A day after the GOP suffered humiliation when its effort to pass a health care bill failed, President Donald Trump sought to reassure Republicans that he would eventually put a plan together.

In his first tweet addressing the failure of the health care bill, Trump urged supporters not to worry because he believed the Affordable Care Act would eventually collapse.


ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2017

The comments echoed remarks Trump made in the Oval Office Friday shortly after the bill failed, in which he blamed Democrats and said the Affordable Care Act would eventually fail. Republicans have helped create many of the problems with Obamacare.

Trump never attempted to work with Democrats in crafting the Republican plan that failed.

The failure of the bill marked a significant setback for Republicans, who have voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act several times since it was enacted in 2010. Yet they could not agree in the end on an alternative to replace it.

Addressing reporters after his decision to pull the bill, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) admitted it was “disappointing” for Republicans.

 “We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say other than Obamacare is the law of the land.”

More than 20 million people stood to lose their health insurance if the bill was repealed.type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58d54cdde4b03692bea5563e

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Unable to kill the Affordable Care Act, Republicans now may be compelled to repair it.

And although President Trump predicted Saturday in a Twitter post that the healthcare law would “explode,” the White House risks a huge political backlash letting millions of Americans lose health insurance.

... Reported by L.A. Times 14 hours ago.

DNC Chair Tom Perez reacts to Trump's statement that Democrats are responsible for the ACA repeal failure, which Perez calls a good moment for 24 million who were going to lose their health insurance. Reported by NPR 13 hours ago.

A quick look at what may be next for Obamacare and health-insurance consumers. Reported by Seattle Times 13 hours ago.

WASHINGTON ― In the wake of the Republican failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Friday, leading figures in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rallying behind a single-payer health insurance and a raft of other bold reforms.

These lawmakers and grassroots leaders have long believed that the problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are rooted in the original health care law’s attempt to accommodate, rather than gradually replace, the private, for-profit health insurance system.

Now that efforts to eliminate the law wholesale are effectively dead, they are again arguing that the best way to improve the country’s health care system is to confront the power of corporate health care provider more directly.

“We have got to have the guts to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies and move forward toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” on Friday night. “And I’ll be introducing legislation shortly to do that.”

Even before the Republicans withdrew their Obamacare repeal bill, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and a close Sanders ally, previewed this message at a rally in defense of Obamacare on Thursday.

“Don’t just be satisfied with defeating Trumpcare ― set your sights on creating real Medicare for all!” he told a cheering crowd of hundreds of activists.

Representatives of several major progressive organizations ― the Working Families Party, the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, Credo, Social Security Works and the National Nurses United ― all echoed this push in conversations with The Huffington Post on Friday and Saturday.

“The problem is the insurance companies, Big Pharma ― they’re gonna come back and use the chaos to their advantage,” predicted Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson. “If Democrats go with a half-a-loaf policy, Republicans are going to blame them for the failures of Big Pharma. They have to immediately pivot to expanding Medicare.”

Notwithstanding the support of the influential groups for the proposal and ― according to a May 2016 Gallup poll ― even a majority of the American people, Medicare-for-all legislation is a non-starter in the current Congress. Single-payer health insurance still lacks support from many, if not most, Democrats, let alone from the Republican lawmakers who control both chambers.

But the proactive strategy speaks to increasing confidence among progressives that if they stick to their ideals and build a grassroots movement around them, they will ultimately move the political spectrum in their direction.

“It does take time for social change,” said Chuck Idelson, communications director of the National Nurses United, a 150,000-person labor union that has long advocated for a single-payer health insurance system. “We didn’t end slavery overnight. It took from Seneca Falls in 1848 ’til 1920 until women won the right to vote. But they only won it by building a movement.”In the meantime, a potential benefit of this ambitious approach is what’s known as shifting the “Overton Window,” a political science term for the narrow range of acceptable political views at a given moment in time.

By adopting a position that is considered extreme by contemporary standards, politicians and activists can make more attainable policy goals start to seem reasonable by comparison.

That phenomenon already seems to be working in progressives’ favor.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the only one of Sanders’ Senate colleagues to endorse his presidential bid, discussed the possibility of lowering the Medicare eligibility age or empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices in his statement on the Republican bill’s collapse.

“There are plenty of ideas already on the table that would make health care more affordable for working families, from a public option, to prescription drug negotiations, to offering older Americans the chance to buy into Medicare,” Merkley said on Friday. “I’m happy to work with anyone, from either side of the aisle, to explore these or any other ideas that would improve health care for working Americans.”

Lowering the Medicare eligibility age from its current level of 65 is a “very interesting” idea, because of the positive financial effect it would have on the Obamacare insurance exchanges, said Austin Frakt, a health economist for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

By allowing the oldest exchange participants to enroll in Medicare, lowering the Medicare age would relieve the health insurance marketplaces of some of their costliest customers, said Frakt, who also has academic posts at Boston University and Harvard.

“It would reduce the premiums in those markets,” he predicted. (Frakt noted, however, that absent measures to offset the cost of the additional beneficiaries, the change would increase Medicare’s financial burden.)

Social Security Works’ Lawson praised the idea as an incremental step toward Medicare-for-all. 

“Start by lowering the age to 62 and get it down to zero,” he said.


If Democrats go with a half-a-loaf policy, Republicans are going to blame them for the failures of Big Pharma.
Alex Lawson, Social Security Works
Another progressive policy gaining mainstream traction is legislation permitting the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, where the existing single-payer system keeps prices lower. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) was one of several Democratic senators to endure heavy criticism in January for helping block a resolution supporting drug importation. In late February, Booker became a co-sponsor of legislation Sanders introduced that would legalize prescription drug importation from Canada and other countries.

President Donald Trump talked about getting tough with pharmaceutical companies over the price of prescription drugs as recently as early January.

But he has remained silent on the matter since inauguration, including the 17-day period when he was trying to pass House Republicans’ Obamacare repeal bill. What’s more, the ordeal cast serious doubt on his willingness to take on the GOP’s ultraconservatives, who no doubt oppose any form of government intervention to reduce drug prices.

Trump now claims he is counting on Democrats to negotiate over Obamacare on his terms, since, in his telling, the law is on the brink of collapse.

Obamacare’s insurance exchange markets have major problems in some states and regions, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office characterized them as stable overall.

Still, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested in a CNN interview on Friday night that Democrats would be open to working with Trump and congressional Republicans on reforming the law.

“We’re not gloating that they failed. We’re sad that they won’t work with us to improve Obamacare,” he said.

Murshed Zaheed, political director of Credo, warned Democratic leaders that any Democratic efforts to work with Republicans would not get any help from grassroots groups like his.

“If Democrats want to push their version of so-called moderate proposals ― good luck to them,” Zaheed said. “I don’t think anybody should be under any illusion that Schumer or [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi will get anything from collaborating with the right-wing extremists that control Congress.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 10 hours ago.

Car, motorcycle and health insurance will cost more from April 1 with regulator Irdai giving go-ahead to insurers for revision in commission for agents. Reported by DNA 3 hours ago.

Much of the commentary following the disastrous failure of “TrumpCare” focuses on the role of the ideological fissures in the Republican Party, the failure of Paul Ryan to understand the dynamics of his caucus, or the lack of policy expertise of Trump and the White house.

All of these factors played a minor role, but they ignore the three truly important factors that made it impossible for the GOP to cram “TrumpCare” – or “RyanCare” – or ACA “repeal and replace” — down the throats of Congress and the American people.

*Factor #1.* *First and foremost, their bill was politically toxic.* Before the vote, the Quinnipiac Poll found it was opposed by 56% of the voters and supported by only 17%. People didn’t just find it distasteful. It became *politically radioactive*. Politico reported that:

…when voters are told their Republican member of Congress supports the plan, they move from approving of their congressperson by 12 points (46% approve, 34% disapprove) to disapproving by 21 points (35% approve, 56% disapprove) - a net shift of 33 percentage points. The voters also move from saying they would reelect their congressman, 44-38, to saying they will elect a Democratic challenger, 45-38. That is a net 13-point swing away from the Republicans in the vote for Congress.

If “TrumpCare” had been popular, the supposed “divisions” in the GOP wouldn’t have mattered at all. Everyone would have lined up, saluted, and supported their party’s leader in the White House.

Why was the bill so unpopular? First and foremost it’s because most people hate the underlying Republican philosophy pertaining to health care. And they hate it for good reason: it doesn’t work.

