Ryan/Collins-Care 2.0 Goofs

Seven Reasons Why Ryan/Collins-Care 2.0 Is All But Guaranteed to
Impose Crushing Costs on Voters, Hurt Trump’s Base, And Hand Power Back to the Democrats (from: Breitbart)

If passed in its current form, the GOP’s Obamacare 2.0 bill will impose brutal costs Americans still struggling to make it through a great recession—particularly President Donald Trump’s base—and risk handing Congress and the presidency back to Democrats.

1) The bill’s provisions increase healthcare costs for Trump voters in critical states. As an analysis conducted by the Washington Post shows, voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will see their tax credits decrease under Obamacare 2.0. “If you’re a 40-year-old making $75,000 a year, you’re going to get a 75 percent or higher increase to your tax credits—a beneficial situation for you,” the Post explains. “If, however, you’re a 60-year-old making $30,000 a year, you’re going to see a reduction in those tax credits (unless you live in Upstate New York or Massachusetts or parts of central Texas).”

In other words, senior citizens—who vote regularly in mid-term elections—will see their healthcare costs increase under the Republicans’ bill.

Plus, Obamacare 2.0 phases out credits for people who start earning more than $75,000. Why? Because screw the voters and they’re on their own? What a great message to send to the middle class! Not only are Republicans hurting people struggling to make ends meet, they also punish you if you make too much money. Everyone loses, except perhaps insurance companies.

2) Meanwhile, the bill is “a gift to illegal aliens,” as conservative author Daniel Horowitz writes. Illegals can get health care through identity theft and fraud, because Obamacare 2.0 makes it impossible to check enrollees’ immigration status. The bill incentivizes further illegal immigration by encouraging illegals to come to the U.S. to cut into taxpayer-funded programs meant for citizens. Poll after poll shows Trump’s immigration policies prioritizing Americans and their problems over foreigners and their wants are hugely popular with voters. Giving away health care to illegals, while ramping up the price for Trump’s core voters, is a slap in the face.

3) Obamacare 2.0 will be labeled as “Ryan/Collins-Care,” and Democrats and their media allies will highlight every hard case to attack Republicans for hurting the poor and elderly. Remember when a progressive group put out an ad showing Paul Ryan pushing a grandma in a wheelchair off a cliff? Obamacare 2.0 gives the media and the Democrats a golden opportunity to walk away from their healthcare mess and blame Republicans, and amplify that message endlessly.

4) Republicans kicked things off with horrific messaging. In a condescending statement, Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz told Americans they’ll have to “invest” in their health care instead of getting a new iPhone. “Americans have choices,” he said on CNN. “And they’ve got to make a choice. And so, maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest it in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions for themselves.”

5) The arbitrary and crushing penalty for not enrolling during the randomly-selected period will hurt financially struggling voters already fighting to stay afloat. As Avik Roy writes in Forbes, the “continuous coverage” part inflicts a massive cost increase on those who go without paying for a plan for more than 63 days. “Worse still, the bill contains an arbitrary ‘continuous coverage’ provision, in which those who sign up for coverage outside of the normal open enrollment period would pay a 30 percent surcharge to the normal insurance premium,” Roy writes. And you have to pay this for an entire year—which will not go over well with people struggling to pay for rent, for childcare, for student loans. In other words, it’s not enough to pay a one-time penalty if you forget to sign up for your Obamacare 2.0 in time or choose to forgo insurance altogether. No, you have to pay 30 percent more, on top of rising costs, for a whole year. How is this supposed to help, say, parents with three kids paying a large monthly premium (not counting eye and dental, of course) with a high deductible?

6) This bill is going to unleash the kind of political fury on Republicans that will elect Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Part of what killed Hillary Clinton’s campaign was voters getting their massive Obamacare premium increases in the mail in October. Republicans seem eager to inflict that kind of fatal damage on themselves. The explosive reaction to Obamacare launched the Tea Party in 2010 and swept Republicans into Congress during the mid-term elections of 2014. The Left is furious and energetic under Trump. The 2018 midterm elections are right around the corner, and Democrats are going to launch a holy war against Trump during the 2020 election. The Left will rally around Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other progressives and portray the Democrats as the party of the forgotten man. The white, working class gave Trump a chance in 2016. They could easily begin voting Democratic again or drop out of the political process altogether after a healthcare betrayal.

