Trump Wants To Destroy Your Financial Future
Sure, Biden has restored the economy and expanded access to healthcare, but Trump is more exciting, so let's roll the dice on the worst candidate in history!
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – This week, Donald Trump renewed his pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act should enough American voters decide they’re done with this whole democracy thing. He infamously attempted to do it a few times during his horrendous presidency and completely failed to do so, despite having full control over both chambers of Congress.
It turns out, there were a few Republicans who were hesitant to strip millions upon millions of Americans of their health insurance simply because Donald can’t stand anything with the name “Obama” attached to it. Frankly, I was surprised the ACA managed to survive given the avalanche of disinformation about the law. In addition to requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions – and at the same rates as healthier people – the ACA also:
Provides free preventive care
Ends lifetime and yearly dollar limits on coverage of essential health benefits
Helps you understand the coverage you’re getting
Holds insurance companies accountable for rate increases
Makes it illegal for health insurance companies to cancel your health insurance just because you get sick
Protects your choice of doctors
Protects you from employer retaliation
Allows adult children to remain on their parent’s insurance until age 26.
These guaranteed benefits aren’t just for Americans who buy coverage through the ACA marketplaces, the benefits apply to everyone with health insurance, including employer-based insurance policies. The press does a horrible job informing voters of this fact, so getting the word out is entirely up to us.
By the way, if Trump repeals the ACA, he won’t replace it with a goddamn thing. He’s had six years to announce a plan and…nothing. Anyone who takes his word for it is as dense as they are gullible.
Either way, he’ll be doing a lot more than just stripping millions of people with pre-existing conditions of their healthcare, he’ll be making your insurance a lot worse, too, returning us all to the nightmarish status of health insurance circa pre-2009. That means your insurance company can kick you to the curb as soon as you’re sick or injured. That means your insurance company can charge you punitively expensive premiums for the same or worse coverage than you had before. That means your insurance company can charge – without limits – whatever co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses it chooses. That means any transition to Medicare-For-All using the ACA is dead for at least another generation. In other words, if Trump gets the chance to do this because gas is $3, there’s a solid chance you could end up going bankrupt due to healthcare costs – or worse.
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This is just one of many reasons why voting for Trump or a third party candidate – because of 3.2 percent inflation or any other pathetic excuse – is ludicrous and selfish, dooming millions to death and bankruptcy. So, sure, you might get your revenge against Joe Biden for bread that’s 20 cents more than it was last year, but there’s a solid chance you’ll lose everything if you get sick or injured. At the very mildest, you’ll pay a lot more for health insurance and that’s a fact.
And while we’re here, have I mentioned Trump’s record on the economy? In case you forgot, it sucked despite his unsubstantiated, lie-filled brags. There was a manufacturing recession prior to COVID and there was a severely deep recession in 2020 due in large part to his incompetent response to the pandemic.
Trump’s economy lost a net total of 2.9 million jobs and his unemployment rate increased to 6.3 percent. Joe Biden, on the other hand, has presided over a record 14 million new jobs and 3.9 percent unemployment – with more jobs created in 2021 than any other single year on record. Say nothing of the fact that every Republican president since Taft either partially or fully presided over recessions, with Bush 43, Hoover, and Trump presiding over painfully deep ones. The last three Democratic presidents, including Biden, have presided over reductions in the federal budget deficit, while the last four Republican presidents presided over significant increases in the budget deficit.
Almost forgot to mention that the Biden economy grew by a substantial 5.2 percent in the third quarter of this year, inflation has fallen from nine percent to three percent and continues to drop.
Too many voters are responding to polls based on lies from Republicans and both-sides gibberish from the legacy news media, and not based on the reality of what’s happening, so the upshot here is we all need to dedicate the next year to ballyhooing the success of the Biden economy. It’s not hard but the existence of democracy depends on it.
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Asking Hard Questions
The radical right and the radical left never want to look in the mirror.
by Ben Cohen
Part of maturing as a person is recognizing your own fallibility. Instead of good and bad, you see nuance and complexity. You become less judgmental of others because you can see your own flaws and idiosyncrasies. For the politically active, this maturation is reflected in the moderation of one’s beliefs. You become less strident, less ideological, and more able to entertain ideas you disagree with.
Whenever I see political ideologues over a certain age, I can’t help but wonder about their personal lives. If they hold the same beliefs in their forties that they did in their twenties, there’s a good chance they haven’t matured very much. Anecdotally, I can confirm that every hardcore left wing activist I knew in college still ranting about “the military industrial complex” have what you might call “complicated” personal lives (this isn’t to say that the military industrial complex isn’t a problem — although not as much many on the left believe it is). Part of this, I believe, has to do with an inability to take responsibility for one’s actions.
Taking responsibility
The current theology of militant identity politics currently dominating college campuses and Gen Z social media circles is a perfect example of this…
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Thank you to for spotlighting the Affordable Care Act which too few Americans know about.
"But but but healthcare costs are still rising" yes they are and its the the singular thing the ACA doesn't fully address because we still have a for profit healthcare system, unlike every other civilized and semi civilized third world shithole on the planet. Makes you wonder who is living in a shithole third world country. "But but but people had to switch doctors." Yeah the main stream media worked really hard to find those people AND singularly failed to mention it happened pre ACA all the time as well. Well not really, I went and did the research years ago, pre ACA people had to switch doctors falling out of their network at a rate of under 5%. Guess what the switch rate was under the ACA?