We tried the GOP philosophy of allowing the “competitive” market to provide the “most wonderful health care plan in the world” and it produced a system that resulted in per person health care costs twice as high as the rest of the industrial world and outcomes that were worse. That was the world of pre-ACA health care.

The “unfettered market” allowed insurance companies to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions – and to define one of those “pre-existing conditions” as simply being a woman. It allowed them to enforce lifetime caps on coverage – so if you got really sick you were simply out of luck.

Recall that the pre-“ObamaCare” world priced the old and sick out of the market, and allowed insurance companies to sell policies that covered so little that they weren’t really true insurance policies at all. Health costs became the chief cause of personal bankruptcy, and number of people who were uninsured skyrocketed.

When the ACA or “ObamaCare” passed, the GOP spent billions of dollars tarnishing the “ObamaCare” brand. So the brand itself became mildly unpopular. And they made it an emblem of Obama’s supposed dictatorial overreach and “big government” rallying cry for their base.


It turns out that ordinary people get much angrier if someone wants to take away something they have, than they do when they are denied something to which they aspire.

But most Americans really do consider access to health care a right: not just access to buy insurance if you can afford it, but real access to real health care.

As a result, people always liked the actual contents of “ObamaCare” – and the law directly benefited many in the GOP base who didn’t like the brand.

So the moment Donald Trump’s election allowed the GOP to credibly threaten to actually take those benefits away, and people began to connect the benefits with the brand, the brand itself also became popular. And ordinary people got really furious that the Republicans were trying to take their personal health care benefits away.

The CBO Report laid bare the true effect of “TrumpCare” - taking health care from 24 million Americans to give a tax cut of $600 billion to the wealthy. That pretty much put the final nails in the coffin of “TrumpCare”. Meanwhile the bill was also going to defund Planned Parenthood – one of the most popular organizations in the country.

It turns out that ordinary people get much angrier if someone wants to take away something they have, than they do when they are denied something to which they aspire. That’s especially true if the motive is to benefit a tiny fraction of the richest, most powerful people in the country. The GOP got a taste of that fury.

*Factor #2. That brings us to factor two: The Resistance.*

Trump’s election spawned the greatest upsurge of progressive mobilization in the last fifty years. People turned out in droves – to the Women’s March and other protests, and to scores of Republican Town meetings.

They formed new organizations like Indivisible and the Town hall Project. They swelled the ranks of older organizations like MoveOn, Organizing for Action (OFA), Planned Parenthood, People for the American Way, Ultraviolet, and People’s Action. Together these groups joined with unions, community organizations, immigrant’s rights organizations, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Center for Popular Democracy, the Democratic National Committee, and with a multitude of social media sites to coordinate their efforts. Add to the mix the revival of the coalitions that had originally passed the Affordable Care Act – Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Save Our Care.

Together these organizations created a title wave of palpable opposition to “TrumpCare”. Thousands turned out to Republican Town Hall meetings to demand that the GOP drop its efforts to “take away our health care”. They had “stake outs” at Congressional offices. They marched through the Capitol. They sat in Congressional offices. And they generated literally hundreds of thousands of calls to Congress – targeting their calls especially to the most politically vulnerable GOP Members.

The last day of the battle, they virtually shut down the incoming phone lines in the offices of GOP Members whose votes were in play.


That real, intense, up-close-and-personal stuff made it perfectly clear to [members of Congress] that voting for the “TrumpCare” bill could mean political suicide.

So GOP Members of Congress weren’t just seeing analyses from staff, or reading editorials or looking at poll numbers. They were forced to look thousands of their constituents in the eye. They were forced to watch the local news coverage of confrontations between themselves and voters who were explaining how “ObamaCare” had saved their lives – and others who were desperately afraid that “TrumpCare” would cost them their financial security, or cause them to be unable to take their cancer drug.

That real, intense, up-close-and-personal stuff made it perfectly clear to many of them that voting for the “TrumpCare” bill could mean political suicide. Whether they explained their position in terms of their commitment to conservative ideology, or compassion and concern didn’t matter. They refused to be dragged into supporting a bill that – like a dead fish – smelled worse every day it sat on the political dock. They put their hand on the stove and it was very hot. Nothing any leader or negotiator could do was going to change their personal observation of the bill’s unpopularity – no matter what faction of the House GOP they called home.

*Factor #3. Third, Donald Trump was right about one thing: Democrats were partially to “blame” for “TrumpCare’s” defeat.* They get a big share of the credit for its demise because they directly aligned themselves with the Resistance and their own voters. They stood up straight and said no way, no how. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer were magnificent.

And Democrats were unified. Democrats joined arms and stood up together. For instance, many of the Members of the Senate who are sometimes most prone to vote with Republicans were not tempted at all on “TrumpCare.” Just try cutting Medicaid in West Virginia – a state that has one of the highest rates of usage of Medicaid in the country. If you were the Senator from North Dakota, why in the world would you want to vote to support a bill that would penalize the oldest and most rural consumers? North Dakota is after all, one of the oldest most rural states.


Democrats joined arms and stood up together. For instance, many of the Members of the Senate who are sometimes most prone to vote with Republicans were not tempted at all on “TrumpCare."

It was that Democratic unity that forced Ryan and Trump to negotiate with the so-called “Freedom Caucus” in the first place. They couldn’t afford to loose more than 22 votes in the House since they would get zero votes from Democrats. And in the Senate they only had a margin of three – they could have lost a dozen.

There are definitely some problems with the ACA. Most importantly some individual insurance market places only have one major insurance company offering plans. No competition, means higher rates and deductibles.

But there is a simple solution. Just create a Public Option – make available Medicare to anyone who wants to buy into the plan and let that plan compete against the private insurance companies. That would drive down rates in a second, since Medicare is the most efficient health insurer in the country. Of course some private insurance companies say that would be “unfair” competition since Medicare has such a huge enrollment base it’s overhead is very low – and it doesn’t have to pay profits to Wall Street.

Of course many people think that’s why it would make sense for everyone in America to be covered by Medicare and to do away with private insurance companies entirely, except for “Medicare Supplemental policies”, since that would really drive down the costs of health insurance. That’s especially true if Medicare could negotiate with drug companies to lower prices like they can in the rest of the industrial world.

So in summary, let’s be clear that once the Resistance Movement organized, and Democrats took a hard line, “TrumpCare” was likely a doomed effort from day one. No amount of clever coalition building by Ryan, or brilliant “negotiating” by Trump would ultimately have won the day. That, by the way, is how out of touch many of the beltway pundits are who blathered on about how inevitable it was that the ACA would be repealed. They need to get out more.

And if by some miracle, “TrumpCare” had actually passed the House and Senate and become law, it could easily have sunk any hope the GOP has of hanging onto the House in 2018. If progressives to our job right over the next year and a half, it still will.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

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WASHINGTON ― Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the House Freedom Caucus, said Sunday that the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is not over. Meadows’ statement comes after President Donald Trump said he is moving on from the failed legislation to try to pass tax reform.

“This is not the end of the debate,” Meadows said on ABC’s “This Week.”

On Friday afternoon, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) pulled legislation backed by the White House that would have repealed the signature health care reform bill signed by President Barack Obama and replaced it with one that would have caused 24 million Americans to lose their health insurance. Opposition from the House Freedom Caucus was instrumental in the bill’s defeat.

Trump tweeted Sunday morning that the Freedom Caucus was to blame for keeping both the Obamacare and Planned Parenthood alive, as the bill would have cut federal funding for the family health provider.


Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2017

“If [Democrats are] applauding, they shouldn’t,” Meadows said in response to Trump’s tweet, adding that the president will wind up being “the most valuable player … on this.”

He continued with the clunky sports metaphors, saying that the bill failing on Friday was comparable to the New England Patriots losing to the Atlanta Falcons at halftime of the Super Bowl before staging an unprecedented second-half comeback. Meadows also said the legislative effort was in overtime.

“We’re not at the end of the game,” he said. “We’re there, literally, perhaps, again, in overtime, but we’re there to get this across the finish line.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 22 hours ago.

Via Global Macro Monitor,

OK, comrades, let’s check our partisanship at the door and deal with some real analysis on the health care bill that just went down in flames. Here are a few of our thoughts on why the Trump/Ryan healthcare bill to repeal and replace Obamacare went down and some economics behind it...

1)  Most important, the bill had no support throughout the country.   The latest poll released Thursday afternoon showed that only 17 percent of the country supported the plan.



