Patriotic American Are Not on The Side of Crazy Conservatives Who Want to Shutdown Government

Patriotic American Are Not on The Side of Crazy Conservatives Who Want to Shutdown Government

As lawmakers attempt to pass a funding bill to keep the government operating past Monday, House Republicans won’t agree to avert a shutdown unless Obamacare is delayed for one year. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has been pushing this anti-Obamacare strategy for weeks, claims this represents a “compromise.”

But the American public doesn’t necessarily agree. Even as the deadline for passing a continuing resolution draws near, the vast majority of Americans still don’t want Congress to delay or defund the health reform law, according to the results from a new tracking poll.

The Morning Consult group finds that just seven percent of voters support delaying or defunding Obamacare. On the other hand, 39 percent of voters want Congress to either let the law take effect or expand the law even further. Another 29 percent think that Congress should work on making improvements to Obamacare, but ultimately leave the law in place. By a two to one margin, the poll’s respondents said “the results from the 2012 presidential election represented a referendum on moving forward with the Affordable Care Act.”

In a memo regarding the new results, the Morning Consult group notes that voters have ultimately been “unmoved by three months of the defund argument.”

Morning Consult’s results track with earlier research that has found that most Americans want to give the health reform law an opportunity to work. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and USA Today found that even when Americans don’t support Obamacare, they still want lawmakers to try to make it work rather than try to undermine it. And Morning Consult’s last tracking poll found that even Republicans don’t favor defunding the health law.

And if the government does end up being forced to shut down because of Republican brinkmanship over Obamacare, the majority of voters say they’ll put “a lot” of the blame on GOP lawmakers in Congress. According to the new poll, nearly eight in 10 independent voters say they’ll blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown.

In an analysis of the new polling results, conservative health policy columnist Avik Roy acknowledges that Americans “don’t view the law in the apocalyptic terms that many conservatives do.” Even though Cruz — who recently conducted a fake filibuster to speak out against Obamacare for over 20 hours — claims that “the American people overwhelmingly reject Obamacare,” Roy notes that doesn’t mean the public actually supports shutting down the government in order to get rid of it.

Only parts of Obamacare or the ACA have been put into effect and millions of Americans are reaping the benefits for their families. Conservatives want to use blackmail and fiscal hostage taking to go against the will of the American people. Conservative do not and never have believed in government by and for the people. It is a freaky political philosophy partly based on mid 20th century fascism and partly on old world rule by monarchs and the elite. It is not an American political party.

Fox News Nutty Conservatives Continue War on Women

Fox News Nutty Conservatives Continue War on Women

Fox News medical contributor Dr. David Samadi falsely claimed that he had only been "complimenting" women on their higher use of preventive health services than men when responding to criticism of his earlier call for higher health insurance premiums for women.

In an August 27 appearance on Fox & Friends, Samadi argued that women should pay more than men for health insurance because "they are using the [health care] system a lot more than we are, so they go through a lot of preventive screening, they give birth, they have the whole mammogram, pap smears." He also cited the fact that "women live longer" and that "women have the breasts, they have the ovaries, they have the uterus," while men "only have the prostate," as evidence for why women should pay more for insurance. After his appearance, Samadi was intensely criticized for his comments.

A week later, on the September 3 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade invited Samadi "to clear up" his previous statements about the difference in medical costs between men and women. Samadi misleadingly characterized his earlier comments as a "compliment" to women:  

    SAMADI: One of the things I said is women are excellent -- and this was a compliment to them. Is that they are very proactive and they go get screened. In my practice it's the women that bring men to our practice because they just -- men don't go get checked. So just like the mammogram, when U.S. task force said women, we don't want you to get mammograms, they went after, they fought for it, and they went ahead with mammograms. With men, when they said no PSAs, everybody said OK. Sound good to me, I'm gonna go watch my sports.

Samadi's explanation of his August 27 comments whitewashes his more outlandish points. Marie Claire blogger Maura Brannigan noted the ridiculousness of Samadi's decision to count the number of diagnosable body parts in determining appropriate health coverage costs, and Slate's Amanda Marcotte highlighted Samadi's evidence-free defense of his claim that women deserve to pay more for childbirth:

    As Gretchen Carlson couldn't help but point out in reference to childbirth costs, starting a pregnancy takes two people, but bringing it to fruition only takes one. Samadi didn't really have a good rejoinder to that. "Not always," he said, creating one of those situations where you really wish a follow-up question was asked. Was he suggesting that the ridiculously small number of pregnancies created in single or lesbian women by sperm donors was justification enough to spare men the responsibility of sharing childbirth costs?

Experts have previously noted that women face discrimination in purchasing health insurance, and will continue to until the Affordable Care Act's provision banning the practice known as "gender rating" comes into effect in January, 2014. As the National Women's Law Center (NWLC) has noted, women "are charged more for health coverage simply because they are women." According to the NWLC, in the individual market, 92 percent of the best-selling healthcare plans charge different rates for men and women of the same age, and as a result, women pay an overall $1 billion more per year. This difference holds true even of plans that do not cover gender-specific care for women, like maternity care. From the NWLC:

    Furthermore, our research shows a wide variation in the differences women are charged both within and across states--even with maternity care excluded. For example, one plan examined in Arkansas charges 25-year-old women 81% more than men for coverage while a similar plan in the same state only charges women 10% more for coverage than men. Neither plan covers maternity care. It's hard to justify or explain that variation.

Conservatives continue to paint women as either being too concerned about preventative medicine or the gender that requires too much medical maintenance. That is even though there is no evidence to support any of their lame brain theories. Conservatives feel like if they sit around and jawbone an issue for a while they have come to an informed opinion. Which is like a physicist looking at the stars for a hour or so and claiming to have all the answers about the galaxy we live in, no empirical studies required.