The Senate plans to take up a House-passed budget for 2012 that would do away with Medicare and Medicaid as they are known today and give $1 trillion in new tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and profitable corporations. Sen. Bernie Sanders joined a press conference in the Capitol on Tuesday that focused on Medicaid. He called the idea of slashing health care coverage "a death sentence for God knows how many thousands of Americans."
The House-passed budget would dramatically restructure Medicaid by converting it to a block grant. It also would sharply cut the program's funding. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Republican budget proposal would cut current federal funding levels by one-third by 2022. It would be half of what it is today as of 2030.
At the press conference, Sanders cited a Harvard University study in 2009 that found 45,000 Americans die each year because they don't get to a doctor or hospital on time because they lack health insurance coverage. Slashing Medicaid would make matters worse at a time when Medicaid is the only way tens of millions of low-income children, pregnant women, the elderly and disabled get access to the basic healthcare they need.
Medicaid is critical to millions of pregnant women across the country. Medicaid covers 42 percent of births nationally, and in 2009, covered 44 percent of the births in Vermont. Without this coverage and its cost-sharing protections, women who have low incomes would delay or forego the care that is vital to ensuring a healthy pregnancy and reducing costly complications like pre-term births.
Medicaid also is a lifeline to elderly and disabled Americans and their families. Many individuals with modest incomes exhaust all of their own resources before turning to Medicaid as a last resort to help meet their long-term care needs. For elderly and disabled Americans who are poor to begin with, Medicaid is the only option. Long-term care services provided to older adults and people with disabilities account for two-thirds of all Medicaid spending, and Medicaid pays for about 62 percent of long-term care in the nation.
You see what the GOP under Ryan and McConnell were trying to do as those negotiations took place last year. The same party that is refusing to extend Medicaid or apply the ACA is McConnnell's.
Just because he can kill with a pen, doesn't reduce the lethality of what they are doing. They did not get their way. The ACA will stop a great deal of mischief. Obama fought to make sure it didn't happen. But Mitch has blood on his hands already and doesn't care. So I find it hard to find sympathy for the man. He shoild go home either to Kentucky or maybe China:
How Mitch McConnell became very rich ...Somehow, some way, McConnell got much richer in 2008, getting at least $5M from somebody.
That somebody was his second wife's father, who made his fortune in shipping Chinese-made goods to the USA.
Elaine Chao married McConnell in 1993, and was George W. Bush's anti- Labor Secretary for the full eight years.
According to Laura Flanders, her father, James Chao:
had the luck not only to attend one of his country's finest universities with Jiang Zemin, the future leader of the People's Republic, but also to fall in with the immensely powerful Shanghai-born family the Tungs, who shifted their operations to Taiwan for a time.
The Tung dynasty is powerful in Chinese politics and business to this day. Hong Kong's first chief executive after reunification with mainland China was Tung Chee Hwa, the first child of the magnate Tung Chao Yung, in whose Maritime Trust company James Chao got his start. James Chao married into another powerful family: the Hsus. His wife's family would later operate a shipping empire in Hong Kong.
So Mitch McConnell has moved from the upper-middle class of a lifelong government employee into the real upper class ($20M or so net worth) of someone who married a woman with a rich father.
Who just happened to become rich from his connections with the rulers of communist China.
Villagers would say that this is old news, "free" trade is great for everybody, we like Mitch and Elaine, and want him to return our calls, etc.
So they have not reported on the source of McConnell's mega-wealth (relative to the rest of us), and how that source has presumably, for 20 years or so, affected McConnell's positions on "free" trade and its devastating impact on millions of Americans who used to have decent manufacturing jobs.
McConnell and his wife are cheap-labor Republicans who hate the idea of American factory workers making more than $15 an hour.
Because that's what their benefactors want them to do.
But this is just about Mitch. Can you imagine how Biden and Obama feel, having to share airspace with Ryan and McConnell, such venal people on a daily basis?
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