Jim Worth: An Unhealthy Debate: Again

Poll: Slim majority want Congress to repeal healthcare reform
A slim majority of Americans want Congress to Repeal the Obama Administration's Healthcare Reform law, a new poll reported Tuesday. The poll by Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, released today, found that 48 percent of Americans want the Republican-controlled Congress to Repeal the reform Legislation, while 43 percent want the law to stay in place. The poll's results come on the same day that House Republicans open up floor debate for repealing the legislation. The House is scheduled ...

As House healthcare debate begins, report finds millions of Americans have preexisting medical conditions
WASHINGTON -- On the day Republicans in the House begin their charge to the Repeal the sweeping healthcare overhaul law, the Obama Administration released a report Tuesday that estimates that as many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have preexisting medical conditions that could make it more difficult for them to obtain health coverage. The analysis prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services marks an attempt to quantify how many across the country would be affected if the law,...

"House Republicans plan to vote tomorrow to repeal last years health care overhaul."
"One of the key defenses of the law is that it will reduce the Deficit over the next decade and the decades to come. But the projections employed to make this argument just aren’t believable. Democrats gamed the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring process, producing a score that distorted the long-term numbers and was believable only under a set of fantastic and improbable assumptions." ...

Have Republicans read the health care bill they are about to repeal?
During the Health Care reform debate of 2009-2010 opponents of the Health Care Reform Bill frequently asked "Have you read the bill?"  The question was aimed at attacking the complexity of the Health Care reform bill, which ended up being over 2,300 pages long.  Lost in the debate was the fact that legislators nearly always rely on their aides to inform them of the provisions of every bill.  In addition, the bill was so long in large part because it quoted old laws that it was cha...

One More Reason for Dems to Welcome the Repeal Debate
[Guest post by Noam Scheiber:] On Sunday, Jon Chait cited one reason Democrats should relish the debate over repealing Healthcare Reform: public support for Repeal appears to be dropping. Two days earlier, Jonathan Cohn hinted at another reason: Repeal is likely to divide the business community--a.k.a the GOP base--a significant portion of which prefers the health reform law over the GOP's nonexistent alternative. Today, a piece in Politico highlights a third reason Democrats should be high-fi...

Independent analysis debunks false GOP claims about health reform
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a group with a reputation for producing materials that are balanced, authoritative, and accessible to non-specialists, has released a study of the claims central to the debate on repealing health reform that will reopen in the House this week. The short answer is that the CBO analysis is deemed accurate while Republican claims to the contrary are deemed inaccurate. At issue is the pending bill to Repeal "job killing" Health Care reform, a bill who's ve...

Liberal group ad calls for Republicans to vote against healthcare repeal
The same day that the House of Representatives is set to begin the floor debate on repealing the Obama Administration's Healthcare Reform law, a liberal interest group is airing an ad calling for Americans to rally against Repeal. The ad, created by Americans United for Change, argues that Americans have the same healthcare benefits as members of Congress under the Affordable Care Act, which repeal of the act would take away. "The Affordable Care Act gave your family the same coverage that me...

HHS: 1/2 Have Preexisting Conditions
From a water-carrying Washington Post: With House set to debate healthcare, government finds up to half of Americans under 65 have preexisting conditions By Amy Goldstein Tuesday, January 18, 2011 As many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have medical problems that are red flags for Health Insurers , according to an analysis that marks the government’s first attempt to quantify the number of people at risk of being rejected by Insurance Companies or paying more for coverage. The sec...

How to Repeal Obamacare in the Senate
This week the House will pass a bill to Repeal Obamacare. Congressional experts will argue that the Senate won’t pass a full repeal. They are correct to argue that full Repeal will not be passed by both the House and Senate in the next few months, but they may be wrong that a full Repeal bill will not pass in this Congress within the next two years. If Senators don’t take two procedural steps this week, they will make it virtually impossible to ever get a vote on the House-passed full repe...

Calling the First Meeting of JournoList II
Good morning, fellow JournoListers! Ezra Klein here. Welcome to our new home! Times have been tough since Weigel exposed our e-mail list. We have spent months looking for a new way to distribute talking points, and while some of you still want to go the Twitter route, it’s a little too public for most of us. I think this blog will provide the perfect cover. Nobody reads it any more, so it’s basically as private and secure as our e-mail; perhaps more so. Better still, if we ever are e...

Preview of Boehners New Civility
Out of respect for Tuscon Victims, House Republicans have downgraded their designation of Health Care reform from “job-killing” to “job-crushing” and “job-destroying.” But with this new verbal sensitivity, John Boehner is insisting, “No act of violence is going to keep us from doing our jobs and representing the will of our constituents. The American People have made it clear they want us to focus on cutting spending and removing barriers to job creatio...

Liberal group up with new ad on health care repeal
The political fight over the federal Health Care law is ramping up in Nevada and elsewhere. And, let’s be clear, a political fight is what this is. Republicans, with a fresh majority in the U.S. House, have vowed to Repeal the Affordable Care Act. Of course, even if they could muster the votes to Repeal the law in the House, it wouldn’t make it through the Senate controlled by Democrats or past President Obama’s Veto pen. So think of this as the early days of the 2012 election. To that end

House Dems: Frosh GOP unaware of reform's benefits
House Democrats trying to build support for the Healthcare Reform law say their new Republican colleagues are unaware of the law's benefits. Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Democrat Henry Waxman (Calif.) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) say the GOP's efforts to Repeal the reform law would take consumer protections away from constituents of freshmen GOP congressmen. “Healthcare reform is already delivering important health benefits to your constituents,” Waxman and Pallone wrote Tues...

