December 25, 2018: "Merry Christmas" to Grandma, Except She's Dead

 

12/25/17: Merry Christmas, everyone. According to the Groper-in-Chief, the “War on Christmas” has been won. Liberals will no longer kick over public Nativity scenes. Commies will cease gathering up Christmas cards and burning them in bonfires. Barack Obama will never again come to your house, knock politely and, upon entry, smash your keepsake ornaments. 

Trump’s first tweet of the day is a rousing cheer in the fictitious war that never was: “Merry Christmas.” 

In this war, Trump fought heroically since there were no bullets involved. Plus: there were presents. 

Also, we should say, “Merry Christmas, Grandma!” 

At the urging of lobbyists for the nursing home industry another victory is won when Trump & Co. cut back “unnecessary” regulations. Say, Granny has an operation. Doctors implant a medication pump in her abdomen. The sutures don’t hold. Over a period of eight days the incision opens. The pump sticks out of Granny like the horrible creature that pops out of that the guy’s guts in Alien. Granny gets an infection and dies. 

(This is a true story.) 

Well, now you can tell Granny, “Merry Christmas” whenever you see her. Except for the minor detail that Granny is dead.

Until now. Because she's dead!

 

Under new rules it will be much harder to sue nursing homes in cases of improper care or negligence. 

Meanwhile, the average cost of a year’s stay in a semi-private room in a nursing home is more than $80,000 annually. But don’t worry. Medicare and Medicaid help pay most of the costs. 

Oh, wait, Paul Ryan and the Republicans want to cut back Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

When Does the GOP Stop Whining about Obamacare and Do Something?

OH, FOR GOD’S SAKES! When are Republicans “snowflakes”—a term the right loves to throw in liberal faces—going to quit crying about Obamacare? It’s a bat shit crazy blizzard! Once again, they’re in a tax-slashing tizzy because Anthem is pulling out of the Ohio insurance market.

You just figured out Obamacare was “failing?” You’ve been parroting that line for seven years. You giant pack of assholes! You voted fifty times to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. You warned, even before it became law, there would be “death panels” for granny if it passed. You scared dimwits across America with that line of preexisting manure. You promised you were going to repeal and replace Obamacare as soon as you had a chance. You only needed a Republican president.

You have him. 

True, he’s a tweeting nitwit, but even a tweeting nitwit could sign any bill your GOP-controlled Congress managed to slap on his desk in the Oval Office. You can get it done tomorrow. You can kick 24 million people off insurance under GOP Plan #1, or 23 million under GOP Plan #2, any time the Senate moves to grant approval. 

President Obama can’t stop you.

You know who else can’t stop you? President Truman! He’s dead. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR—all long, long gone. 

They have the same power to stop you as Mr. Obama.

GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR collective asses. Louie Gohmert, you and your Tea Party pals shut down the government in 2013 in a vain effort to destroy Obamacare. What’s wrong, you fair weather fanatic! Shut everything down now if you want to do something “constructive” in regard to denying health care to your fellow citizens. You shouldn’t need to. Your party has 52 votes in the U.S. Senate. Mitch McConnell jimmied the rules. You need 50 “ayes” and a tie-breaker from the Vice President to get a plan through the Senate.

You control the levers of power. Pull them, you candy-ass cowards.

If you want to eliminate the 3.8% tax on incomes above $250,000 that helped make it possible to cover people with preexisting conditions, do the deed and live with the political and moral consequences. You can’t cut taxes and cover everyone Obamacare covered. You can’t repeal and replace basic addition and subtraction. If you want to take a chance on letting kids with cancer die or let families go bankrupt because sons or daughters were unlucky, make the bold call. But don’t forget, in 2010, 62% of all bankruptcies in this country were a result of catastrophic medical bills. Obamacare didn’t fix that problem; but it helped. It absolutely didn’t cause it. 

The real dilemma is the high cost of health care. The United States is the most expensive place in the world to get sick and seek care.

Maybe that’s the fundamental problem—and you can’t solve it by slinging typical right-wing bullshit.

Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act isn't going to address the main problem.