7) It destroys political capital desperately needed for the rest of Trump’s first term, particularly pro-American immigration reform. Trump’s election victory wasn’t a once-in-a-generation election. It was once-in-a-century, or once-in-history. Republicans have one, brief chance to correct the course the U.S. is heading down and bind up all of the wounds inflicted on Americans over the decades. There is a small window to end the era of cheap labor, low wages, mass immigration, hollowed-out communities, family disintegration, drug addiction, and suicide. Will Republicans take it and secure their party’s dominance for the next 50 years? Or will they throw it away?

The Obamacare 2.0 bill pushed by some Republicans strips out even Obamacare’s weak protections preventing illegal aliens from signing up for health care meant for citizens.

A draft of the bill, released by the House Committee on Ways and Means, cannot even include bare-bones provisions requiring officials to check an enrollee’s immigration status, the Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz warns, calling it a “gift to illegal aliens.”

Obamacare included provisions from an earlier bill allowing illegal aliens with fraudulent documents to apply while the government and Obamacare managers looked the other way. Eager for welfare state clients and looking to grease the skids for a massive amnesty down the road, Obamacare navigators signed up thousands of illegal aliens for benefits.

“Obama had already paved the path for illegal alien Obamacare when he signed the massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) in 2009,” conservative author Michelle Malkin explained in March 2014. “As I’ve reported previously, the law loosened eligibility requirements for legal immigrants and their children by watering down document and evidentiary standards—making it easy for individuals to use fake Social Security cards to apply for benefits with little to no chance of getting caught. In addition, Obama’s S-CHIP expansion revoked Medicaid application time limits that were part of the 1996 welfare reform law.”

Obamacare has no meaningful, robust protections in place against illegal aliens claiming health care. The law claimed to exclude illegals, but in practice, made no effort to verify that the people applying for health care were citizens. Now, Republicans are about to take that problem and make it much worse by gutting enforcement, Horowitz says:

Although Obamacare didn’t require photo ID and fingerprints to verify identity, it did harness the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Thus, officials were at least able to check immigration status against Social Security numbers.

The problem with this bill is that because it tweaks Obamacare and creates a new massive entitlement system through the budget reconciliation process, it cannot have the statutory effect of mandating HHS and IRS work with Citizenship and Immigration Services to use the SAVE database because that issue is outside the jurisdiction of the reporting committees. And no subject matter from other committees can be included in reconciliation.

Thus, to pass Obamacare 2.0 instead of plain repeal via budget reconciliation, Republicans must use weaker verification language.

Allowing illegals access to health care through fraud is a disastrous move, Horowitz shows. What Republicans are doing is almost inexplicable: Ramping up the most punishing aspects of Obamacare while removing even its fig-leaf requirements against granting illegal aliens health care. Except, according to Horowitz, they never intended to repeal the “meat and potatoes” of Obamacare at all.

There’s also the deeply troubling aspect of Republicans encouraging illegal immigration with enticing incentives and promises not to punish law-breakers. Illegal alien identity theft is a serious, widespread problem. Since it’s all but impossible to work and collect benefits in the U.S. without valid ID and documentation, illegals commit felonies to steal Americans’ Social Security numbers and forge tax documents.

“The demand is so great for counterfeit documents because the illegal alien population wants to work—that’s the majority of their motivation for wanting to come to this country,” one former immigration officer told Fox News in December. “So there’s a huge demand for those documents that are required to pass the employment eligibility verification procedures…. In every neighborhood where there’s a significant illegal alien population, there are at least several document vendors who supply this service,” he said. Illegals typically buy three fraudulent documents: A counterfeit resident alien card or work authorization card, plus a counterfeit California driver’s license, and a counterfeit Social Security card, which costs about $120 to $300. He encountered at least one hundred illegals during his career with voter registration cards who admitted they had voted in a U.S. election.

