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The Zombie Rises: Senate Moves To Insert O’Care Mandate Repeal In Tax Bill

Tierney Sneed contributed reporting.

No matter how many times the full or partial repeal of Obamacare has died in Congress this year, it continues to claw its way back from the grave.

The latest incarnation, blessed on Tuesday by Senate GOP leadership, is an amendment to Republicans’ long-awaited tax overhaul bill that would repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate. Such a policy change would save the government more than $300 billion but cost about 13 million people their health insurance coverage, and drastically hike premiums for those who remain in the individual market, experts say.

Pursuing such a health policy in tandem with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations is politically risky—and powerful medical organizations are already mobilizing in opposition to the bill.


Though hard-right members of Congress and President Trump have been agitating for weeks for the repeal’s inclusion in the tax package, GOP leaders have been hesitant, concerned that mixing controversial health policy into an already politically dicey tax debate could sink the bill entirely. Despite pressure from the Freedom Caucus, the House decided not to include the mandate repeal in its tax bill, which could pass as early as Thursday.

But senators indicated that they will attempt to insert that provision this week as the bill goes through a markup in the Senate Finance Committee.

“I think it’s looking more and more doable,” a smiling Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) told reporters Tuesday following a meeting of the GOP conference behind closed doors. “It just makes the overall bill a lot more possible.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said Republicans spent most of their weekly lunch meeting discussing the idea, and he came away with the impression it would happen. “My gut tells me we will reach a consensus on doing that,” he said. “It’s not unanimous, there are some people who are concerned. But it’s $338 billion, and that’s a lot of money.”

Asked what the money could be used for, Kennedy suggested moving up the planned corporate tax cut, which the Senate bill had originally delayed for one year.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office recently reported that repealing the mandate would result in hundreds of billions of federal savings because at least 13 million people would lose their health insurance and no longer draw government subsidies. The CBO found that some of those people would be dropping their insurance voluntarily, but many of those who remain would be priced out of the market.

“They’re going to shrink the risk pool of healthy people,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) explained. “Which means you have mostly sick people left. This will be, for an enormous number of people, a huge increase in their health insurance premiums.”

In interviews this week in the halls of the Capitol, GOP lawmakers were enthusiastic about the prospect of gutting a pillar of the Affordable Care Act after failing to do so in nine months of controlling every branch of the federal government.

Yet a handful seemed uncomfortable with the idea. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), whose vote was crucial in defeating multiple ACA repeal bills earlier this year, told reporters she worries about the political and policy repercussions of gutting the mandate.

“I personally think that it complicates tax reform to put the repeal of the individual mandate in there, particularly if it’s done before the Alexander-Murray bill passes, because of the impact on premiums,” she said.

To assuage the concerns of Collins and those who share her concerns, Republican leaders have floated the idea of passing the tax bill with the individual mandate repeal in tandem with a promised vote on the bipartisan bill introduced earlier this fall that would restore cost-sharing payments to insurance companies and restore tens of billions of dollars for Obamacare outreach that President Trump cut earlier this year.

“By putting it in there we would have a better chance of moving forward with something that is along the lines of what Senator Alexander has been talking about, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), told reporters. “Those I think compliment one another.”

But Democrats say such an offer is a non-starter.

“They should put our bipartisan health care bill on the floor as quickly as possible, without any attempts to sabotage it or use it as political cover to jam legislation through that would be devastating for patients and families,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), co-author of Alexander-Murray, said in a statement Tuesday night.

“It would make absolutely no sense to stabilize health care with one hand while devastating it with the other,” she added.

Still, Republicans insist that unlike their repeated face-plants on health care earlier this year, the overriding desire among Republicans to pass a massive tax cut is so strong that even a controversial mandate repeal provision can’t derail it.

“This is totally different from health care,” Kennedy said after meeting with his fellow Republicans. “Nobody is standing up and saying, ‘If you do this, I’m not going to vote for the bill.’ Everyone is trying to get to yes.”

stringer bell wrote: »

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/this-chart/louie-gohmert-flow-chart-left-wing-conspiracy

Behold, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s Amazing Flow Chart Revealing Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) produced a chart for the ages at an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, in an attempt to convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the Justice Department ought to appoint a special prosecutor to probe the so-called “Uranium One” scandal.

“We’ve got a chart here that shows just how integral the relationship is with Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Mueller, into this whole Uranium One thing,” Gohmert told Sessions, waving a piece of paper with the chart printed on it while his staff held up a larger version on poster board behind him.