Maybe a good place to start with cuts would involve taking a look at salaries for top health care executives. According to Bloomberg, “Among the 200 top-paid U.S. executives at public companies, those in health care and pharmaceutical businesses were awarded average pay packages of $37 million in their most recent fiscal year.” No other business sector had executives who did better. Why, you have to wonder, how Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson and Johnson does it! Gorsky had to pinch pennies annually, under Obamacare, earning only $103 million between 2012 and 2016.

Starvation wages!

How do these poor health care executives manage!

What about those poor drug companies! Pfizer had a 42% profit in 2014! Sure, they dipped to 14.2% in 2016. Then again, Gilead Science made a 55% profit that year, Biogene Idec 33%, Amgen 32%. Johnson and Johnson, leader in the field with $70 billion in revenue, made a paltry $16.54 billion in profit in 2016. 

Who can live with that lousy 22% return!

TRUE, PROFITS WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER if the Justice Department under Obama had quit suing them for illegal business practices and slapping them on their greedy wrists for defrauding Medicare. Ten top settlements between 2009 and 2014 forced Big Pharma to cough up $13 billion in penalties.

You can look it up if you don’t believe me. But, nooooooooooooooooo, don’t dare regulate these pirates!

You don’t need to worry about kindergartners who develop type-1 diabetes or babies born with heart defects. You need to give tax cuts to the Koch brothers! Those billionaires, Charles and David, are headed for the poorhouse with only $41 billion a piece. That’s why they decided to donate $889 million to GOP candidates in 2016.

They can’t survive under their tax burden.

You want to run on your “accomplishments,” you political poltroons? You want to say you repealed health care and gave huge tax cuts to the richest among us? 

Democrats can’t stop you.

You had seven years in opposition to work out a plan. You voted to repeal and replace again and again. Now your base is counting on you—well, not counting the significant portion that will wake up soon, if you pass your plan, and realize they too lost their coverage.

IF OBAMACARE IS TERRIBLE, if it’s failing, if insurers are pulling out (and by the way, Anthem pulled out of Ohio because the company said it has no way of knowing what you boneheads are planning, particularly in regard to subsidies), you are in charge. The buck doesn’t stop with Obama. 

The buck stops with Donald J. Trump.

You bitched about Obamacare for the best part of a decade. You ran nonstop against it in 2016. You’ve had control of both required branches of government to repeal and replace, for months now.

Dry you crying eyes. 

Get something, anything, passed, no matter how terrible, and place it on President Trump’s desk pronto.

OR, ARE YOU LIKE THE DOG that chased the car? Only you caught the ambulance. Don’t blame our side because you have no clue what to do with it.

Woof, you fools.

Woof!

Trumpcare 2.0: The Coalition of American Oligarchs Loves It!

Well, thank god. The Republicans are started down the road (or maybe across the Bridge to Nowhere), on the way to repealing and replacing Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act was terrible, right?

Okay, maybe it did reduce the number of uninsured Americans to an all-time low, cutting the total from 16%, or 1 in every 6 of our neighbors, to 8.6% of the nation’s population, or 1 in 11. 

Who cares about uninsured neighbors? Unless they crawl over to your property and die on your lawn.

Obamacare is imploding. President Trump says so. According to Speaker Paul Ryan, U.S. health care was perfect until President Obama started messing around. From the days of smallpox and the Founding Fathers to passage of the ACA people with preexisting conditions were never able to get insurance. 

Just as Jesus intended!

(I’m not sure about right-wing theology in this matter. My understanding of Jesus and his message would be: Heal the sick and help the poor.)

As of Thursday we know Trumpcare 2.0 is going to be fantastic even though House Republicans dared not wait to let the Congressional Budget Office score it. In fact, according to Mr. Trump every American is going to have better coverage, at way lower cost, and all nurses will be Victoria’s Secret models.

If you don’t believe any of that—because you actually understand math—well, you must listen to “fake news.”

I know. You might be conservative. You know someone who had to pay for maternity care in their insurance package and they’re 93 years old. Or you know someone who couldn’t choose their own doctor back in 2010.

Or you, yourself, saw premiums spike.

We liberals get that. That does sting.

And remember when America was great, before President Obama, and premiums never went up!