With well over ten million illegals in the U.S. and so many buying up fake documents, there will almost certainly be a massive rush to claim health care benefits, especially with liberals looking to sign up illegals to “resist” against the Trump administration.

“If nothing is done, Obamacare 2.0 will contain the same verification provisions as the original version that have enabled illegal aliens engaging in identity fraud to access the subsidies,” Horowitz writes.

It’s an insult to injury for Americans victimized by mass immigration policies and punishing healthcare regulations. Yet some Republicans seem eager to inflict more pain on the very voters who put them in power. Poll after poll shows Trump’s immigration policies prioritizing Americans, particularly struggling and vulnerable citizens, over foreigners are hugely popular with voters. Republicans in Congress ignore these voters and their pleas for affordable health care and immigration enforcement at their own peril.

An experienced healthcare policy researcher observes that the Obamacare “replacement” plan put forward by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) not only would allow for taxpayer funding of abortion, but would actually expand its funding over that provided in the original Obamacare law.

Writing at The Federalist, Christopher Jacobs, founder and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Juniper Research Group, says the Patient Freedom Act (PFA) sends a “strikingly different message” from that demonstrated in House Republicans’ recent approval of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2017.

A former senior policy analyst in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, and a senior policy analyst with the Joint Economic Committee’s Senate Republican staff, Jacobs writes the PFA, “would go further than Obamacare in funding abortion coverage.”

“Whereas Obamacare provides federal funding for insurance plans that cover abortion, the Patient Freedom Act would allow for direct federal funding of abortion procedures themselves,” he adds.

Jacobs explains that the PFA offers states three options regarding how to handle health care. States would be able to either keep Obamacare as passed with its individual and employer mandates as well as its subsidies; create a new, more “complicated” program in which states would receive most of the same funding as under Obamacare that would be directly sent to individual Americans through new Roth Health Savings Accounts (HSAs); or totally rid their states of Obamacare and all the federal funds that go with it.

Noting that the bill’s text favors the second option of the new Roth HSAs, Jacobs observes, “If a state chooses the second option, most of the provisions of Title I of Obamacare would not apply. That repeal would include the individual and employer mandates, and some (but not all) of the federal benefit mandates included in Obamacare.”

Jacobs continues that for states that choose the second or third options, the PFA would repeal the section of Obamacare (1303) that restricts some federal funding of abortions and allows states to ban coverage for abortions on the exchanges. The section also requires health insurance companies to set up a “wall” to ensure federal taxpayer funds for subsidies are separate from other funds that are used to pay for abortions.

Pointing out that national pro-life groups have criticized Section 1303 of Obamacare as “an accounting sham because money is fungible,” Jacobs also notes that many insurers have not bothered to observe the “wall” between funding sources at all.

“However, Obamacare made an attempt, albeit a largely meaningless one, to prevent taxpayer funding of abortion,” Jacobs says. “By contrast, the PFA makes no such attempt to do so.”

He continues:

Because the PFA itself includes no restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion, it’s critical to examine the source of funding for the new state-based allotments. While the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding of abortion, it does so only for appropriations provided through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ spending bill. Other agencies covered through other spending bills must explicitly prohibit funding of abortion coverage, otherwise federal funding of abortion would be permitted—and potentially required by courts as a necessary medical service.

The PFA, says Jacobs still relies on Obamacare’s “existing funding stream” and would allow “subsidies in the form of refundable tax credits—to finance the allotments to individuals’ Roth HSAs.”

“Because that funding stream goes through the Department of the Treasury via the Internal Revenue Code, the Hyde Amendment restrictions do not apply—meaning that federal funds can, and will, finance abortion coverage,” he writes.

“I don’t know whether leaving out the Hyde protections was a deliberate policy choice by the Senate offices, or an unintentional omission by them, but even the latter scenario shows a lack of concern that federal funds should not finance abortions – particularly surprising given the way Obamacare gives billions in federal funds to plans that cover abortion,” Jacobs tells Breitbart News.

Breitbart News reached out to the offices of both Sens. Collins and Cassidy several times, but no person was available to speak to confirm or deny taxpayer funding of abortions in their healthcare plan.

