@jjstraka34 Oh, no argument from me on the reasons, I know the why's and such, but knowing doesn't alleviate my being upset with both my state, NC (for #1), and the feds for not dealing with the core issue of the bigger problem of the drug and insurance companies (#2... and a BIG #2 is EXACTLY what it is ). I took alot of flak in public health for pointing out and predicting some of what the ACA was probably going to cause with prices and insurance companies. NC is down to bout one exchange and that is up about 80% for me. Some of it was 'ok' but it caused alot of problems and was not in my opinion well thought out for the long term. I most certainly do not think they took into consderation the rapidly changing aging demographics in the US. The influx of a big, and much younger group, latino's, and a MASSIVE increase in those going on medicare and SS (baby boomers, which still has not reached it's peak).
It is unfortunate now that many have got insurance because of thoses ACA 'fixes' it is going to come down harder many of those with 'GOPCARE' (unless the writers are super wise, and I don't see that one bit).
Agreed, this is causing ALOT of anger, and it is going to get hotter.
I am acutally surprised that things have been as peaceful (relatively) as they have been.
There isn't a hell of alot of disagreement in this thread about what SHOULD be done with healthcare, and that doesn't even take into account our European and Canadian posters who already live under a sane system. However, when it comes time to discuss the path that would lead the US to that system, I don't see where it leads. Let's even hypothetically say Bernie Sanders had become President, who is the most vocal and well-known proponent of Medicare for all. Assume he has a slim majority in both the House and Senate. Say 75-80% of Democrats are on board (as you will have centrists who will not be). That doesn't get you close to where you need to be when every Republican is a guaranteed vote against it. If the House and Senate (and Presidency) is in Republican hands, we have as good a chance of colonizing Pluto as we do of implementing a universal, single-payer system.
This doesn't even address how exactly we would extract a multi-billion dollar predatory industry from our culture and, in essence, destroy it. What evidence is there the insurance industry, with unlimited access to wealth, lobbyists, and lawyers, would ever allow this to happen?? The public demand would have to be near 85-90%, and even if we agreed to get to that point, our current political divisions would ensure that the conversation and negotiations would break down into the same tribal disagreements we have now, simply over details rather than the broader idea.
There are proponents of the idea that "well, let the Republicans pass this and then everyone will see how bad it gets, ushering in single-payer". This is, in my estimation, not only delusional (since there is no evidence this is what would happen) but is also sacrificing the well-being of the millions of people who need health coverage NOW. I'm 110% behind single-payer health care, but that is simply pie-in-the-sky in our current climate. Right now, what we are facing is an attempt to use legitimate gripes with the ACA to not only decimate every worthwhile provision of THAT bill, but to take it a step further and gut Medicaid, which is one of the 3 pillars of the social safety net. And what's next after that?? You think Social Security and Medicare aren't next on their list?? They absolutely are. But take Democrats out of the equation entirely, even if you hate them. Deal right now with who is holding ALL power in Washington. And I promise you (to quote from "The American President") whatever your particular problems with healthcare are, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump aren't the slightest bit interested in solving them. All evidence suggests they are willing to make them exponentially worse to fund a tax cut for an income bracket that no one participating in this discussion will ever sniff in their lifetime.
Republicans and some Democrats say the Democrats have no message. Their message is Trump is bad and Russia is bad. Being against something is well and good but what are you for?
Medicare for All should be what we're for. Will Republicans pass it? No. But it is the answer. It is better than Obamacare and better by far the Trump's Wealthcare.
Have you heard Repubs cherry picked arguments? "Obamacare is horrible and people are dying, costs out of control, and I knew one guy who lost coverage!".
How do Dems respond to that? "Well uh let's work together to fix it." That is almost agreeing it sucks which is their point and also defending a flawed system when there is a better alternative.
When Repubs say "Obamacare is teh wurst! Death spiral!" stand up and say it's superior to Trumpcare and if you want to replace it with something better - we'll vote for medicare for all. That is a true improvement over Obamacare and here's why....
Johnny Depp making a joke about "hey remember the last actor to assassinate a president" in bad taste? Yes. Does Trump have the moral high ground with the feigned outrage he showed? No because the next day Trump invites New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, who said last year that Hillary Clinton should be "shot for treason," to the White House Friday for President Trump's bill signing of the Veterans Accountability Act.
This thing is a set of guidelines designed to make it easier to fire Department of Veterans Affairs employees . The VA is already chronically understaffed firing more people and putting more stress on them is probably not the answer unless the question you are asking is can we get rid of the VA and privatize the VA so my buddies can make money off of Disabled Veterans?