*The Quinnipiac University poll, released Thursday afternoon, shows fewer than one-in-five voters, 17 percent, approve of the Republican plan to replace Obamacare. The majority, 56 percent, disapprove, with slightly more than a quarter, 26 percent, undecided on the proposal.- Politico*



2)  Ceteris Paribus (all other things equal) doesn’t hold in negotiations.  Almost every concession Trump/Ryan made to the hard-right Freedom Caucus resulted in a loss of moderate Republicans, such as the Tuesday Group.   The last straw seemed to be the gutting of the services provided by a typical insurance policy.



*House Republicans leaders promised hard-right conservatives yet another concession on the health care bill on Wednesday, but it has already lost key support from House moderates and may seriously endanger their chances of getting the bill through the Senate. Ahead of the vote on Thursday, GOP leaders said the Senate would gut Obamacare’s Essential Health Benefits rule after the House passes the American Health Care Act.*

 

*That rule requires insurance plans to cover a basic minimum of health care services. These benefits include maternity and newborn care, pediatric care, emergency services, substance abuse treatment, and prescription drugs. Organizations representing 400,000 doctors wrote a letter to Congressional leaders earlier this year asking them to keep these requirements in a replacement of Obamacare. – Think Progress.*



3) The legislation was a “corner solution.”   That is,  it only had the support of Republicans and was not a nonpartisan bill.  President Trump sounds like he has learned through this process that the country wants affordable health care for all and will reach out to Democrats on the next iteration.  This should neuter the Freedom Caucus in blocking the next bill.

4) Bad numbers.  The CBO’s estimate that 24 million would be kicked off health care and 14 million next year, in an election year, was devastating.



*CBO and JCT estimate that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law. Most of that increase would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate. Some of those people would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.  – CBO*



5)  Conservatives complained health care premiums did not come down enough.  Bingo!   There are many other reasons health insurance premiums are rising rather than just Obamacare.  Premiums were skyrocketing before Obamacare.  We know firsthand.  Second, the simple demographic dynamics of the U.S. of an aging population are a fundamental reason why insurance costs are rising.  The pool of insured is getting older and hence the higher costs.  This is the whole philosophical basis behind Medicare — older folks are priced out the insurance market and need government subsidies.

6) Bad economics.   The health care act would have had a deleterious economic impact.  The Achilles heel of the economy is the disparity in the distribution of income and wealth, probably at its worst in the nation’s history.  If you provide relief to the higher income groups, who have much lower marginal propensities to consume and tax the lower income groups through higher healthcare costs, who have higher marginal propensities to consume, economic activity is depressed.



*the American Health Care Act, and the results are not pretty. An $883 billion tax cut, $274 billion of it going to the richest 2%. $880 billion stripped from Medicaid. And 24 million fewer insured individuals over the next ten years. – Forbes*



That is is kind of mean, no?

7) The bill was rushed.  It should have been debated and tweaked through the normal committee process and will in the next iteration, which will need 60 votes in the Senate. Therefore a bipartisan bill.

8) *The Upshot*.  Aside from the Freedom Caucus, we believe the American government, Republicans, in particular,  have learned from this political disaster, the large majority of the country wants universal affordable health care and the next bill will be one to repair Obamacare.  This marks a philosophical win for President Obama.

How will the loss affect President Trump’s agenda going forward?   Not positive, but hard to assess its lasting impact.  He is definitely weakened politically, however.   Will the Freedom Caucus now feel more emboldened to block tax reform if it adds to the budget deficit?    This keeps the disastrous Border Tax Adjustment (BAT) in play, which is tantamount to the government playing Dr. Frankenstien with the U.S. economy.

We did warn last month of policy overreach by a president who lost the majority of the vote — 25K people rallies, aside.



*What worries us most is the government is misinterpreting the November victory as a big mandate, which leads to policy overreach and massive pushback by the population resulting in social instability.  – GMM, February 2017*



Stay tuned. Reported by Zero Hedge 17 hours ago.

As the GOP's healthcare reform bill was pulled on Friday, the major stock indices rebounded in a fit of confusion, helped by* the collapse in market liquidity to the lowest levels of 2017*...

However, as NorthmanTrader's Sven Henrich writes, nothing has been solved (or even addressed). Our country, whether people are willing to admit it or not, has deep structural problems that require deep thinking and broad support to solve them.

For decades both parties have presided over the emergence of these structural problems and their only solution has always been to throw more debt at it. I said it before the election and I say it again: Neither candidate and neither party has shown any willingness or capability to address any of the structural problems we face.

*They market solutions to fight the symptoms, but not the root causes and in the end accomplish little.*

Under Republicans and Bush we ended up with a doubling of the debt and the financial crisis in 2008. Then Democrats presided over another $10B in debt accumulation and $4 trillion in central bank balance sheet expansion with a meager rise in real wages and consumers taking on record debt while all income and wealth benefits went to the top 1% resulting in vast further increases in wealth inequality. Yes things looked better on measures such as unemployment but it was paid for with massive accumulation of debt and artificially low rates. The election of Donald Trump under the banner of populism serves as evidence of the underlying discontentment.

So now Republicans are back in charge and are claiming competence and a willingness to “fix” things. Really?  Are they really?

Take health care as an example.* The promises given were outlandish, everyone will have coverage, premiums will go down, taxes will go down, Medicare will not get cut and it will be a “beautiful picture”. Sorry folks, but that was all nonsense. Aways has been and if you fell for it you got suckered again.*

There is no magic bullet, there is no magic plan, there is only structural reality. And this structural reality says our demographic wave along with our for profit oriented health care system demand certain compromises.

The health care industry is interested in profits first, everything else is secondary. Health care is the field they are in, but they are in the business of profit. Hence, while the developed world has national health care systems with coverage for everyone the US does not. Never had and while Obamacare was a meager attempt at creating one it was fought in every way possible by industry lobbying groups who wanted to protect their profit margins. I get it. Covering people who are a net loss for the industry is counter to quarterly profits. Ultimately Obamacare ended up being a very flawed compromise, but it managed to get millions of uninsured to have insurance.

*Indeed while the cost of health care is rising dramatically everywhere in the world it is the US were the costs of medications and treatments are more expensive than anywhere else in the world:*

There are many reasons for this, but I can tell you one contributing factor *is this:*

*Big time pig time*. It used to be people entered the medical field because they actually wanted to help people in need. Some still do of course, but it’s all about the mighty buck, especially for insurance companies. What is insurance at its root? It’s to provide a coverage pool so people who are faced with an emergency don’t end up getting ruined. Now it’s about squeezing the most bucks out of people by avoiding paying out when possible and to not cover people who are at most risk. Basically making the most money while avoiding providing the services you advertise as much as possible. Swell.

*The medical industry is difficult and problematic everywhere, but with its ballooned costs Americans pay much more than people with national health insurance systems and often enough can’t claim they get a lot more as a result. *Americans are faced wth an obesity and drug abuse crisis (legal and illegal) and life expectancies for certain age groups are actually regressing. Americans have not gotten healthier over the past few decades yet they spend more for health care and one could certainly make the case that these trends are intertwined.

I use costs as an example and certainly the European health care system has its own issues. Demographics make it a big time challenge everywhere as it is.

But the larger point is this: The US health care insurance system is a complex mess, it’s pricey and the US being a country with a child poverty rate in excess of 20% has major issues in ensuring health care access to its citizens while professionals in the industry are enriching themselves in degrees many Europeans equivalents can only dream of. And let’s be very clear: Access does not equate coverage. In fact, the system is so skewed economically that medical reasons are the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the Unites States. Getting ill or falling victim to a disease can financially ruin you. A horrid reality about the US health care system. And sadly, many people are perfectly ok for others to suffer that fate.

And with baby boomers retiring and getting old there is an avalanche of millions of older people requiring treatment and care for years to come further straining a system that is already vastly underfunded.

And so, in context, what the new administration actually proposed was actually quite revealing in its intent. What was the intent? Well, precisely the opposite of the promises made. Premiums would go up big time for older people especially, Medicare would get cut by $880B, up to 24 million could lose insurance altogether and the notion of tax credits to use for people who have hardly any income is an intellectual insult. If you make only $20-25K a year (if that) you wouldn’t even have enough taxable income to make use of the tax credit. It’s all BS. That’s the clear message. *There are many articles on all this and the CBO analyzed the consequences of the bill proposal, but the gap between the promises made and the details offered instead is pretty glaringly wide.*

Was what was proposed better than what existed before? I took a shot at the answer *here.*

Who would have benefitted? The insurance industry and of course the 1% who will see the most tax benefits from the reversion of Obamacare related taxes. Populism at its finest. Yet even this was not enough for certain forces in the Republican party.

