Is kicking senior citizens out of nursing homes good politics? That’s a question GOP asking itself these days. One of many questions related to the politics of health care. Although not many are asking it since the public largely has no idea the question is being asked at all as recent polls show. With the Senate’s version of ‘Trumpcare’ finally released to the public, we’re now learning that, yes, the GOP appears to think kicking seniors out their nursing homes is good politics. Because transferring Medicaid costs to states and individuals has been a key GOP goal of Trumpcare’s congressional authors the entire time and nursing homes are paid for by Medicaid for the vast majority of people. So in addition to the many profound moral questions raised by the GOP’s health care ‘reform’ plans, a growing number of profound political questions are being raised the more we learn about Trumpcare as it takes form. Including whether or not putting nursing home coverage on a fiscal death spiral makes for good politics. Granny would probably say ‘no’, but she’s got competition.
Change is coming to Washington DC. Mostly horrible changes. But as we’ll see in this post, there is one very significant and positive change coming as a consequence of the unified GOP control of the White House and Congress: GOP is actually going to start getting the blame it deserves for all the damage its pro-oligarch/anti-everyone-else agenda routinely inflicts upon the American people. Politics can be frustrating for a myriad of reasons, but one of the biggest sources of frustration is the cloud of perpetual obfuscation and confusion that tends to permeate the political discourse and collective understanding of what’s actually happening, why it’s happening, and who should be rewarded or blamed for it. But for the next couple of years, at a minimum, it’s going to be very clear who to blame for the damage DC is about to unleash, and it’s not just going to be Donald Trump. And when it comes to health care “reform” (privatization) that the GOP is about to impose upon the populace, that blame is about to get dangerously diffusive for state legislatures and governorships because the Health Care Austerity Hot Potato is about to get tossed in their laps over and over. Indefinitely. And since the GOP controls almost all state legislatures and governorships at the moment they won’t be able to prevent themselves from slashing these programs. So with the coming block granting of first Medicaid and then Medicare (or maybe both together), the politics of health care is about to get weird. And tragic because the GOP won’t be able to help itself with all the austerity
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