And benefits were never curtailed, until the Affordable Care Act was enacted!

And Big Pharma priced drugs fairly because executives who run the companies love the sick so much they wish they could give them drugs free. But legally they can’t, so they jack up the price of live-saving insulin by 700%.

Yes! Let the Big Business folks shape the entire health care system again. Big Business folks are saints.

Big Government? Always evil! Always.

Just ask Mitch McConnell.

No, scratch that. Senator McConnell made sure in a budget deal last week that money would be there to cover retired coal miners and widows who lost health insurance when mining pensions failed.

As a liberal, by the way, I’d say, yes, we can afford to cover unfortunate miners and widows. 

We can also afford to cover five-year-olds who suffer from leukemia. 

To be fair, we all know, except maybe for President Trump, that health care is a maddeningly complicated business. Every honest person knows this issue has a thousand moving parts—and honest people may disagree about details and cite competing examples. But if you believe Trumpcare is going to be way better and cost way less, you’re being played for a sucker.

Consider the opinions of those who know the system best. Below is a list of groups that came out against the first GOP plan in March.

That plan was so terrible, only 17% of Americans approved. You might as well have asked people: “Do you approve or disapprove of cholera?” 

Cholera would have polled higher.

Anyway, these groups opposed the first version:

American Medical Association

American Hospital Association

Catholic Health Association

Association of American Medical Colleges

Children’s Hospital Association

AARP

Oh, yeah, also:

American Nurses Association

American College of Physicians

National Nurses United

National Physicians Alliance

Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

American Academy of Pediatrics

These groups joined in opposing the second iteration of Trumpcare:

American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network

American Diabetes Association

American Heart Association

American Lung Association

Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation)

March of Dimes

National Multiple Sclerosis Society

National Organization for Rare Disorders

WomenHeart: The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease

Then again, there were a few groups that did come out strongly in favor of Trumpcare 2.0. So let’s not forget them:

Coalition of American Oligarchs

Trump Family, Inc.

Koch Brothers Family Reunion

Mar-a-Lago Supper Club

—and—

The Walton Family Foundation for Not Insuring Our Own Workers

All across America this weekend, the top 25 billionaire hedge fund managers, the seven members of the Walton family, worth a combined$134 billion according to the Forbes 400 list, and the two richest Koch brothers, who suffered so deeply under Obama that their wealth only increased to $42 billion each, are celebrating. So are big Trump backers like Sheldon Adelson and Carl Ichan, assorted members of the Trump cabinet (Wilbur Ross, Betsy DeVos) and, of course, the President, himself. With a personal fortune estimated to be $3.7 billion, he is #156 on the Forbes list—and if this plan goes through, he’ll save a bundle.

In other words, it’s a great day for freedom (to develop lung disease and die if you’re poor), to be an oligarch in America.

At Mar-a-Lago (membership fee: $200,000; annual dues: $14,000), they’ll be partying hard in weeks to come. I think all the members will now be able to afford second helpings of beautiful chocolate cake.

Got a child with cancer! Too bad for you.

Donald Trump Blames Healthcare Failure on the Whigs

This weekend, our star reporter caught up with President Trump on the sixth tee of his golf course, not far from Mar-a-Lago. Feeling glum in the wake of his health care defeat, the man who once assured voters they’d get tired of winning once he took office was willing to talk about losing.

His reasoning was soon apparent.

“I blame Democrats for my failure,” he began, “Also, three million illegal immigrants voted in Congress.”

“Sir,” our reporter wondered, “didn’t you say repealing and replacing health care would be “so easy” during the campaign?”

“I didn’t say that,” the President countered. “Hillary Clinton said that. How can I be blamed if my lips are moving, but I’m quoting?”

“As Time noted this week,” our reporter tried a fresh tack, “a GOP-controlled U. S. House of Representatives voted fifty times to repeal the Affordable Care Act when President Obama was in office.” If your party controls the House and Senate and you are securely seated in the Oval Office, how can Democrats be to blame? Can’t the House simply vote for repeal again—a fifty-first try? Don’t you have enough votes to pass Trumpcare without them?

 “Well, I guess I’m right, because I’m president and you’re not.”