*And so this first attempt at major legislation by the new administration failed miserably. But this failure highlighted some important realities:*



Republicans were not going to make it better for you, the citizen. And Americans realized this and hence they rejected it and consequently it created a big divide among Republicans. See, despite all the hate you see on the internet Americans are not stupid and they saw this health care bill was going to shaft them and they made their discontentment heard.



And now the pressure to produce results will grow exponentially. After all the mid terms are coming next year and the survival instinct will start taking over.

*Health care was the first big promise and it produced nothing and it was not going to structurally improve anything. If anything it would’ve widened the wealth gap furthering its current form.*

Now you’ll hear a lot about tax cuts to come. It’s the new QE carrot that’s dangled in front of everybody.

I have no idea how this will turn out, but know that before tax cuts can even be agreed upon there’s this little issue about the debt ceiling and an actual budget with revenue projections and actual cuts that need to be hashed out.

Currently the Treasury department keeps spending cash to keep the debt ceiling flat, but the Treasury department will run out of cash and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is already on the record saying that it needs to be increased.

His boss had some things to say about that very topic just a few years ago:

*If you haven’t noticed by now there is an ever widening gap between rhetoric and reality.* It’s easy to make promises:



Do tax cut & infrastructure related tweets carry the same currency? pic.twitter.com/j3rAtrYRY2

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) March 24, 2017



It’s much harder to keep them, and the tweet above went after the core question raised in this post: Doubt.

I don’t know when and how people will realize that the promises where indeed *empty*, but everything so far, from health care, tax cuts, etc. is all geared to even further widen the wealth gap that already exists and continues to widen. *People have piled a lot of money into expensive stocks based on certain promises made including 4% GDP growth and “massive” tax cuts. I continue to believe that once reality sinks in people may develop second thoughts and doubt and there will be a lot of money trapped at very high P/E levels that will seek to get out.*

I repeat: *Neither party has shown a willingness or capability to address the big structural realities we face as a country.* And to be fair the problems may only be solvable via massive realignment. But as long as low interest rates, courtesy of the Fed, are permitted to sustain artificial high debt loads both parties are able to get away with accomplishing little on the structural front.

Ultimately the math will force their hands. And doubt, while not yet clearly present in equity markets, is already very much present in the polling:

My premise: *You can’t pass any broad based legislation benefitting the top 1% with this lack of broad based support.* If anything, you need to be bold and reach across the isle in a big way to create policies that benefit the many and not the few.

Yet I see zero evidence in the current political climate for any of this to happen or ever happening.

*Instead all we see is drama of some sort every single day.* I don’t need to point it out, you know what I am talking about. But drama can serve a purpose. As long as everyone is engaged in talking about drama there is no time or need to talk about substance and real solutions. And hence drama becomes method. And ever more drama is needed to keep folks distracted from non existent substance. So I fully expect more of it to come.a

In the *Final Wave* I described the latest charting evidence for why we believe we are in the final phase of the bull market. As I said at the beginning: Our country has deep structural problems that require deep thinking. Does anybody see evidence of deep thinking anywhere? Or even a debate on how to address them? Can a country solve its structural problems without an objective debate and well designed solutions to solve them?

I doubt it. Reported by Zero Hedge 15 hours ago.

The Affordable Care Act overcame the tea party protests of 2009 and the Democrats losing their filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2010. It survived two challenges in front of the Supreme Court and the calamitous rollout of healthcare.gov.

Now it has withstood the attempt to replace it with the American Health Care Act, better known as Trumpcare.

Somehow, despite the intense political forces arrayed against it, and the mind-boggling policy problems it tries to solve, the 2010 health care law keeps defying efforts to wipe it out. That says something about the people who wrote it ― and what they have achieved.
Obamacare has never been hugely popular, and it has never worked as well as its architects hoped. Millions of Americans don’t like it and, even now, there are parts of the country where the markets are struggling to survive.

But the program has provided security and access to care for millions of others. More importantly, it has shifted the expectations of what government should do ― and of what a decent society looks like.
This week’s defeat of the Republican repeal effort shows just how hard it is to undo those changes. And it won’t get any easier.

What Obama And Pelosi Did (And Trump And Ryan Didn’t)

On Friday, hours before President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) formally conceded their bill lacked the votes to pass, White House press secretary Sean Spicer signaled what was coming. Trump, he said, had “left everything on the field.”

The statement was preposterous.

Trump and the Republicans in Congress had spent all of 63 days trying to pass their Obamacare repeal ― less than three weeks of which were spent actually debating the text of the AHCA. They held votes before Congressional Budget Office evaluations were ready, and were about to ask the full House to decide on the proposal just hours after making major changes to it.

Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had already indicated he intended to bypass his committees altogether and take legislation directly to the floor ― perhaps with a quick House-Senate negotiation, a fast vote and a signature from the president.

By contrast, it took former President Barack Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) more than a year to pass Obamacare ― a politically tortuous period that many people later blamed for Democrats losing their House majority in 2010.

At the time, every apparent error loomed large ― from taking on health care at all, to letting the process drag out for more than a year, to slavishly crafting a proposal as CBO specified, to cutting unpleasant deals with health care’s special interests.

Lost amid the recriminations was the talent each player brought to his or her task ― and the Democrats’ single-minded focus on avoiding mistakes of the past in order to achieve something their party had been trying to do since the days when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House.


I am not saying we needed 14 months to do this. But I think a more careful and deliberate approach ... would have gotten us further down the path to a solution.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)
The work had begun long before Obama even ran for president. In the aftermath of the defeat for Bill Clinton’s 1994 health care plan, activists, advocates and intellectuals regrouped ― and then spent literally years hashing out their ideas for achieving universal coverage in a politically viable way. When Obama did run, he borrowed their work for his own plan. When he was elected, the most pivotal committee chairman of the process, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), was ready with his own blueprint that looked nearly identical.

Baucus had done something else: Working with then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), he had convened meetings with virtually every health care stakeholder, from hospitals to unions to insurers to patient advocacy groups, exchanging ideas and negotiating over principles. It meant that when the actual legislating started, the channels of communication were already open and the groundwork for a common vision was already in place. 

And still it was a nearly impossible task. Like the Republicans this year, Democrats found consensus difficult to achieve ― among the outside groups, and within their own ranks as well. Liberals wanted a more generous program, and a public option. Moderates wanted to avoid too much government spending and too much meddling with the way independent businesses operate.

But unlike the Republicans, the Democrats’ reaction was to work with the different groups and slowly bring them along ― most vividly, by negotiating with a handful of moderate Republicans, in the hopes that one or two (or maybe more) would sign onto the plan. It never happened, but the effort to woo those members helped secure moderate Democrats who needed to tell their constituents that, yes, they had tried to be bipartisan.

One reason Democratic leaders were able to preserve legislative momentum was that they understood, at all times, where they were trying to go ― and they were fluent enough in the policy to handle direct negotiations on their own. One of the enduring images of Obama during the Affordable Care Act fight was his visit to a Republican Party policy retreat in Baltimore, where he fielded questions and parried criticisms from the assembled members for roughly 90 minutes.


The work that led to Obamacare had begun before Obama even ran for president.

Trump, by contrast, seemed to lack anything beyond a superficial understanding of the bill, to the point where allies worried about letting him negotiate details. “Either doesn’t know, doesn’t care or both,” a Capitol Hill aide told CNN about the president.

As for Pelosi, her job was easier than Ryan’s in one important sense. Nobody in her caucus was as extremist or nihilist as the Freedom Caucus, partly because Democrats had done so much prep work and hammered out a rough consensus before the hard legislating work began.

But Pelosi didn’t try to jam through “slapdash” legislation, as Harold Pollack, writing in Politico, recently called the AHCA. And she didn’t flinch when her political task looked utterly hopeless.

When Kennedy’s seat went to Scott Brown, depriving Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority to approve a final compromise, she told Obama she would get the votes for the Senate’s bill ― and she did, taking charge of the whip count personally ― and working her caucus, one member at a time, until she had a majority.

On Sunday, during an appearance on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), conceded that maybe the Democrats knew what they were doing.

