I have asthma. Asthma is a chronic yet easily managed disease. I have been taking the same medications for years to control my symptoms. I have not needed to see a pulmonologist (asthma doctor) for the past several years. I saw one recently, primarily because my health insurance company is not covering my medications any longer. These are medications they saw fit to cover last year and the year before and the year before that.
There is a myth in politics that elections are won and lost in the middle. The premise is that "independent" voters support tenets of both major political parties and candidates must craft their message to attract a majority of these "moderates." Despite the fact that nearly twice as many Americans self-identify as conservative as compared to liberal, conservatives are often referred to as "extremists," or worse.
President Obama: "I am accused of a lot of things but I don't think I am stupid enough to go around saying this is gonna be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn't gonna work." What if companies competed to sell health insurance on functioning websites like Amazon or Travelocity?
During a recent conference call with bloggers to promote his bill to allow Americans to keep their current health insurance, Senator Ron Johnson told the story of a woman who is battling lung cancer and her husband who is recovering from prostate cancer. Both are enrollees in the soon to be extinct Wisconsin high risk insurance pool for patients with pre-existing conditions.
Remember when President Obama said "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan" but did not really mean it? Senator Ron Johnson thinks President Obama should keep his word and has introduced legislation to ensure that Americans can in fact keep their plans.
Did House Republicans thank him? Not exactly. In a conference call with bloggers earlier today, House Republican Conference members Sean Duffy, Tom Reed and Rodney Davis 'acknowledged defeat' in the effort to defund Obamacare instead setting their sights on an effort to delay the implementation of Obamacare, an effort championed by House Republican Conference chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rogers.
In a follow-up conference call earlier today, Senator Ted Cruz reminded bloggers and reporters that the fight to defund Obamacare has always been a multistage process. Stage one began in July and August, energizing and mobilizing the grassroots conservative base. Stage two happened when the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the continuing resolution funding the government but defunding Obamacare. Stage three requires uniting senate Republicans before beginning to pick off red state Democrats.