Sen. Rand Paul: ACA replacement is in ‘pre-negotiation’ stage

“I guess I would say, ‘Where are you for the people who need healthcare?’ I’m thinking about my mom and some of my students who are graduating and going out in the world who don’t have employee sponsored jobs right away”. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “nobody will be worse off financially” under the Republican replacement plan.

According to the AARP, the Ryan plan to repeal Obamacare would dramatically increase healthcare costs for seniors. “Negotiates a deal and they pass it”, one Republican lobbyist speculated to Mike Allen, attempting some game theory. That’s why the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and AARP have already come out in opposition.

So how does the flat-tax credit help struggling Americans compared to Obama’s Affordable Care Act?

Breitbart, which was previously run by current White House strategist Steve Bannon, has reserved most of its negative coverage on the bill for Ryan.

Fewer people may be covered, a stoic Ryan said over the weekend on CBS’ “Face the Nation”, “because this isn’t a government mandate”. Another unloved insurance regime, that’s what, which will need its own painful rescuing soon enough.

At the time of the phone call, Trump was under fire for making sexist remarks about women in between shoots during an Access Hollywood taping. And Ryan, of course, will be apoplectic. This is the first big test of his presidency.

Ryan and other Republicans say they’re committed.

The individual mandate exists to prevent what health policy experts call a “death spiral”, where insurance premiums climb asymptotically as the cost of insuring people becomes more and more expensive. Currently, Medicaid is an “entitlement”, which means that the federal government pays for the medically-appropriate health care of all eligible recipients. Don’t vote for this bill just to see it die in the Senate.

Health care reform? Hardly.

On an instinctual level, it’s hard not to have the feeling that Trump intuits all this.

When Obamacare was being crafted, Republicans insisted on process, precedent and prudence. Spokespeople for Ryan said when the speaker schedules a town hall that he will attend, it will be posted on his website.

“Look, you guys know I have real concerns with our nominee”, Ryan said on the call. There is simply no way that this administration, with its competing fiefdoms, is fully on board with the Ryan plan.

Ryan made good on his promise to not campaign for Trump. We said, this is what the auto is going to look like.

LIASSON: That’s right. They are. We stopped him then. That sounds mighty generous but, in reality, it is only another example of Ryan’s remarkable ability to completely disregard anything that interferes with the grim reaper sensibilities he honed while he was a rapt devotee of the economic fiction that Ayn Rand expounded upon in her doorstop novels. Cobble together a new one.