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[alway]

Those 4 are holding out for a more extreme, even worse version of the bill though. Like Mk 1 in the house. Also like Mk 1 in the house, I suspect it will be made even more extreme in last minute dealings to appeal to them, 2 of those 4 will sign on, and the rest will simply vote for it within 2 weeks from today. All the while talking about how it isn't the "final bill", since the house needs to reconcile them next. Because that's how Republicans work now. It will be on Trump's desk before they even admit to the fact that they participated in the legislative process on this bill.

[EnigmaticHat]

Its not just the 4 Republicans, a lot of them are raising concerns.  They just aren't committing to a decision the way Ted Cruz and the other 3 did.

The main sticking point for the more moderate senators is that the bill goes after the elderly, a key demographic for some of the senators.  From the New York Times:

Older people could be disproportionately hurt because they pay more for insurance in general. Both chambers’ bills would allow insurers to charge older people five times as much as younger ones; the limit now is three times.

The Senate measure, like the House bill, would phase out the extra money that the federal government has provided to states as an incentive to expand eligibility for Medicaid. And like the House bill, it would put the entire Medicaid program on a budget, ending the open-ended entitlement that now exists.

It would also repeal most of the tax increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act to help pay for expanded coverage, in effect handing a broad tax cut to the affluent in a measure that would also slice billions of dollars from Medicaid, a program that serves one in five Americans, not only the poor but also almost two-thirds of people in nursing homes. A capital-gains tax cut for the most affluent Americans would be retroactive to the beginning of this year.

[Frumple]

Key demographic for the GOP period, more like. Unfortunately, saying it's a sticking point suggests the GOP in congress, senate or house, has enough moral fiber for anything to stick in it, much less have a substantiative instead of merely vocal problem with fucking over their single biggest demographic (on top of every goddamn body in the country save maybe some of the richest of us in the short term) and putting a torpedo into the core constituency of a number of their folks next up for reelection.

Not a suggestion I'm entirely comfortable entertaining, frankly. Or that enough of that noted demographic will actually admit they fucked up voting for the shits, even as it literally causes them to die. If the media bubble bullshit doesn't mean they're not even aware of the problems with the bill to begin with, anyway.

[smjjames]

And to top it all off, conservatives are screaming: "OBAMACARE-LITE! NOT CONSERVATIVE ENOUGH! RAR!". Okay, not screaming, but you get the idea that it doesn't go far enough. So, yeah, it's like they think it's not cruel enough or something.

TBH, I'm not sure what they mean by 'not conservative enough' here, what do they want out of it that is not conservative or what do they want to change to make it more conservative. Whatever the heck conservative means in this specific case.

Also, the CBO score is going to be next week sometime. I'm going to guess that it's just as bad as the previous CBO score or worse.

[Reelya]

Logan's Run might be about conservative enough for them.

[nenjin]

It's the selling tickets to population control events that's so appealing to them.

[origamiscienceguy]

I think what conservatives want is a free-market type of healthcare, with lots of specialist offices competing for customers which would result in better (and possibly cheaper) care. The obvious problems with this is the people who can't afford anything.

[Strife26]

I think what conservatives want is a free-market type of healthcare, with lots of specialist offices competing for customers which would result in better (and possibly cheaper) care. The obvious problems with this is the people who can't afford anything.

Ayup. Healthcare is pretty obviously in the category of things that aren't appropriate for the free market.

[Reelya]

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/31/asia/india-child-deaths/index.html

Headline: "Why are so many children dying in India?"

Well, let me start with the fact that there's no universal healthcare in India. it's all for-profit, and it has a child mortality rate far exceeding other similar nations. It's has a mortality rate about 50/1000 live births, compared to 12/1000 for China, despite being about equal to China on this in the 1950s - 1960s.

[RedKing]

I think what conservatives want is a free-market type of healthcare, with lots of specialist offices competing for customers which would result in better (and possibly cheaper) care. The obvious problems with this is the people who can't afford anything.

Ayup. Healthcare is pretty obviously in the category of things that aren't appropriate for the free market.

Socialist blasphemy! All things are appropriate for the mighty Invisible Hand. And if you disagree, start a company that figures out a way to make money off disagreeing with me, and let's see who the market agrees with.

....yeah, I've pretty much given up hope. We're in the death throes of hypercapitalism, and I'm just waiting around to see if we all get sucked into a neo-feudal Mad Max dystopia, or a proletarian revolution that would make Lenin cream his slacks.

[Frumple]

I think what conservatives want is a free-market type of healthcare, with lots of specialist offices competing for customers which would result in better (and possibly cheaper) care. The obvious problems with this is the people who can't afford anything.

They certainly claim to... while pointedly and insistently refusing to acknowledge that (most kinds of, at the absolute least) healthcare doesn't work like a normal market, and that the signals it sends trend pretty strongly towards resulting in the exact opposite of cheaper or better, much less both, particularly outside of a relatively very small fraction of said market.

