When Republicans Repeal Affordable Healthcare

What happens when the Republican Party repeals the Affordable Care Act without enacting any kind of replacement? According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Republican-backed Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015 — which passed a Senate vote in late 2015 but died due to President Obama’s veto — would drastically slash the number of Americans who have health insurance, while at the same time ensuring higher premiums and chaos in the insurance market.

Here are the CBO’s five biggest reasons the GOP’s repeal plan is a disaster for American health care:

1. 18 million Americans would lose their insurance in the span of a year. Under the bill passed by Republicans — which would keep insurance market reforms in place but would gut both the Medicaid expansion and subsidies for people to buy private insurance — an estimated 18 million people would lose their health insurance within just one year.
2. An additional 9 million would lose their insurance shortly after the first year of repeal. Once the elimination of both subsidies and expanded Medicaid happen, the number of people who lose their insurance thanks to the legislation will total 27 million. Over the long run, the CBO projects that the number of uninsured in the U.S. would increase by 32 million by 2026 over what it would have been without repealing the ACA.
3. Premiums on the individual market would skyrocket by 20% to 25% relative to where they’d be without repeal within a year. In part because the GOP plan still bars insurers from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions, insurance premiums on the individual market would increase by as much as 25% within a year of Obamacare repeal, as insurers would scramble to raise prices to cover the costs of insuring more sick people.
4. Premiums would then go up by 50% after the GOP eliminates the Medicaid expansion and private insurance subsidies. Once people who buy insurance individually lose access to subsidies to help them offset the costs, insurers will raise prices even higher — in fact, the CBO estimates that “premiums would about double by 2026” under the GOP’s bill.
5. Half the country would be stuck in an area where no insurers would offer them non-group coverage. As if the projected price increases for individual market buyers weren’t bad enough, the CBO also says that many insurers will simply pull out of individual markets in many places, as “about half of the nation’s population lives in areas that would have no insurer participating in the nongroup market in the first year after the repeal of the marketplace subsidies took place.”

Repealing Obamacare is a huge tax cut for the rich. This did not play a major overt public role in the 2009-’10 debate about the law, but the Affordable Care Act’s financing rests on a remarkably progressive base. That means, as the Tax Policy Center has shown, repealing it would shower money on a remarkably small number of remarkably wealthy Americans. Read more about the GOP's tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent:

• Repealing Obamacare is a huge tax cut for the rich
• What Working Class Americans Lose When Trump Scraps Obamacare

Democratic Party Base Is Cell Phone Only

The most recent numbers on US wireless (cell phone) only households released in December show the inexorable rise of households without any landline telephone. The new report discloses that as of the first half of 2016, 49.3 percent of all U.S. households have no landline phone, an increase of 2 percent over the previous year, which is a statistically significant difference within this very large study. At 59.2 percent in 2015, the latest year individual state statistics are available, Texas has the highest cell phone only adoption rate of all 50 states.

Further, among households with both landline and cellular telephones, 16.3 percent received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones. Combined, 65.9 percent of American households are only or almost only reachable by calling a household member using their mobile cell phone number. At 75.8 percent, Texas has the highest prevalence of adults in wireless-only (59.2%) and wireless-mostly (16.6%) homes.

The Fight For DNC Chair

When they meet in late February, the 400-plus members of the Democratic National Committee will elect a new chair. They will signal whether or not the party will boldly begin to transform itself back into the party of New Deals and Great Societies sought by the new generation of Democrats. Those 400-plus voting members of the DNC must take stock of the need to strike a bold new direction to reverse the party's losses.

Democrats lost another net 43 seats in legislatures across the country in 2016, after previously losing 910 seats during Obama's administration. Republicans added to their historic 2014 gains in the nation’s state legislatures with the addition of five state House chambers and two state Senate chambers in 2016.

Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Republicans hold more total state legislative seats in the nation, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920. Democrats now have total control of just 13 state legislatures.

Republicans gained 2 more states' governorships in 2016, after already gaining 12 over the last 8 years, increasing its total to 33, a record high last seen in 1922. Democrats had also lost 69 US House seats and 13 US Senate seats since 2009 and barely managed to stem further losses in 2016.

All that after Democrats had a 58-seat majority in the Senate, a 256 seat majority in the House, and held 28 governorships when Barack Obama took office in 2009. And Democrats face a more challenging election map in 2018 than they faced in 2016. Survival of the Democratic Party is literally on the line.

But the race for DNC chair has become a power struggle between Centrist and Progressive factions of the Democratic Party.

Climate Deniers In Control Of U.S. Government

2016 will officially be the hottest year on the books in more than 120 years of record keeping by U.S. agencies. It will be the third straight record-setting year — and of the 17 hottest years, 16 have been this century — a clear sign of the human-caused rise in global temperatures caused by the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases over the past century.

From January to December, 2016 was marked by record-breaking high temperatures worldwide. Countries like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Botswana, India, Niger and Iraq experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded. And heat waves, many of them deadly, charred parts of Britain, France, South Africa, the U.S. and regions like Southeast Asia.

• 2016 in Texas: 3rd warmest year, a slew of weather and climate disasters

The poles were not spared from the heat. In November, for instance, sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic reached record lows. Scientists called it an “almost unprecedented” event at the time.

In the U.S., high temperatures were a feature throughout the year. Every month in 2016 had significantly more record high temperatures than record lows, according to a Climate Central report this week.

“The blistering pace of record-high temperatures across the country is the clearest sign of 2016’s extreme heat. Record-daily highs outpaced record-daily lows by 5.7-to-1 in 2016,” the nonprofit news organization wrote, citing preliminary data from the National Centers for Environmental Information. “That’s the largest ratio in 95 years of record keeping. Put another way, 85 percent of extreme temperature records set in 2016 were of the hot variety.”

The world is already more than halfway down the road to surpassing the Paris climate pact goal to limit warming to less than 2°C (3.6°F) by 2100

For the year-to-date, 2016 is 1.69°F (0.94°C) above the 20th century average, according to NOAA, and 1.84°F (1.02°C) above the 1951-1980 average according to NASA. Averaging NASA and NOAA’s data, 2016’s temperature through November is 1.23°C (2.21°F) above the average from 1881-1910. (One reason NOAA’s global temperature for November may have been lower than NASA’s is that it doesn’t incorporate Arctic temperatures.)

One major area of warmth during both November and the year as a whole was the Arctic. During November, the Arctic saw an almost unprecedented sea ice retreat, capping off a year that has shocked even seasoned Arctic researchers.

The winter sea ice peak was the lowest on record (beating out 2015) and the summer minimum was the second lowest. Air temperatures in the region have continually been above average by double digits. Another hotspot for November was North America; the contiguous U.S. is poised to have its second-hottest year on record.

These milestones have climate scientists and policymakers concerned as President-elect Trump fills his cabinet with policy makers who reject the established science of climate change. Only one major political party in the world denies climate change, and it's now in total control of the most important political body in the world, the US federal government.