“You realize that isn’t even logical…”

“Obama did it. He tapped my phones—and my microwave,” Mr. Trump insisted. “Steve Bannon says Obama used mind control to stop lawmakers from voting for the bill. It was going to be the greatest health care plan ever. Americans would have received better health care for a small fraction of the cost…”

 “You don’t seriously believe Mr. Obama has power to control minds,” our incredulous reporter asked.

“You shouldn’t be asking me. I didn’t come up with the plan that failed. Paul Ryan did it. Blame him. Sad!”

“Mr. President, didn’t you call Obamacare a ‘complete disaster?’”

“Yes, I did. Terrible. And did I mention Obama tapped my microwave and my coffee maker?”

“Mr. President, didn’t you promise during your campaign you would come up with a health plan to cover everyone?”

“I ran a great campaign, if you didn’t notice. I won the greatest Electoral College victory in the last 10,000 years.”

“Sir, the Congressional Budget Office scored the Ryan bill and said by 2026, an additional 24 million Americans would end up without insurance. How does that square with your promise to cover everyone?”

“That is everyone,” the President replied.

“Perhaps I should repeat: The CBO said 24,000,000 would be …”

“All illegal immigrants! Also, member of ISIS. Did you know I have a secret plan to defeat ISIS as soon as I take office.”

“You are in office, sir. Moving on. Considering your stunning health care defeat how do you plan…”

“It wasn’t my defeat,” the President interjected. “In fact, I blame the Whig Party. We don’t win in America anymore. We need Patton and MacArthur to pass a terrific health care act. Frederick Douglass will help. I know it. He’s an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

“Mr. President, Frederick Douglass died in 1895…”

“How should I know that? Sean Spicer said he was fine. I can’t be blamed if I repeat everything I hear.”

“Considering the fact only 17% of Americans approved of the Ryan plan, Mr. Trump, do you feel you need to study this subject in greater depth?”

“Everyone loves our plan. Omarosa loves it. The Russians love it. So do all Bannon’s friends in the white nationalist movement. Also, I had the biggest inaugural crowd ever. I had more people than Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Millard Fillmore combined. Twenty billion people watched me live on television. Every one of them loved my speech...”

“Mr. Trump, President Truman had a famous sign on his desk that read: ‘The buck stops here.’ He felt the final responsibility for what happened was his and he must take blame if anything went wrong. What kind of sign would you like to see for your desk?”

“I’m considering: ’What buck?’ That would be great. And I deserve a great sign because I’ve done more to start off my term than any president in history. No, more than all of them combined! Why should I get blamed for anything? When I said for five years Obama wasn’t born in this country, my lips were moving because Hillary Clinton made me say so. I might have been moving my lips when I said I grabbed women by the p----; but Billy Bush egged me on. Plus, I had the word ‘p----,’ in air quotations. That makes all the difference.”

Our reporter was fast approaching intellectual exhaustion. “Mr. President, I know this week has been a tough one for your administration. Do you feel you bear any responsibility for the fact the FBI is investigating members of your campaign to see if there was cooperation with the Russians to interfere in the recent election?”

“No.”

“You had to fire General Michael Flynn—after you made him your chief National Security Advisor. We now known he took at least $65,000 from Russian entities, that he was paid $503,000 by the Turkish government…”

“I fired him. That makes me best president ever.”

“If you appointed him…and he turned out to be linked to Russians…um…doesn’t that mean your judgement was flawed?”

“Nope. I blame Millard Fillmore.”

“Paul Manafort, your campaign manager, reportedly took $12.7 million from pro-Russian parties in the Ukraine…”

“Again! I fired him. That’s how smart I am.”

“Let me try one final tack, sir, because I’d like to get a sense of your devotion to the truth. You’ve heard the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Had you been in his place how would you have responded when your father asked if it was you who had chopped down the beautiful cherry tree?”

“I would have said, ‘My hatchet might have been moving, but I blame the hatchet.’”

With that, our poor reporter tossed his notes high in the air and made a beeline for the nearest bar to pour out a few stiff shots of bourbon.

Did the Democrats sink Trumpcare? Or was it the Whigs?