“When the Democrats came to power in 2009, for 60 years at least, they had been pursuing a national health care system, yet they didn’t introduce legislation for eight months, and they didn’t pass it for over a year of Barack Obama’s first term,” Cotton said.

“I am not saying we needed 14 months to do this,” he added, “but I think a more careful and deliberate approach, which we now have time to do because we are going to have to revisit health care anyway, would have gotten us further down the path to a solution.”The Resilience Of Obamacare

But the Republican failure wasn’t just about process. It was also about policy ― and a failure to realize just how profoundly the Affordable Care Act has changed public expectations for how the U.S. health care system operates.

The end product of that long, cantankerous debate in 2009 and 2010 wasn’t pretty. Keeping the health care industry on board meant heeding their demands to ratchet back aggressive cost controls. Holding moderate Democrats in the coalition meant putting a tighter lid on what the program would spend. Passing the Senate bill meant accepting statutory language that its authors had hoped a conference committee would clean up before enactment.

These compromises and concessions made implementation difficult. The sloppy language from the Senate bill exposed the program to the lawsuit King v. Burwell, which, if successful, would have destroyed the exchanges. The deals to secure support from individual members, like the “cornhusker kickback” that helped reel in Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), stained the whole effort with a tinge of corruption. The stingy funding meant that some middle-class people wouldn’t get much financial help, despite high premiums.

Republicans proved exceptionally adept at turning these problems into political advantages. But more frequently than not, they attacked the law because it wasn’t living up to liberal ideals ― because it left middle-class people on the hook for premiums, or because the plans had onerous deductibles, or because it was insufficiently harsh to the health care industry. McConnell was fond of pointing out that the law had left some 25 million people uninsured.

The message was unmistakable: The health care law had failed because it had made health care harder for people to get, and the GOP had a better way.

These arguments helped Republicans grab and hold congressional majorities, and they helped put Trump in the White House. But McConnell wasn’t interested in covering more people any more than Ryan wanted to lower people’s deductibles. And the need to write legislation exposed their real policy preferences ― which were lower taxes, fewer regulations and less government spending on the poor.

The combination meant that more people, not fewer, would be exposed to crippling medical bills. When the CBO finally did weigh in, the number of people predicted to lose their insurance, 24 million, was so big that even Republicans couldn’t spin or lie their way out of it.

“All politicians overpromise,” Jonathan Chait, of New York magazine, observed. “But the Republicans did more than overpromise. They delivered a policy directionally opposed to their promises.”

Republicans had also convinced themselves that nobody who had insurance through the Affordable Care Act liked it. The media coverage made it easy to believe this. Stories of people losing their old plans or paying more for new ones were all over the press for the first few years of the program. Stories of people saving money, or getting insurance for the first time, were much harder to find.But as surveys showed, the majority of people getting coverage through the Affordable Care Act were actually satisfied with it ― and quite a few were deeply grateful. In the last few months, finally, their stories became part of the conversation. They showed up on television, in the print media, and especially at town hall meetings ― forcing Republicans to answer questions they’d successfully dodged for years by tapping into anger with “Obama” and glossing over details about the “care.”

“If it wasn’t for Obamacare, we wouldn’t be able to afford insurance,” an Iowa farmer told Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Recalling Grassley’s 2009 false warning that the Affordable Care Act had “death panels,” the farmer said, “With all due respect, sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panel. We’re going to create one big death panel in this country if people can’t afford insurance.”

At a CNN town hall, in front of a live national audience, an Arizona man with cancer told Ryan that the health care law was paying for his cancer treatment. “I want to thank President Obama from the bottom of my heart because I would be dead if it weren’t for him,” the man said, adding that he was a Republican who once opposed the law and had volunteered in GOP campaigns.

The backlash left Republicans visibly rattled. And although leaders tried to write off such incidents as paid activists making trouble, they couldn’t explain why nearly every group connected to health care ― from the American Medical Association to AARP ― was making the same arguments.

Nor could Republicans explain plummeting public support for the legislation. By the end, the GOP bill had support from just 17 percent of the population ― much less than Obamacare, at its worst, ever polled.


Depriving people of health insurance because they have a pre-existing condition is no longer acceptable.

Up until the end, Republicans had the votes to pass the House bill or something like it, and deliver Trump the big win he craved. It’s not so difficult to imagine a scenario with slightly better leadership, and slightly less obstreperous Republican factions, in which the legislation would have gone through both chambers and eventually to the White House.

But doing so would have almost surely produced a massive political backlash, because taking health insurance away from millions of people ― depriving people of health care because they have a pre-existing condition, or because they don’t have enough money to pay for it ― is no longer acceptable.

It was the status quo until 2010. That was seven years ago and there is very little enthusiasm for going back.

As Sen. Bill Cassidy, a conservative doctor who represents the conservative state of Louisiana, told The New York Times, “There’s a widespread recognition that the federal government, Congress, has created the right for every American to have health care.”

What Happens Now

Obamacare remains a shaky enterprise, with markets in several states down to two or even one insurance company. And Trump, who has already taken some actions to sabotage the program’s performance, might make it even a shakier.

“Bad things are going to happen to Obamacare,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Friday, making what sounded to a lot of people like a threat. “There’s not much you can do to help it.”

Nobody questions that Obamacare requires reinforcement and repair ― or that someday it might need total replacement. Conservatives and liberals each have plenty of ideas along those lines.

But the standard for judging any of these proposals, or some bipartisan combination of them, will be the same one that Trumpcare failed to meet: Does it protect the people who need protection? Does it improve access to care? Does it reduce financial insecurity? Does it move the U.S. closer to a system where all Americans truly have a way to get the medical care they need ― at a price they can afford?

This, in the end, is what Obama, Pelosi and their allies achieved with the Affordable Care Act ― not the creation of a jury-rigged system of regulations and tax credits, or the expansion of an overtaxed Medicaid program, or any of the myriad smaller policy initiatives the Affordable Care Act. The true legacy of Obamacare is the principle that everybody should have health insurance.

Erasing that is not something that can happen in 63 days. And it may never happen at all. 

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.

It’s President Donald Trump’s health care system now. The question is: What’s he going to do with it?

After the collapse of the GOP effort to repeal the Barack Obama administrations’s Affordable Care Act and enact a different set of reforms to the health care system Friday, Trump inherited programs that aren’t going anywhere and that serve tens of millions of Americans.

Trump reacted to his defeat by practically threatening to stand aside and do nothing to address the shortcomings of the law, like rising premiums and declining choices of insurers in some states. “The best thing we can do politically speaking is let Obamacare explode,” he said at the White House Friday. He made a similar statement on Twitter the next day.


ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2017

Despite claims by Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that the Affordable Care Act is unfixable, the Trump administration has tools at its disposal it could use to make the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges more attractive to health insurers and potentially less costly for consumers. Or Trump could go in the other direction and undermine the law to bolster their case for “replacing” it later.
“I’m quite confident that unless the administration decides to not steward the exchanges because they have some draconian negotiating strategy that the exchanges will be fine next year,” said Andy Slavitt, who oversaw the exchanges as acting administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama.
“If they choose to screw with them, they control all the branches of government and I think they’ll be judged very harshly,” Slavitt said.

The White House and Department of Health and Human Services so far have sent mixed messages to the industry and consumers about what to expect.


The program doesn’t work for consumers if there are no insurers participating.
Larry Levitt, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
Trump issued an executive order on his inauguration day directing federal agencies to relax Affordable Care Act rules, and the IRS responded by announcing it wouldn’t reject tax returns that failed to include information about health coverage under the law’s individual mandate, for example.

But the administration also has taken some steps to quiet anxiety among health insurers that the exchanges next year won’t function properly and that losses some have suffered ― and that drove some insurance companies out of the market entirely ― will continue. Insurers have until late June to decide whether to sell policies on the exchanges next year.

And the key to shoring up the health insurance exchanges right now is catering to the carriers, even if those same changes make the law less consumer-friendly.

“The program doesn’t work for consumers if there are no insurers participating,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

There are limits to how much improvement, or damage, Trump could make to the health insurance exchanges, but there are several key actions that will go a long way to determining whether his administration wants to make the markets work better or worse.

-*How To Make It Better*-

*Pay the subsidies*

In addition to the tax credits the Affordable Care Act offers to low- and middle-income households to reduce their monthly health insurance premiums, the law provides extra subsidies to the poorest enrollees that cut their out-of-pocket costs like deductibles and copayments.

