accepted accounting practices. That promise lasted, oh, maybe ten minutes? Analysis of his latest “balanced” budget using GAAP puts the state about $1.9 billion in the red.
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The really interesting thing is the speed at which the GOP is trying to ram this through. In the first two months? Paul Ryan made a speech with the sentence “This is our chance” and he sounded desperate. They all seemed panicked. As if they know that they don’t have four – or even two – years to get this done.
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