Tag: Trumpcare

Our fake president fires remaining members of HIV/AIDS advisory council

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Trumpcare takes over!

❝ Months after a half-dozen members resigned in protest of the Trump administration’s position on health policies, the White House dismissed the rest through a form letter.

The notice “thanked me for my past service and said that my appointment was terminated, effective immediately,” said Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University who works on HIV testing programs. He was appointed to a four-year term in May 2016…

❝ The group is designed to include “doctors, members of industry, members of the community and, very importantly, people living with HIV,” said Scott Schoettes, a lawyer with the LGBT rights organization Lambda Legal. “Without it, you lose the community voice in policymaking.”

❝ Schoettes was among those who quit in June, and he went out with a fiery commentary in Newsweek. “The Trump Administration has no strategy to address the on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic, seeks zero input from experts to formulate HIV policy, and — most concerning — pushes legislation that will harm people living with HIV and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against this disease,” he wrote in the column.

The only community voice Trump listens to is the one that is ready to hand him a blank check. Followed by the ignorant blivets who think they have something to gain from a fake president.

A Good Job to Have in America: CEO of Health Insurer

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❝ Do you ever wonder if you’re in the right industry, but the wrong profession?

Even though many major health insurance companies, like Aetna and UnitedHealth, are continuing to pull out of exchanges, most have seen their stocks nearly double since the Affordable Care Act was signed in 2010. Their executives have also cashed in with annual compensations that have been climbing alongside their companies’ stocks.

❝ Here’s what the high-rollers of health insurance get paid. We looked at publicly-traded companies, which have to reveal executive compensation in annual proxy statements submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Total compensation includes salary, bonus, stock and options (valued at grant date), incentives, and other benefits.

❝ Centene’s Michael Neidorff was the highest paid CEO, making $22 million in 2016. During a three-year period from 2014 through 2016, he made $62 million.

Like other health insurance CEOs, his $1.5 million-dollar salary only represented a small fraction of his income. Most of his compensation came in the form of stock awards — around $13 million worth each year.

Centene’s stock performed the best among these companies, nearly doubling over three years. A booming stock means Neidorff takes home even more than what’s reported to the SEC.

RTFA to see who owns the biggest pies. Ah, compassionate conservatism.

McCain got the applause — Murkowski and Collins did more to defeat Trumpcare!

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Senators Collins and Murkowski with some clown

Early Friday morning, Sen. John McCain showed up to work with cancer and cast the final, and most dramatic vote, to block his party’s effort to repeal Obamacare. He received a round of applause from Democrats, cheers from protesters outside the capitol, and reportedly said of his vote, “I thought it was the right thing to do.”

But two other Republicans were at least equally — and perhaps more — instrumental in killing the latest, and maybe final version of the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare: Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.

And they displayed their concern for working class voters long before McCain’s concern for details.

Collins, the moderate four-term Republican from Maine, was one of the first senators to come out against the earliest Senate version of a repeal-and-replace bill. She hasn’t wavered since. Collins was one of two Republican senators to vote “no” on the motion to move Trumpcare in its multiple and sometimes yet-to-be specified incarnations to the Senate floor for debate…

Collins — along with all other Republican women — were excluded from the working group that designed the initial version of the Senate bill…

The second Republican to oppose the final “skinny repeal” measure was Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who along with Collins was the only other Republican to oppose the motion to proceed and was also threatened by a male colleague from the other chamber in the days leading up to the vote…

Ultimately, McCain swooped in to save the day in dramatic fashion. He deserves the praise he is getting for it. But it was Murkowski and Collins more than anybody that ensured the defeat of Trumpcare, and maybe the survival of Obamacare.

McCain hasn’t spent a day of his life without socialized medicine providing his care. From birth to a military father, he has been covered.