The obvious problem with it is a significantly larger one than the people that can't afford it -- a normal market can adjust to that without much difficulty, to one extent or another. It's that a free market setup is fundamentally anti-optimal (or whatever the blazes is below suboptimal on the sliding scale of optimality) for the services the market in question deals with. When you apply a free market to health care, what you're going to get out of it is not cheaper, or better, or more available, but rather the opposite as consumers are more or less literally incapable of sending the signals that would inform the market to be any of those... because for a great deal of said services, trying to means you're dead, or crippled, or otherwise rapidly moving outside the market entirely, one way or another.

E: Though, all that said, regardless of whatever conservative intelligentsia and ideologues argue on the subject, we now have clear examples of what conservative politicians are trying to do, and it damn sure ain't trying to break healthcare into a free market. Looks a good lot more like "give tax breaks to rich people, to hell with the rest of you."

[EnigmaticHat]

I think what conservatives want is a free-market type of healthcare, with lots of specialist offices competing for customers which would result in better (and possibly cheaper) care. The obvious problems with this is the people who can't afford anything.

That *is* Obamacare is the problem.  Yeah its not purely free market but its funneling a HUGE amount of money into private industry and Americans have plenty of choice both in terms of healthcare providers, and in terms of insurance providers.  While getting more people involved in the economic process, and providing a private option to expand healthcare coverage and make our system compare more favorably with the rest of the world.  Republicans may not agree with the methods or the goals but if you look at it from the perspective of "make Democrats shut up about healthcare for the next 20 years" its pretty much a conservative wet dream as long as they can keep people like Bernie Sanders away from the reigns of power.

The thing is that if they wait for the CBO to get back to them, what its going to tell them is that the bill will effect insurance companies either negatively or neutrally, but it will take a bunch of money out of their client's pockets.  What's even the point of free market reform if it doesn't benefit any of the agents actually involved in the process?  The corporations in this giant industry are nervous about the bill in its current form.  The main argument for it that doesn't contradict the CBO, is that the bill will reduce taxes on some people but that's not free market that's small government.

One thing that's worth pointing out here is that any Obamacare repeal IS going to get a liberal response in the next 10 years.  Probably a largescale one with at least 50% public support.  If we do go old system>Obamacare>Repeal and replace>neo-Obamacare, that will be 3 healthcare overhauls in the space of less than 20 years.  That's not good for any of the industry professionals involved who are going to have a buttload more work on their hands, we already see right now small practices that are unwilling to take insurance because its too much work.  The instability of such a back-and-forth is going to be very stressful for young people approaching 26 (who want cheap insurance and a medicaid safety net), and old people approaching retirement age (who want to plan their finances 20 years in advance and who want a medicaid safety net).  I'm not even talking voting demographics, like stress can cause health problems.  No one likes financial uncertainty and both those groups are at unusually high risk of running out of money if for very different reasons.

[smjjames]

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/31/asia/india-child-deaths/index.html

Headline: "Why are so many children dying in India?"

Well, let me start with the fact that there's no universal healthcare in India. it's all for-profit, and it has a child mortality rate far exceeding other similar nations. It's has a mortality rate about 50/1000 live births, compared to 12/1000 for China, despite being about equal to China on this in the 1950s - 1960s.

You speak as if the all for-profit healthcare is the sole reason India has problems with child and infant mortality when the article makes no such claims on that. BTW, the article states some deaths that happened at a state run hospital, and the wiki page for India health says that the system is state run. So, it doesn't look like it's a fully for-profit type of healthcare. The US system we had before Obamacare is a much better example of for-profit healthcare and how it doesn't work.

@EH: There's still a risk of conservatives (or whatever form Republicans take in 20-30 years) trying to yank it back, so, it becomes neo-obamacare>repeal to whatever>pendulum right back. Though there's a good chance that whoever is President after Trump (or Pence if Trump drops out of office for whatever reason) might try to swing things to some form of universial healthcare. The Republicans are already finding it politically very difficult to remove something that is popular (and yet they keep trying), so, repealing universial healthcare would be even more difficult.

Why don't the Republicans just fix/reform ACA rather than try to repeal/skeletonize it? Pfft.

Also, theres a fifth GOP Senator that is firmly against the Senate GOP. They should just force it to a vote and go 'Hey, we tried!' and move on.....

[redwallzyl]

What will it take to finally make people see that the GOP doesn't give a shit about them or their interests and are just exploiting them for their own ideological and financial ends? do they literally have to kill tens of thousands?

[Dunamisdeos]

What will it take to finally make people see that the GOP doesn't give a shit about them or their interests and are just exploiting them for their own ideological and financial ends? do they literally have to kill tens of thousands?

I'd like to take this time to proudly proclaim that I have always hated both major parties here in the US equally for exactly that reason. They're just clubs that tell you who it's ok to hate, from my perspective.

Obama and his admin was the first one (in my lifetime) that I ever felt cared about the general populace in any meaningful way whatsoever, even if I didn't agree 100% with some of his stuff.