These subsidies are paid to health insurance companies directly, and the law requires them to reduce eligible customers’ cost-sharing whether the federal government makes the payments or not. And nonpayment isn’t a theoretical problem; it’s a real one.

House Republicans sued the Obama administration in 2014 to halt these payments, arguing the funding needs congressional approval it didn’t receive. A federal judge sided with House Republicans last year, prompting an appeal from Obama’s Justice Department. When Trump took office, his administration became the defendant, so he and congressional leaders got the court’s permission to delay the proceedings.

What they do next is crucial. If House Republicans drop the lawsuit or appropriate the money to keep the subsidies flowing, it not only would make sure low-income families keep their benefits, but it would quell a major source of worry for insurance companies.

Enforce the mandate

The individual mandate (and the fines taxpayers owe if they aren’t covered and don’t qualify for an exemption) is the least popular part of the Affordable Care Act, especially among Republicans. But it’s also vital for keeping the exchanges operating, because it pushes people with less medical need into the insurance pool, where their premiums offset the costs of treating sicker people.

The IRS announcement earlier this year made insurers nervous, but a strong signal now from the administration that it will make people comply with the law could alleviate that. “It’s insurer perceptions that matter here. If they’re not confident that this market is going to work, then they’re going to run for the exits or raise premiums,” Levitt said.

Work with the states

Alaska and Minnesota already are taking matters into their own hands to improve the health insurance markets in their states. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has invited states to apply for “waivers” the Affordable Care Act created that could give them flexibility to redesign the exchanges themselves.

“That gets states more engaged,” Slavitt said. “It creates different solutions and, as far as I’m concerned, so long as you’re meeting the core requirement of covering more people with high-quality benefits, let the states experiment.”

One form that could take, Levitt explained, is helping states set up “reinsurance” funds like the one in Alaska. These compensate insurers that experience higher-than-expected costs, which allows them to charge lower premiums. And lower premiums mean less federal spending on tax credits, so these programs can actually save the federal government money, Levitt said.

Sign up more people

Enrollment on the health insurance exchanges dipped this year, partly because the Trump administration halted some outreach and advertising the Obama administration planned for the end of the 2017 sign-up period.

They could choose a different path for the coming enrollment campaign and work to sign up more customers, especially younger, healthier ones, which would strengthen the market for everybody, Levitt said.

“It’s potentially the most stabilizing thing the Trump administration could do,” Levitt said.

*Be flexible with insurers*

Not all consumers would like this, but Price has some leeway to allow health insurance companies to offer policies with fewer benefits, which would lower premiums in exchange for less coverage.

The Affordable Care Act requires health plans to cover 10 “essential health benefits,” like hospitalizations and prescription drugs, but gives the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to specify how that works.

Price would, for example, allow insurers to sell policies that only cover generic prescription drugs or that set limits on how many rehabilitation service visits a patient could have in a year, Levitt said.

“There are tradeoffs and consequences in all these changes,” Levitt said. “There’s a big difference between taking administrative steps to sabotage the law and moving it in a more conservative direction,” he said.


They control all the branches of government and I think they’ll be judged very harshly.
Andy Slavitt, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
-How To Make It Worse-

Cut off the subsidies

If Trump gives in on the House Republican lawsuit or if Congress refuses to fund the cost-sharing reductions, it could blow up the insurance exchanges quickly. Health insurance companies might be able to leave the markets right away, tossing millions off their plans to prevent facing billions of dollars in losses. And they wouldn’t come back.

“If they wanted to destroy the insurance market immediately, then the easiest thing they could do would be to stop paying,” said Timothy Jost, a professor at Washington and Lee University Law School.

Ignore the mandate

Trump could continue along the path the IRS started by making clear to the public that his administration won’t penalize people who don’t get health coverage.

“Weakening the individual mandate could very well sabotage the individual insurance market,” Levitt said.

“Insurers would perceive weakening the individual mandate as a sign that the administration is trying to sabotage the law,” he said. Fear that healthier consumers would opt out without the threat of a fine would spook insurers into avoiding the exchanges, he said.

Let enrollment stagnate

The next sign-up period for the health insurance exchanges begins Nov. 1. The administration could choose to pick up where Obama’s team left off and engage in a nationwide campaign to publicize health insurance enrollment and help people apply for coverage.

Or they could scale back this work, as they did early this year, and leave enrollees to their own devices, which would result in lower enrollment overall and likely make the insurance pool sicker, because those with the greatest health care needs would be the most prone to sign up without help or reminders. 

“It will be Secretary Price’s legacy forever if he acts in ways that are destructive to the American people. And he knows that people will die if they lose their coverage,” Slavitt said.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 10 hours ago.

The upcoming premium hike of 4.9 per cent is making the Hannah family feel "nervous and sick". Reported by Brisbane Times 9 hours ago.

Authored by Michael Hudson via NakedCapitalism.com,

*Nobody yet can tell whether Donald Trump is an agent of change with a specific policy in mind, or merely a catalyst heralding an as yet undetermined turning point.* His first month in the White House saw him melting into the Republican mélange of corporate lobbyists. Having promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy looks more like “Wall Street First.” His cabinet of billionaires promoting corporate tax cuts, deregulation and dismantling Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the Junk Economics promise that giving more tax breaks to the richest One Percent may lead them to use their windfall to invest in creating more jobs. What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more property and assets already in place.

*One of the first reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks of the most crooked financial institutions to soar, hoping for a deregulatory scythe taken to the public sector. *Navient, the Department of Education’s knee-breaker on student loan collections accused by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of massive fraud and overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 now that it seemed likely that the incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light for financial fraud.

Foreclosure king Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest (and formerly of Goldman Sachs for 17 years; later a George Soros partner) is now Treasury Secretary – and Trump is pledged to abolish the CFPB, on the specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension savings and other investments will give consumers and savers “broader choice,” e.g., for the financial equivalent of junk food. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and de-unionized) charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions.* This may position Trump to become the Transformational President that neoliberals have been waiting for.*

*But not the neocons.* His election rhetoric promised to reverse traditional U.S. interventionist policy abroad. Making an anti-war left run around the Democrats, he promised to stop backing ISIS/Al Nusra (President Obama’s “moderate” terrorists supplied with the arms and money that Hillary looted from Libya), and to reverse the Obama-Clinton administration’s New Cold War with Russia. But the neocon coterie at the CIA and State Department are undercutting his proposed rapprochement with Russia by forcing out General Flynn for starters. It seems doubtful that Trump will clean them out.

*Trump has called NATO obsolete, but insists that its members up their spending to the stipulated 2% of GDP — producing a windfall worth tens of billions of dollars for U.S. arms exporters.* That is to be the price Europe must pay if it wants to endorse Germany’s and the Baltics’ confrontation with Russia.

*Trump is sufficiently intuitive to proclaim the euro a disaster, and he recommends that Greece leave it.* He supports the rising nationalist parties in Britain, France, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, all of which urge withdrawal from the eurozone – and reconciliation with Russia instead of sanctions. In place of the ill-fated TPP and TTIP, Trump advocates country-by-country trade deals favoring the United States. Toward this end, his designated ambassador to the European Union, Ted Malloch, urges the EU’s breakup. The EU is refusing to accept him as ambassador.

-*Will Trump’s Victory Break Up the Democratic Party? *-

At the time this volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing how successful these international reversals will be. What is more clear is what Trump’s political impact will have at home. His victory – or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the way she lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both parties. Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-à-vis Europe, his actions as celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S. politics across the political spectrum.

*The Democratic Party has lost its ability to pose as the party of labor and the middle class. Firmly controlled by Wall Street and California billionaires, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) strategy of identity politics encourages any identity except that of wage earners. *The candidates backed by the Donor Class have been Blue Dogs pledged to promote Wall Street and neocons urging a New Cold War with Russia.

*They preferred to lose with Hillary than to win behind Bernie Sanders.* So Trump’s electoral victory is their legacy as well as Obama’s.* Instead of Trump’s victory dispelling that strategy, the Democrats are doubling down. It is as if identity politics is all they have.*

*Trying to ride on Barack Obama’s coattails didn’t work. *Promising “hope and change,” he won by posing as a transformational president, leading the Democrats to control of the White House, Senate and Congress in 2008. Swept into office by a national reaction against the George Bush’s Oil War in Iraq and the junk-mortgage crisis that left the economy debt-ridden, they had free rein to pass whatever new laws they chose – even a Public Option in health care if they had wanted, or make Wall Street banks absorb the losses from their bad and often fraudulent loans.

