I am not alone in opposing Trumpcare/Obamacare Lite/Obamacare 2.0:@realDonaldTrump @RandPaul Sorry Mr. Trump, but you need to go with Rand on this. He's a doctor, you aren't.— Ed McGonigal (@1EMcGon1) March 8, 2017
CNN:
The AARP issued a statement on Tuesday declaring its opposition to the health care bill touted by GOP leadership this week.Actually, CNN should revisit that statement: AARP claims to represent "millions of seniors across the country". No firm connection between the anomalous "millions of seniors" and AARP has ever been established.
The letter -- from one of the most influential groups in domestic policy -- is the latest blow for a bill that has already seen opposition from many conservative leaders, media organizations and interest groups.
"This bill would weaken Medicare's fiscal sustainability, dramatically increase health care costs for Americans aged 50-64 and put at risk the health care of millions of children and adults with disabilities, and poor seniors who depend on the Medicaid program for long-term services and supports and other benefits," said the letter, signed by Joyce A. Rogers, a senior vice president at AARP.
The group represents millions of seniors across the country and has long opposed any policy it perceives as weakening Medicare, a government health care program exclusively available to the nation's elderly.
That said, AARP is clearly an important lobbying organization, and their lack of support will hurt the bill's chances.
However, their claim that the bill "would weaken Medicare's fiscal sustainability" is kind of silly, since medicare isn't fiscally sustainable in the long term anyhow. To use a medical metaphor, that comes down to the difference between being on life support, versus pulling the plug.
Regardless, there are still plenty of others opposing the bill:
The Week:
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan finally introduced his proposed replacement for ObamaCare late Monday. It did not go well.As the article goes on to speculate, Paul Ryan knows this, and it is why he proposed such a losing bill in the first place: He wants it to lose. He is playing politics, and he knows it is better for the GOP to pass nothing than to replace Obamacare.
Democrats were predictably appalled that the GOP proposal, called the American Health Care Act, would essentially take away health care from millions of people, many of them poor, in order to pay for upper-class tax cuts. Moderate Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) summed up the feelings of the Democratic caucus when he declared that the bill's savage cuts to Medicaid were a "disgrace to our nation" and that "I will fight it with everything I have."
But there was never a chance that Democrats would support any major Republican changes to the Affordable Care Act. So what's really interesting is the amount of opposition that the bill has instantly generated among conservatives.
If Democrats see taking away poor people's health care to pay for things like tax breaks for health insurance CEOs as cruel, the American right sees it as not cruel enough. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asserted that the bill was "dead on arrival." The far-right Freedom Caucus in the House was no more enthusiastic. Conservative health policy wonks attacked the bill. And major conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Club For Growth, FreedomWorks, and the CATO Institute immediately came out swinging against "RINOCare."
In other news...
Washington Post:
A vast portion of the CIA’s computer hacking arsenal appeared to have been exposed Tuesday by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which posted thousands of files revealing secret cyber-tools used by the agency to convert cellphones, televisions and other ordinary devices into implements of espionage.While this only reveals what we already suspected, it also shows how the government is having a more difficult time keeping its secrets. Fortunately, as the government becomes more complex, it also becomes more unintentionally transparent. It is harder to hide secrets when you have so many of them.
The trove appeared to lay bare the design and capabilities of some of the U.S. intelligence community’s most closely guarded cyberweapons, a breach that is likely to cause immediate damage to the CIA’s efforts to gather intelligence overseas and place new strain on the U.S. government’s relationship with Silicon Valley giants including Apple and Google.
WikiLeaks, which claimed to have gotten the files from a current or former CIA contractor, touted the trove as comparable in scale and significance to the collection of National Security Agency documents exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
But while the Snowden files revealed massive surveillance programs that gathered data on millions of Americans, the CIA documents posted so far by WikiLeaks appear mainly to unmask hacking methods that many experts already assumed the agency had developed.
U.S. intelligence officials and experts said details contained in the newly released documents suggest that they are legitimate, although that could not be independently verified, raising new worries about the U.S. government’s ability to safeguard its secrets in an era of cascading leaks of classified data.
Finally, in a bit of fun news:
Mediaite:
Harvard University featured two of their most famous dropouts — Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — in a new YouTube video on Tuesday that previewed the Facebook CEO’s upcoming commencement address at the Ivy League school.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: They know we didn’t actually graduate, right?
BILL GATES: Oh, that is the best part! They actually give you a degree!
ZUCKERBERG: You don’t even have to go to class?
GATES: No, no! You just put that degree on your resume, and it looks great!
ZUCKERBERG: Can you help me figure out what I’m going to say?
GATES: Yeah! We should work on it together. Let’s go get some more snacks.
ZUCKERBERG: All right. So you get to wear the hat and everything?
GATES: Yeah, you bet! Don’t wear anything underneath. (Zuckerberg laughs)
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