State of Play
With his powerful Speech in Tucson, his legislative wins in the lame-duck session, and a modest increase in his poll numbers, President Obama certainly is politically stronger than he was in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 election. The conventional wisdom in D.C. already has begun to shift, and with Republicans toning down their Rhetoric because of the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy, the next couple of months may be a period of relative calm for the President. But there is danger ahead if the...

Health care: Democrats for full repeal of this 'malignant tumor' says Rep. King
Using what he terms a "Health Care vernacular" ,  Representative King calls the Obama health care bill a "malignant tumor"  and says the entire bill must be  and will be repealed - with significant  Democrat support. Rep. King feels American rights are diminished by the Federal Government making decisions about King says we must "Repeal it, pull it out by The Roots , so that it doesn't grow back again. " Breaking this down to two primary issues - the philosophical issue of Am...

House kicks off debate over health-care repeal
The House meets Tuesday for its first day of debate on a measure that would Repeal the national Health Care overhaul, following a week during which legislative action came to a standstill following the Tucson shooting tragedy. Debate on the Health Care Repeal bill is expected to begin after the House reconvenes at 2 p.m. The House has set aside seven hours for debate on Tuesday and Wednesday, with a vote on the measure expected to come Wednesday afternoon. The Repeal measure is expected to pass ...

The Real Showdown
Ezra Klein's healthcare preview: In the end, Repeal will pass the House -- likely tomorrow -- and quickly die in the Senate. Then comes the more interesting phase of the fight over health-care reform: The GOP's effort at revision. Republicans, who already know that Repeal will fail, are preparing to begin the longer and more complex campaign to replace, rewrite, or simply undermine various parts of the bill. The relevant committees in the House will try to develop alternatives, w...

House Dems to hold hearing on reform law's protections
As House Republicans plan to Repeal the Healthcare Reform law this week, their Democratic counterparts are staging a hearing on Tuesday where individuals will testify in favor of consumer protections included in the reform law. The House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee is billing the hearing as the only one in which “parents of young Children and young adults, Americans with pre-existing medical conditions, Small Business owners and seniors will have the opportunity to testify abou...

Obamacare Repeal Will Kill People, Shrieks House Dem
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: Our next guest is a Democratic congressman who says repealing the Health Care law would lead to more Americans dying. Apparently, this is why the two parties have a hard time agreeing. Congressman John Garamendi joins us live. You and the other congressman are quite far apart on this. REP. JOHN GARAMENDI, D-CALIF.: Yes, we are. VAN SUSTEREN: Indeed, you are. All right, why do you say repealing it would cause more Americans to die? GARAMENDI: Well, we know that over the ...

Healthcare Law a Jobs Killer?
TM NOTE: Texan4Hillary offers his perspective as a movement progressive Activist, weeknights 6 pm EST. Sorry Mr. Speaker, no. The healthcare law is very flawed. The mandate making Americans buy from a cartel is abhorrent. But it does have some redeeming qualities bundled in it and the Right Wing lies on the law must be debunked. The Right’s effort to Repeal the entire thing is outlandish, especially since the mandate is based on the GOP’s own plan for healthcare coverage back in the...

AP dismantles Republican claim that health reform will cost jobs
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) argued in a recent report that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, enacted last March, will cause "significant Job Losses" in the United States -- up to 650,000, he said -- citing the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The claim is so important to the Republican Party's opposition strategy that they've titled the bill, "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." But as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reported Tuesday for The Associated Press, the ...

Health care repeal vote just GOP's first step (Politico)
The highly anticipated vote Wednesday to Repeal the Health Care reform bill will make headlines and count as a promise kept by House Republicans. But in the end, it’s really just for show. The real work begins immediately afterward, with Republicans using every legislative and political tool at their disposal to wage a two-year campaign against the overhaul. And there won’t be anything subtle about this slow-drip strategy as Republicans aim to erode public confidence in the law a...

Obama sees approval rating surge above 50 percent
President Obama saw his Approval Rating rise above 50 percent in two major polls released this week, the highest it has been in months. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Tuesday shows that 54 percent approve of the president's job performance, matching his highest rating since April 2010 after he signed the Healthcare Reform bill into law. Fifty-three percent said they approve of Obama in a CNN/Opinion Research poll put out Monday. The ABC figure represents a five-point jump from Dec...

Obama overall approval up to 54%, but on issues still mired
Barack Obama got a bounce on overall approval coming off of last week’s high-profile memorial event in Tucson, Arizona, going to his highest job performance rating since last April in the Washington Post/ABC poll — but that was mainly driven from personal approval. Jake Tapper notes, though, that his Job Approval on key issues remains mired at pre-midterm levels.  Plus, it appears that neither The Post nor ABC will release the sample demographics: Aided by his response to the Tuc...

ObamaCare and the Deficit
House Republicans plan to vote tomorrow to Repeal last year’s Health Care overhaul. You can read the text of the Repeal Legislation here. One of the key defenses of the law is that it will reduce the Deficit over the next decade and the decades to come. But the projections employed to make this argument just aren’t believable. Democrats gamed the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring process, producing a score that distorted the long-term numbers and was believable only under a set of fan