But it turned out that Obama’s role was to prevent the changes that voters hoped to see, and indeed that the economy needed to recover: financial reform, debt writedowns to bring junk mortgages in line with fair market prices, and throwing crooked bankers in jail. Obama rescued the banks, not the economy, and turned over the Justice Department and regulatory agencies to his Wall Street campaign contributors. He did not even pull back from war in the Near East, but extended it to Libya and Syria, blundering into the Ukrainian coup as well.

*Having dashed the hopes of his followers, Obama then praised his chosen successor Hillary Clinton as his “Third Term.” Enjoying this kiss of death, Hillary promised to keep up Obama’s policies.*

The straw that pushed voters over the edge was when she asked voters, “Aren’t you better off today than you were eight years ago?” Who were they going to believe: their eyes, or Hillary? National income statistics showed that only the top 5 percent of the population were better off. All the growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during Obama’s tenure went to them – the Donor Class that had gained control of the Democratic Party leadership. Real incomes have fallen for the remaining 95 percent, whose household budgets have been further eroded by soaring charges for health insurance. (The Democratic leadership in Congress fought tooth and nail to block Dennis Kucinich from introducing his Single Payer proposal.)

*No wonder most of the geographic United States voted for change – except for where the top 5 percent, is concentrated: in New York (Wall Street) and California (Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex).* Making fun of the Obama Administration’s slogan of “hope and change,” Trump characterized Hillary’s policy of continuing the economy’s shrinkage for the 95% as “no hope and no change.”

-*Identity Politics as Anti-Labor Politics*-

*A new term was introduced to the English language: Identity Politics. *Its aim is for voters to think of themselves as separatist minorities – women, LGBTQ, Blacks and Hispanics.* The Democrats thought they could beat Trump by organizing Women for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), LGBTQ for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), and Blacks and Hispanics for Wall Street (and a New Cold War). *Each identity cohort was headed by a billionaire or hedge fund donor.

*The identity that is conspicuously excluded is the working class. *Identity politics strips away thinking of one’s interest in terms of having to work for a living. It excludes voter protests against having their monthly paycheck stripped to pay more for health insurance, housing and mortgage charges or education, or better working conditions or consumer protection – not to speak of protecting debtors.

Identity politics used to be about three major categories: workers and unionization, anti-war protests and civil rights marches against racist Jim Crow laws. These were the three objectives of the many nationwide demonstrations. That ended when these movements got co-opted into the Democratic Party. Their reappearance in Bernie Sanders’ campaign in fact threatens to tear the Democratic coalition apart. As soon as the primaries were over (duly stacked against Sanders), his followers were made to feel unwelcome. Hillary sought Republican support by denouncing Sanders as being as radical as Putin’s Republican leadership.

In contrast to Sanders’ attempt to convince diverse groups that they had a common denominator in needing jobs with decent pay – and, to achieve that, in opposing Wall Street’s replacing the government as central planner – the Democrats depict every identity constituency as being victimized by every other, setting themselves at each other’s heels. Clinton strategist John Podesta, for instance, encouraged Blacks to accuse Sanders supporters of distracting attention from racism. Pushing a common economic interest between whites, Blacks, Hispanics and LGBTQ always has been the neoliberals’ nightmare. No wonder they tried so hard to stop Bernie Sanders, and are maneuvering to keep his supporters from gaining influence in their party.

When Trump was inaugurated on Friday, January 20, there was no pro-jobs or anti-war demonstration. That presumably would have attracted pro-Trump supporters in an ecumenical show of force. Instead, the Women’s March on Saturday led even the pro-Democrat New York Times to write a front-page article reporting that white women were complaining that they did not feel welcome in the demonstration. The message to anti-war advocates, students and Bernie supporters was that their economic cause was a distraction.

The march was typically Democratic in that its ideology did not threaten the Donor Class. As Yves Smith wrote on Naked Capitalism: “the track record of non-issue-oriented marches, no matter how large scale, is poor, and the status of this march as officially sanctioned (blanket media coverage when other marches of hundreds of thousands of people have been minimized, police not tricked out in their usual riot gear) also indicates that the officialdom does not see it as a threat to the status quo.”

*Hillary’s loss was not blamed on her neoliberal support for TPP or her pro-war neocon stance, but on the revelations of the e-mails by her operative Podesta discussing his dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders (claimed to be given to Wikileaks by Russian hackers, not a domestic DNC leaker as Wikileaks claimed) and the FBI investigation of her e-mail abuses at the State Department.* Backing her supporters’ attempt to brazen it out, the Democratic Party has doubled down on its identity politics, despite the fact that an estimated 52 percent of white women voted for Trump. After all, women do work for wages. And that also is what Blacks and Hispanics want – in addition to banking that serves their needs, not those of Wall Street, and health care that serves their needs, not those of the health-insurance and pharmaceuticals monopolies.

*Bernie did not choose to run on a third-party ticket. Evidently he feared being accused of throwing the election to Trump. *The question is now whether he can remake the Democratic Party as a democratic socialist party, or create a new party if the Donor Class retains its neoliberal control. It seems that he will not make a break until he concludes that a Socialist Party can leave the Democrats as far back in the dust as the Republicans left the Whigs after 1854. He may have underestimated his chance in 2016.

-*Trump’s Effect on U.S. Political Party Realignment*-

During Trump’s rise to the 2016 Republican nomination it seemed that he was more likely to break up the Republican Party. Its leading candidates and gurus warned that his populist victory in the primaries would tear the party apart. The polls in May and June showed him defeating Hillary Clinton easily (but losing to Bernie Sanders). *But Republican leaders worried that he would not support what they believed in: namely, whatever corporate lobbyists put in their hands to enact and privatize.*

The May/June polls showed Trump and Clinton were the country’s two most unpopular presidential candidates.* But whereas the Democrats maneuvered Bernie out of the way, the Republican Clown Car was unable to do the same to Trump. *In the end they chose to win behind him, expecting to control him. As for the DNC, its Wall Street donors preferred to lose with Hillary than to win with Bernie. They wanted to keep control of their party and continue the bargain they had made with the Republicans: The latter would move further and further to the right, leaving room for Democratic neoliberals and neocons to follow them closely, yet still pose as the “lesser evil.” That “centrism” is the essence of the Clintons’ “triangulation” strategy. It actually has been going on for a half-century. “As Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere quipped in the 1960s, when he was accused by the US of running a one-party state, ‘The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them’.”

*By 2017, voters had caught on to this two-step game. *But Hillary’s team paid pollsters over $1 billion to tell her (“Mirror, mirror on the wall …”) that she was the most popular of all. It was hubris to imagine that she could convince the 95 Percent of the people who were worse off under Obama to love her as much as her East-West Coast donors did. It was politically unrealistic – and a reflection of her cynicism – to imagine that raising enough money to buy television ads would convince working-class Republicans to vote for her, succumbing to a Stockholm Syndrome by thinking of themselves as part of the 5 Percent who had benefited from Obama’s pro-Wall Street policies.

*Hillary’s election strategy was to make a right-wing run around Trump. While characterizing the working class as white racist “deplorables,” allegedly intolerant of LBGTQ or assertive women, she resurrected the ghost of Joe McCarthy and accused Trump of being “Putin’s poodle” for proposing peace with Russia. *Among the most liberal Democrats, Paul Krugman still leads a biweekly charge at The New York Times that President Trump is following Moscow’s orders. Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher and MSNBC produce weekly skits that Trump and General Flynn are Russian puppets. A large proportion of Democrats have bought into the fairy tale that Trump didn’t really win the election, but that Russian hackers manipulated the voting machines. No wonder George Orwell’s 1984 soared to the top of America’s best-seller lists in February 2017 as Donald Trump was taking his oath of office.

*This propaganda paid off on February 13, when neocon public relations succeeded in forcing the resignation of General Flynn, whom Trump had appointed to clean out the neocons at the NSA and CIA.* His foreign policy initiative based on rapprochement with Russia and hopes to create a common front against ISIS/Al Nusra seemed to be collapsing.

-*Tabula Rasa Celebrity Politics*-

*U.S. presidential elections no longer are much about policy.* Like Obama before him, Trump campaigned as a rasa tabla, a vehicle for everyone to project their hopes and fancies. What has all but disappeared is the past century’s idea of politics as a struggle between labor and capital, democracy vs. oligarchy.

