Close your eyes for a few seconds and remember the despair you felt one year ago, while a Trump presidency was still a looming but unavoidable nightmare.
Donald Trump, a man with no empathy and even less grasp of policy nuances, was the president-elect. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), a man who literally fantasized about cutting health benefits for poor people during his college keg parties, had spent the Obama years rallying his fellow Republican lawmakers around a singularly cruel agend...
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Congress repealed the Obamacare individual mandate; now states are trying to repair the damage
With its passage of the Republican tax bill Wednesday, Congress has successfully repealed a critical component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — but states could still safeguard current health law.
To offset a tax cut — which largely benefits wealthy individuals over the long term — Republican lawmakers repealed the individual mandate. The tax overhaul bill now goes to the president’s desk. Once the bill is signed into law, the mandate will be repealed in 20...
Paul Ryan says ‘nobody knows’ if the tax bill will blow up the deficit. Economists beg to differ.
Though he never deserved the reputation, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is known as a deficit hawk. And yet the tax cut bill he helped shepherd through Congress is projected to add at least $1.414 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade.
During a Wednesday morning appearance on NBC’s Today, Ryan was asked how he, as someone who is supposedly concerned about the deficit, can support a bill that will blow it up.
“I remember you in 2012 doing ev...
The GOP tax plan is not a game
On Tuesday afternoon, the House passed the final version of the GOP’s tax bill, and the Senate is expected to pass the bill later Tuesday night. The plan will upend the American economic system, raise taxes on middle class people making between $40,000 and $50,000 a year by more than $5 billion, cut taxes by more than $5.5 billion for people making more than $1 million a year, punish wage-earning employees, repeal the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, likely force billi...
House passes massive tax cut for corporations, the wealthy, foreign investors and Donald Trump
The House of Representatives voted 227 to 203 on Tuesday to pass the final version of the GOP Tax Cut and Jobs Act.
Lawmakers had just four days to read through the 503-page bill after it was released on Friday. Just hours before the House was set to vote, even top Republicans on the tax writing committee couldn’t speak to the basic details of the bill.
I asked Kevin Brady — THE WAYS AND MEANS CHAIRMAN — if he could name the tax brackets.
He ...
Some Missouri HIV-positive patients to lose health coverage as assault on Obamacare continues
Some HIV-positive patients in Missouri will lose critical health coverage in 2018, thanks to high costs and little marketplace competition. Many of the affected individuals live in rural areas, where access to health care is already limited.
According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, about 95 patients in 51 counties will lose coverage starting January 1. The state has begun notifying the patients of this change, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
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Alabama is first state to freeze enrollment to Children’s Health Insurance Program
Alabama is the latest state to bear bad news to recipients of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), warning families Monday that it will no longer enroll children starting Jan. 1, 2018 and will terminate the program entirely on Feb. 1, 2018 if Congress fails to act.
Congressional lawmakers have yet to renew federal funding for CHIP since the program expired on Sept. 30. Since then, state officials have had to relay devastating news of funding shortages to families of...
The Trump administration’s Orwellian plan to gut Roe v. Wade
Two women, known by the pseudonyms “Jane Roe” and “Jane Poe,” are being held at federal facilities for undocumented minors who enter the country without an adult guardian. They are pregnant and want abortions. Yet they cannot obtain one because the Trump administration will not let them leave the facility to obtain the medical care they seek.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it should. Last October, the Trump administration made a similar attempt to hold a w...
These are the obscure Trump staffers who are systematically dismantling the federal government
In August 2016, a day after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump announced some of his economic plans, he called in to Fox Business Network to discuss those plans with host Maria Bartiromo. In their conversation, Trump insisted his assault on government programs would not have any negative ramifications. “We’re going to be doing smart budget cuts, budget cuts that will make it just as good or better than it is right now but for a lot less money,” he vowed.
Congress has no...
Virginia’s new governor campaigned on Medicaid expansion, but now is sending mixed signals
Months before Virginia Gov.-elect Ralph Northam rode a massive Democratic wave of progressive support into victory in November, he ran on a platform that specifically championed expanding Medicaid, which offers health insurance to low-income people. Northam, whose campaign website currently shows him providing medical care to a child and whose logo features heart monitor imagery, campaigned on the issue by pointing to a June 2016 speech in which he argued for Medicaid expansion on moral an...