“I haven’t seen anyone refuting my analysis that the bill funds abortions, and the offices in question haven’t written me to dispute it,” Jacobs says.

In addition to Collins and Cassidy, the bill now includes Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as co-sponsors.

According to the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein, the PFA should be dubbed the “Obamacare Forever Act,” and represents a “bipartisan” effort to tweak Obamacare yet still allow Obama’s signature law to be cemented into America’s healthcare policy.

“[T]he Cassidy-Collins bill would leave residents in many states trapped in Obamacare, which all states would still be forced to pay for — and their only alternative is to adopt a system while still under onerous rules imposed from Washington,” Klein concludes.

Refugee resettlement from terror-ridden countries is one of the most dangerous endeavors our nation could implement.

Contrary to what some lawmakers and the fake news media have repeated, it is an incontrovertible fact that refugees have committed alarming crimes, and terrorist attacks against our nation.

To outline just a sample of these attacks:

* Atta and the other hijackers, who were visa immigrants into America, were from Egypt and other Middle Eastern locations.
* The San Bernardino couple who gunned down those at a Christmas party had Pakistani and other Middle Eastern origin.
* Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan went on a jihadi stabbing rampage at Ohio State.
* In 2016, an Iraqi refugee Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan was accused of planning to bomb a local mall in Texas.
* In September 2016, a Somali-Kenyan immigrant named Dahir Adan went on a stabbing spree at a mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
* Somali refugee Mohamed Osman Mohamed was arrested for planning to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon back in 2010.
* In 2012, Abdullatif Ali Aldosary, an Iraqi refugee, bombed a Social Security Office in Arizona.
* The muslim-brainwashed executioner who gunned down around 50 homopervert queers in a homogay Florida bar was influenced by "allahu akbar" ISIS.
* Two Iraqi refugees were convicted for having aided Al-Qaeda in Iraq in killing American servicemen. Those so-called "refugees," lied on their applications, and as proof that the screening process is ineffective, were allowed entry with impunity.
* Both Boston Bombers, the Tsarnaev Brothers, were islam-loyal asylum-seekers fleeing Russia and living in Kyrgyzstan before entering the United States.

To satanically-demonic deviates, facts do not matter. They are going to push their radical, anti-American, open borders propaganda no matter what. Exile or deportations of even native-born americans are called for! Listen up, Kenyan-not-Hawaiian-born niggar-insurrectionist!

The average American needs to hear the truth.

Not only are vile vermin forcing all Americans to allow large numbers of non-vetted Islamic refugees from terror-haven foreign governments, they are doing so at the expense of all U.S. taxpayers, binding all Americans to literally finance their own endangerment!

So why the continued opposition to a safer America?

While big businesses pathetically virtue signal by pledging to hire scads of refugees, what they don’t tell you is that for each refugee hired, they receive a $2,400 or more tax credit. You do the math.

Religious institutions have also benefited financially to an enormous extent from refugee resettlement.

Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, World Relief Corporation, Church World Service, and Domestic and Foreign Missionary Service of the Episcopal Church of the USA all have contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees, with a significant number of them islamic. Those religious institutions often use collection plates on Sunday that their members believe is going to help poor Christians, or the Church itself, then turn around to use them for jihadist-supportive refugee resettlement.

Such hellbound individuals managing those groups have no responsible cognizance to determine who a non-jihadist-at-heart "victim of oppression" is - and it is most profitable for them: They get rich, and can still hypocritically fly the false flag of moral superiority.

We cannot stay on this suicidal path any longer. Either we do what is necessary to protect our borders and our Judeo-Christian-Law way of life, or we suffer the consequences legalistic cultic-heretic sharia-law-dominated Europe is now enduring.

One of the Islamic radicals who participated in the slaughter of innocent Parisians in November 2015 did so by gaining entry using a Syrian passport, gaining entry as a "refugee."

Is this the future we want for ourselves? For our children?

That is why we must stand behind President Trump’s executive order, not out of purported "islamophobia," as the usual anti-American goofs proclaim, but out of safety and common sense.

[ Editor's Note: Explore Ryan/Collins-Care 2.0 Goofs at your convenience ]