Common Sense For New Hampshire

From the Belmar Democrats Facebook page:

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Yesterday at 8:00am ·
Connecting National Issues with Local Politics
Opinion by John Hutchinson, Belmar Dems Chair

Complicit com·plic·it
kəmˈplisit/
adj associated with unethical activity (Right off the bat I dislike any column that begins with the definition and pronunciation of a common word. It’s very condescending and a cheap way to try to be dramatic. What’s worse is that he considers having a different policy perspective from his to be unethical, but has nothing to say about the real ethics problems in this administration that have given me so much to write about over the years.)

A new effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as “ObamaCare,” is under way in Washington DC this week! (!?) Republicans, after more than 60 failed attempts to kill the ACA during the Obama Administration and another failed attempt just a month ago, are once again trying to come up with a plan to “repeal and replace.” But, what does this latest plan, and other Republican initiatives, have to do with you and with local politics and local elections?

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Just a Little Background

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The first attempt of the new Trump Administration in March to “repeal and replace” the ACA was meeting resistance from Trump’s own Republican Party, so the evening before the scheduled vote by Congress, a revision to the bill was floated to members. This revision would have repealed the requirement that health insurance plans cover a core set of essential health benefits, such as:

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hospitalizations
maternity care (Even for people that have a 0% chance of ever becoming pregnant.)
prescription drugs
mental health (Would this include Trump derangement syndrome?)
substance use disorder treatment (What if I don’t feel the need to insure myself against substance abuse or perhaps even some other things? Why would the President, the Congress or John Hutchinson know better than me what kind of health insurance I should have?)

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That means that, although you had purchased insurance, it wouldn’t necessarily cover any of the list above. Insurers could sell you insurance without covering these things, the very things you buy insurance to cover, like hospital stays! (Hey John, I think if people are capable of reading your article, they’re capable of reading an insurance policy.) The bill was pulled without a vote because about 40 Congressional Republicans didn’t think this bill was harsh enough. In other words, it didn’t hurt enough people. (I guess FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ and Jimmy Carter all were unethical and wanted to hurt people because none of them ever proposed these kinds of mandates for health insurance.)

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Well… they’re at it again. Republicans are working on a plan that would allow insurers to not cover these things (in other words, allow people not to buy them if they don’t want them) or charge you a “surcharge” if you have a pre-existing condition. (BTW, I asked the head of a human resources dept about that and she said if you switch jobs and join a new employer’s plan you’re fully covered as part of the group regardless of any health issues you may have. The real problem is people who don’t have insurance and then go to buy it once they get sick. Now I believe that as a society we should help pay for health care for people who can’t afford it, but the obligation should not be put on health care providers any more than the obligation to feed the hungry should be put on supermarket operators.) The ACA now prohibits insurers from charging higher premiums based on factors like health status, gender, or pre-existing conditions. (Did you know that men pay more for car insurance than women? Or that young people pay more than older people? Or that people who live in cities pay more than people who live in the suburbs? Should any of that be allowed? Also drivers with a bad record pay a lot more for insurance. Isn’t that sort of a pre-existing condition?) This new law would enable insurers to charge extra (a surcharge) for pre-existing conditions (pregnancy is a pre-existing condition!). (So you get pregnant, buy maternity insurance, have the insurance company pay all your bills, an amount multiple times higher than your premiums, have your baby and then drop your insurance.) Virtually everyone over the age of 50 has pre-existing conditions, such as high blood pressure. (I guess if Trump had his way, nobody would ever be treated for high blood pressure.)

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The Center for American Progress (a totally unbiased source) estimates that these surcharges would be “$4,270 for asthma, $17,060 for pregnancy, $26,180 for rheumatoid arthritis, and $140,510 for metastatic cancer.” In other words, if you want to buy insurance, your annual cost would be the cost for a healthy person (somewhere north of $4,000) PLUS the surcharge for your pre-existing condition. (That’s why you are supposed to buy insurance BEFORE you get sick.) That’s not a pretty prospect. Without the mandate to buy insurance, insurers can’t spread the cost of serious conditions over a large population, so they would have to recover their costs from the people who are ill with that condition. (So they force young people, who don’t have a lot of money to spare, to buy insurance they don’t need in order to to pay for the health care of older people who should have bought health insurance but didn’t.) That affects many of us in Belmar.

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What Does That Have To Do With Belmar Politics?