The White House and Republicans have pushed the Uranium One narrative in response to increased scrutiny on President Trump and 2016 election meddling.

“It sure stinks to high heaven, and it doesn’t appear to me they ought to be involved in investigating,” Gohmert said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DomrQLHbe8A

infamous114 wrote: »

https://twitter.com/igorvolsky/status/930899851134595072

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/301767471562629120

Christopher Steele believes his dossier on Trump-Russia is 70-90% accurate

The respected ex-MI6 officer told Guardian journalist and author Luke Harding that his FBI contacts greeted his intelligence report with ‘shock and horror’

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled an explosive dossier of allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, believes it to be 70% to 90% accurate, according to a new book on the covert Russian intervention in the 2016 US election.

The book, Collusion: How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by the Guardian journalist Luke Harding, quotes Steele as telling friends that he believes his reports – based on sources cultivated over three decades of intelligence work – will be vindicated as the US special counsel investigation digs deeper into contacts between Trump, his associates and Moscow.

“I’ve been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?” Steele is quoted as saying.

One of the reasons his dossier was taken seriously in Washington in 2016 was Steele’s reputation in the US for producing reliable reports on Russia, according to Harding’s book.

Between 2014 and 2016, he authored more than a hundred reports on Russia and Ukraine, which were commissioned by private clients but shared widely within the state department and passed across the desks of the secretary of state, John Kerry, and the assistant secretary Victoria Nuland, who led the US response to the annexation of Crimea and the covert invasion of eastern Ukraine.

The sources for those reports were the same as those quoted in the dossier on Trump, which included allegations that the Kremlin had personally compromising material on the US president, including sex tapes recorded during a trip to Moscow in 2013, and that Trump and his associates actively colluded with Russian intelligence to influence the election in his favour.

Years earlier, Steele shared the results of his investigation of the global football organisation, Fifa, with a senior FBI official in Rome; that led to an investigation by US federal prosecutors, and ultimately the arrest of seven Fifa officials.

“The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible,” Harding writes.

The book traces Steele’s career as an MI6 officer, sent to Moscow in 1990 under cover of working as the second secretary in the UK chancery division at the embassy.

While there, the young spy was witness to the 1991 attempted coup and looked on when Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in central Moscow to denounce the plotters.

Steele left Moscow in 1993 and was later posted to Paris before taking a senior post on MI6’s Russia desk in London in 2006. Because his name had been on a list of MI6 officers leaked and published in 1999, he was unable to return to Moscow. But he was chosen to lead the MI6 investigation of the assassination of the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning in 2006.

Steele left MI6 in 2009, to start up a commercial intelligence firm, Orbis, with a former colleague, Christopher Burrows. Soon after its founding, Orbis began working with Fusion GPS, a Washington-based company doing political and business research, which commissioned the investigation of Trump in 2016.

Steele delivered a total of 16 reports to Fusion between June and early November 2016, but his sources started to go quiet beginning in July, when Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. According to Harding’s account, Steele was shocked by the extent of collusion his sources were reporting.

“For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience,” Steele told friends.

Steele flew to Rome in June to brief his FBI contact with whom he had shared his Fifa report, and returned in September to meet a full FBI team of investigators. He described their response as “shock and horror”, and they asked him to explain his methods and to pass on future reports.

However, as the weeks went by leading up to the 8 November election, the FBI told him it could not go public with material involving a presidential candidate, and then his FBI contacts went silent altogether. Steele told a friend it was clear he had passed on a “radioactive hot potato”.

stringer bell wrote: »

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/this-chart/louie-gohmert-flow-chart-left-wing-conspiracy

Behold, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s Amazing Flow Chart Revealing Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) produced a chart for the ages at an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, in an attempt to convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the Justice Department ought to appoint a special prosecutor to probe the so-called “Uranium One” scandal.

“We’ve got a chart here that shows just how integral the relationship is with Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Mueller, into this whole Uranium One thing,” Gohmert told Sessions, waving a piece of paper with the chart printed on it while his staff held up a larger version on poster board behind him.

The White House and Republicans have pushed the Uranium One narrative in response to increased scrutiny on President Trump and 2016 election meddling.

“It sure stinks to high heaven, and it doesn’t appear to me they ought to be involved in investigating,” Gohmert said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DomrQLHbe8A