Vice President-elect Mike Pence, flanked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John Barrasso CREDIT: AP Photo/Cliff Owen.
Or, rightly said, lack of healthcare specifics. The dirty work done in the small hours specifically gutted these features of ACA:
1. Protect people with pre-existing conditions.
2. Let young adults stay on their parents’ plan.
3. Maintain access to contraceptive coverage.
4. Ensure Medicaid expansion stays in place.
5. Protect children on Medicaid or CHIP.
6. Protect veterans’ health care.
Think Progress has all the details on each one of these, and how the rethuglicans just yanked the rug out from under everyone.
How many people will die from this?
Is the word ‘murder’ OK yet? Can we go with ‘mass murder’?
And they gain what exactly?
Mass murder it is. As for what they gain? Destroying the policies of that ni**er muslim.
I mean this is black-and-white evil. We’re way past the “are we the baddies?” territory.
People who support the GOP while knowing this* are plain evil as well. None of that “oh we’re the disenfranchised suffering poor and they give us hope for some fucking reason” bullshit.
* and if you’re an American voter with interest enough in politics to vote, then you’ll know this. Not buying the ignorance plea. The best I can say for them is that they’re willing to bear the pain of one form of one injustice in order to dole out injustice tenfold to other demographics.
Saad:
Yep. I had very little tolerance for that bullshit in the early days, I have absolutely none now. All those people, they knew damn well they were committing evil, that’s what they wanted. They wanted the power to oppress, torment, destroy. They wanted their hate and petty bias written on the walls. They wanted their privilege to be unassailable. Fuck them all.
> Destroying the policies of that ni**er muslim.
Yeah exactly! The thoroughness with which they are scrubbing every last trace of Obama’s presidency goes beyond simple self-interest.
The GOP in power clearly, viscerally hate him, on a level that’s almost germaphobic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tear out all the furnishings in the White House and ‘lose’ his portrait.
They’re sacrificing a lot of energy and human life to phantoms.
In the comments of the Think Progress article there’s a self-proclaimed “God-fearing (Christ loving) husband and father, OIF/OEF combat veteran, and constitutionalist” gloating happily about this measure. A veteran, celebrating a measure that includes removing protection for veterans. It’s pure hate indeed, and it overrides all common sense and self-interest. In other words, and as it’s been said before: it’s evil. I think that man is right in fearing god, because with followers like him it sounds very nefarious indeed.
So I’ve had it explained to me that a certain person favoured by a person closely biologically related to me voted for the Republican party and not for its leader (I paraphrase), because it was just so. hard. to. decide between the two selections (if you’re not going to “vote for the leader” anyway, why not choose the party that was much more people-friendly?). I dunno, that’s a pretty black mark in my book with few (= no) redeeming qualities.
I’m an ocean way, though… for now.
The reality-based community needs to understand WTF is going on in the heads of Trump voters. We’ve got a severely non-trivial percentage of the populace who…
…have health insurance only because of the ACA…
…and voted for the candidate who openly, directly, said he’d destroy that hated, evil ‘Obamacare’ (which is of course completely unrelated to the wonderful ACA)…
…and, as a result, fucked themselves over. Big time.
What the hell were these people thinking? That’s not just a rhetorical question, because when millions upon millions of people voluntarily inflict this kind of pain on themselves, this country has a serious problem. How do you get people to abandon the self-destructive thought patterns which led them to shoot themselves in both feet? Longer-term, how do you ensure than people don’t acquire those self-destructive thought patterns in the first place?
Cubist:
I don’t think you do. This country is this way because this is the way it was founded. The foundation is rotten, and I think things will have to get very bad indeed before all people realize that.
So in removing protections for children and people with pre-existing conditions, the GOP has helped to ensure that if a fetus is found to have a serious disability or medical condition, abortion is even more likely to be the humane alternative to carrying to term. It isn’t just the spectre of giving birth to a child who will suffer terribly/die painfully even with the best medical care, it’s the very large probability of a child suffering and dying due to lack of (needed and existent but unavailable) care.
Coupled elsewhere with lack of access to safe abortion, and in this very round of fuckery, reduced access to birth control. They really do want as many women* and children to suffer and die as possible, don’t they?
*And if they’re even thinking of non-women with uteri, I am confident that the same is wished upon them.
Whirlwitch:
Yes, they do. And unfortunately, they are in a position to actually pull this off.