Who would have expected even half a century ago that American politics would become so post-modern that the idea of class conflict has all but disappeared. Classical economic discourse has been drowned out by their junk economics.

*There is a covert economic program, to be sure, and it is bipartisan. It is to make elections about just which celebrities will introduce neoliberal economic policies with the most convincing patter talk. That is the essence of rasa tabla politics.*

-*Can the Democrats Lose Again in 2020?*-

*Trump’s November victory showed that voters found him to be the Lesser Evil, but all that voters really could express was “throw out the bums” *and get a new set of lobbyists for the FIRE sector and corporate monopolists. Both candidates represented Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. No wonder voter turnout has continued to plunge.

Although the Democrats’ Lesser Evil argument lost to the Republicans in 2016, the neoliberals in control of the DNC found the absence of a progressive economic program to less threatening to their interests than the critique of Wall Street and neocon interventionism coming from the Sanders camp. *So the Democrat will continue to pose as the Lesser Evil party not really in terms of policy, but simply ad hominum. They will merely repeat Hillary’s campaign stance: They are not Trump.* Their parades and street demonstrations since his inauguration have not come out for any economic policy.

*On Friday, February 10, the party’s Democratic Policy group held a retreat for its members in Baltimore. *Third Way “centrists” (Republicans running as Democrats) dominated, with Hillary operatives in charge. *The conclusion was that no party policy was needed at all. “President Trump is a better recruitment tool for us than a central campaign issue,’ said Washington Rep. Denny Heck, who is leading recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).”*

But what does their party leadership have to offer women, Blacks and Hispanics in the way of employment, more affordable health care, housing or education and better pay? Where are the New Deal pro-labor, pro-regulatory roots of bygone days? The party leadership is unwilling to admit that Trump’s message about protecting jobs and opposing the TPP played a role in his election. Hillary was suspected of supporting it as “the gold standard” of trade deals, and Obama had made the Trans-Pacific Partnership the centerpiece of his presidency – the free-trade TPP and TTIP that would have taken economic regulatory policy out of the hands of government and given it to corporations.

Instead of accepting even Sanders’ centrist-left stance, the Democrats’ strategy was to tar Trump as pro-Russian, insist that his aides had committed impeachable offenses, and mount one parade after another. “Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio told reporters she was wary of focusing solely on an “economic message” aimed at voters whom Trump won over in 2016, because, in her view, Trump did not win on an economic message. “What Donald Trump did was address them at a very different level — an emotional level, a racial level, a fear level,” she said. “If all we talk about is the economic message, we’re not going to win.”* This stance led Sanders supporters to walk out of a meeting organized by the “centrist” Third Way think tank on Wednesday, February 8.*

By now this is an old story. Fifty years ago, socialists such as Michael Harrington asked why union members and progressives still imagined that they had to work through the Democratic Party. It has taken the rest of the country half a century to see that Democrats are not the party of the working class, unions, middle class, farmers or debtors. They are the party of Wall Street privatizers, bank deregulators, neocons and the military-industrial complex. Obama showed his hand – and that of his party – in his passionate attempt to ram through the corporatist TPP treaty that would have enabled corporations to sue governments for any costs imposed by public consumer protection, environmental protection or other protection of the population against financialized corporate monopolies.

*Against this backdrop, Trump’s promises and indeed his worldview seem quixotic. The picture of America’s future he has painted seems unattainable within the foreseeable future. It is too late to bring manufacturing back to the United States, because corporations already have shifted their supply nodes abroad, and too much U.S. infrastructure has been dismantled.*

There can’t be a high-speed railroad, because it would take more than four years to get the right-of-way and create a route without crossing gates or sharp curves. In any case, the role of railroads and other transportation has been to increase real estate prices along the routes. But in this case, real estate would be torn down – and having a high-speed rail does not increase land values.

The stock market has soared to new heights, anticipating lower taxes on corporate profits and a deregulation of consumer, labor and environmental protection. *Trump may end up as America’s Boris Yeltsin, protecting U.S. oligarchs (not that Hillary would have been different, merely cloaked in a more colorful identity rainbow). The U.S. economy is in for Shock Therapy. Voters should look to Greece to get a taste of the future in this scenario.*

Without a coherent response to neoliberalism, Trump’s billionaire cabinet may do to the United States what neoliberals in the Clinton administration did to Russia after 1991: tear out all the checks and balances, and turn public wealth over to insiders and oligarchs. So Trump’s his best chance to be transformative is simply to be America’s Yeltsin for his party’s oligarchic backers, putting the class war back in business.

-*What a Truly Transformative President Would Do/Would Have Done*-

*No administration can create a sound U.S. recovery without dealing with the problem that caused the 2008 crisis in the first place: over-indebtedness. *The only one way to restore growth, raise living standards and make the economy competitive again is a debt writedown. But that is not yet on the political horizon. Obama’s doublecross of his voters in 2009 prevented the needed policy from occurring. Having missed this chance in the last financial crisis, a progressive policy must await yet another crisis. But so far, no political party is preparing a program to juxtapose to Republican-Democratic austerity and scale-back of Social Security, Medicare and social spending programs in general.

Also no longer on the horizon is a more progressive income tax, or a public option for health care – or for banking, or consumer protection against financial fraud, or for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, or for a revived protection of labor’s right to unionize, or environmental regulations.

*It seems that only a new party can achieve these aims. *At the time these essays are going to press, Sanders has committed himself to working within the Democratic Party. But that stance is based on his assumption that somehow he can recruit enough activists to take over the party from Its Donor Class.

I suspect he will fail. In any case, it is easier to begin afresh than to try to re-design a party (or any institution) dominated by resistance to change, and whose idea of economic growth is a pastiche of tax cuts and deregulation. Both U.S. parties are committed to this neoliberal program – and seek to blame foreign enemies for the fact that its effect is to continue squeezing living standards and bloating the financial sector.

If this slow but inexorable crash does lead to a political crisis, it looks like the Republicans may succeed in convening a new Constitutional Convention (many states already have approved this) to lock the United States into a corporatist neoliberal world. Its slogan will be that of Margaret Thatcher: TINA – There Is No Alternative.

*And who is to disagree? As Trotsky said, fascism is the result of the failure of the left to provide an alternative.* Reported by Zero Hedge 9 hours ago.

The price hike has been approved by the Irdai as commission for agents. Reported by DNA 8 hours ago.

Trump's inability to get enough support from his own Republican party to "repeal and replace" the Obamacare health insurance reforms, a major campaign promise, also spurred a rush to safety assets such as gold and the Japanese yen. Reported by IndiaTimes 8 hours ago.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but one thing is clear: The ObamaCare battle was Mission Impossible from the beginning, because Donald Trump ran against Republican orthodoxy on health insurance. Reported by FOXNews.com 2 hours ago.

Obamacare touches more than just those buying individual health insurance on the exchanges. It impacts millions of others. Reported by CNNMoney 7 hours ago.

-*1. Tamil Nadu man deposits Rs 246 crore in demonetized notes under PM’s scheme*-

In what could be the single-largest cash deposit in Tamil Nadu during the demonetization drive, an individual in Tiruchengode in Namakkal district has deposited Rs 246 crore in cash. Read more here.

-*2. J&K minister Syed Farooq Andrabi's house attacked, rifles stolen*-

Heavily armed terrorists attacked the ancestral home of Jammu and Kashmir Minister of State for Hajj and Waqf, Syed Farooq Andrabi, injuring two guards. Read more here.

-*3. Car, motorcycle, health insurance to get costlier from April 1; here's why*-

Car, motorcycle and health insurance will cost more from April 1 with regulator Irdai giving go-ahead to insurers for revision in commission for agents. Read more here.

-*4. Indian man 'racially' abused, assaulted at a McDonald's in Australia*-

An Indian man was allegedly assaulted by a group of teenagers, including a girl, who hurled racial abuses at him at a restaurant in Australia's Tasmania state. Read more here.

-*5. #INDvAUS 4th Test: Right in the balance*-

After fifties by Rahul and Pujara, India lose four wickets post tea to Lyon as honours are shared on Day 2; Australia reduce hosts to 248/6. Read more here.

ReportIndiaDNA Web TeamDNA webdesk

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Mon, 27 Mar 2017-09:50am
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From Print Edition:  Reported by DNA 7 hours ago.

Volatility at the petrol pump has emerged as a major area of concern for shopping centre managers, due to the wild fluctuations in price over recent months. Reported by Brisbane Times 5 hours ago.