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This new proposed “repeal and replace” bill is solely owned by the Republican Party. In other words, ALL Republican office holders, and those running for office under the Republican Party umbrella, own this draconian bill. (You know I blame the Belmar Democrats for a lot of things but I never blamed them for Obamacare. I’ll add that to the list.) And, they own all of the other Republican Party initiatives, such as voter suppression, (Should votes that are illegally cast be suppressed? Just wondering.) removing environmental regulations that have protected our air and water, (I guess there’s no such thing as a bad or ineffective regulation.) frightfully disjointed foreign policies, (American foreign policy has been a disaster for the past one hundred years. My foreign policy would be the same as my domestic policy: stop telling everybody what to do.) and so very much more.

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Those of you who are a bit older like me, and have lived in Belmar for awhile, might remember when Shark River wasn’t the kind of place you would want your kids getting near, (It was that way even in 2016) or when the sand along Belmar beach had the most disgusting and dangerous stuff washing up. (Still does) Federal regulations have an impact on us all, especially those of us who live at the New Jersey shore where these regulations have had a huge impact. The environmental regulations that have helped to clean up the river and ocean are being systematically dismantled by Republicans. (Any time anyone looks critically at any environmental regulation it means they want to destroy the planet.)

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Just imagine if we return to a polluted Shark River; or if the ocean along the New Jersey shore returns to the days before strong environmental protection regulations. Will boaters and fishermen (and women!) keep coming to our marina? (If they do, good luck trying to find a place to park.) Will beachgoers still flock to our sandy beaches? (Beaches are too crowded now anyway. I don’t even like going there anymore.) The Republicans want to take us back to the days before the EPA helped clean up the waters surrounding Belmar, and that will have a devastating impact on our local economy, and yes, on your taxes and your health. Make no mistake, this is what the Republican cuts to the EPA, and the dismantling of environmental regulations, will do. (Maybe you should never vote for a Democrat because it was Richard Nixon, a Republican, who founded the EPA.)

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One other example, among many, is the Republican proposal to dismantle the banking regulations that were put into place after the 2008 financial meltdown. Many of us lost a lot of our retirement when banks folded and the Dow plunged to around 6000, and not a few people lost their homes and all of their retirement nest egg. Removing these regulations puts us right back to the conditions that brought us that financial meltdown in the first place. Want to chance it again? (Those regulations made the too big to fail banks even bigger and drove small banks out of business. Everything is getting worse, they’re making all the same mistakes they made last time, and the next bust…which Trump is powerless to stop…is coming soon. Until we reverse course on all the public debt, private debt, money printing, artificially low interest rates and military interventions all around the globe the American economy will never be healthy.) 

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So, voting for someone who has an “R” next to their name, whether for national, state, county or local office, is voting for someone who owns the policies and initiatives of their party. (You know there ARE local issues, John, that have nothing to do with Trump or the national Republicans. Whatever you might think of Trump or the national Republicans, Belmar’s Democrats have serous problems. They’ve given us tens of millions of additional debt. Public corruption has costed us hundreds of thousands of dollars in judgements and legal expenses and the costs could ultimately be in the tens of millions. Crime and hooliganism is a big problem here. None of that should be considered when voting for our local officials?) If someone tells me that they are a Republican but disagree with these policies, when these policies are central to the party as it exists today, then they are either grossly confused or they are pulling my chain, neither of which bodes well for an elected official that I could support. In other words, they are either actively supportive of these policies, or they are passively complicit with these policies. (Maybe we should just make it illegal to be a Republican.)

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Giving Republicans the power to make decisions critical to our community, our county, and our state gives them the power to roll back progress in the healthcare we deserve, the clean water we drink and on which our community depends, the air we breathe, and the financial security of our homes and our retirement nest-eggs. This is not empty rhetoric. They are doing this now.

This is an opinion piece by:
John Hutchinson
Chair, Belmar Democrat

One more thing. Donald Trump received 1576 votes in Belmar. According to an ABC poll, 96% of Americans who voted for Trump would do so again. (Only 85% of Hillary voters feel that way.)  This means that unless Belmar voters are turning on Trump in bigger numbers than the average for the country…and there’s no reason to believe that…then Trump still has the support of 1500 voters in Belmar. That’s more votes than any Democrat has gotten in Belmar since I can remember.

You’re telling people that if they don’t like Trump then they should never vote Republican.  And for the probably 1500 Belmar voters who do like Trump?…….