This is where defeating this healthcare bill stands in the Senate. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul are holding out because it doesn't cut ENOUGH, and will be easily swayed to vote for it by simply adding a few even more draconian positions. They are NOT reliable no votes in any way shape or form. More importantly, I believe the very idea of a moderate Republican in the Senate is a myth, since they ALWAYS cave, but there are 4 people to focus on. Mitch McConnell has two no votes to spare, and he will likely lean very, very heavily on anyone else who isn't getting in line. Which means the people have to lean on them even more, which is a tall, tall order. The Senators are Murkowski of Alaska, Heller of Nevada, Capito of West Virginia and Susan Collins of Maine. McConnell is going to give a pass to two of them, and threaten and force the other two to get on board. It seems to me 3 of these people HAVE to vote no to defeat this. My guess is that the passes will go to Murkowski and Collins, which means that public pressure on Heller and Capito must be ramped up to the highest degree.
they only need 50 votes then pence will cast the tiebreaking vote and then flip everyone the bird.
Yes Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul are just grandstanding for attention and some cash bribes in the form of cash and extra attention from Republican donors. They will flip they are not really against it.
I find it a bit strange that NOW the dems are wanting to work with the GOP in fixing obamacare, in return for being allowed to debate and discuss the GOP plan. Seems to me the dems are finally admitted obamacare has problems but WERE NOT going to do anything before.
This is what I took away from watching the heated exchange on CSPAN yesterday between minority leader and majority whip. Course the GOP response was , well, you did not want to help us with our plan before, so shove off. Jackwagons all.
As I said before, holding onto to positions and not looking out for the interests of all.
This is a key measure in a negotiation aimed at a win-win situation. But DC does not always think like that, its WE know best, WE are in power, you just sit n take it. They just dont care that acting like that comes back to bite whoever loses the majority of power. Same ol, same ol. A real shame it is, and embarrassing.
So the White House Press Briefing has turned even further into a joke with Sean Spicer and Sanders refusing to appear on camera or be recorded speaking.
CNN sent a sketch artist to draw the scene like they normally do in a courtroom to capture when villains speak. Why would the President ban cameras and video? Are they camera shy all of a sudden? Why do they have to hide from the american people?
But then Spicer had no problem appearing the same day on video on Fox News. Why are we ok with the President trying to hide and only appear on state run fox news? What are they hiding? Why are we ok with the President and his administration playing childish games? They support legislation that will cause people to die and they're playing games "haha there might be tapes might not be". come on.
I find it a bit strange that NOW the dems are wanting to work with the GOP in fixing obamacare, in return for being allowed to debate and discuss the GOP plan. Seems to me the dems are finally admitted obamacare has problems but WERE NOT going to do anything before.
This is what I took away from watching the heated exchange on CSPAN yesterday between minority leader and majority whip. Course the GOP response was , well, you did not want to help us with our plan before, so shove off. Jackwagons all.
As I said before, holding onto to positions and not looking out for the interests of all.
This is a key measure in a negotiation aimed at a win-win situation. But DC does not always think like that, its WE know best, WE are in power, you just sit n take it. They just dont care that acting like that comes back to bite whoever loses the majority of power. Same ol, same ol. A real shame it is, and embarrassing.
Republicans have had control of Congress for the last 7 years. Democrats have no power to push any legislative changes since not long after the bill was initially passed. Republicans voted to repeal the bill wholesale or purposefully cripple it something like 50 times during that timespan. I don't know where this idea comes from that House and Senate Republicans would have worked with Democrats to improve the problems with the bill when they were trying to undermine it and use it as their MAIN political tool for the last half-decade. I don't think people seem to understand that Democrats haven't actually had any actual power when it comes to writing laws since 2010. It's not a matter of wanting to work with Republicans to fix problems with the bill. It's a matter of that never being on the table.
This is a good time to point out that the ACA was a nearly 14-month process that the country was able to judge and follow for a LONG time. I remember the town halls of that summer vividly. More importantly than that, unlike now, the bill was given (I believe) 29 days of debate in the Senate before the final vote. There hasn't been 29 minutes of debate about the AHCA, because no one knew the first thing about it til Wednesday. And again, the ACA was, for it's inception, an olive branch to conservatives that they slapped away sight unseen. It was a conservative plan nearly identical to ones pushed by the Heritage Foundation and the plan implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was governor.
And again, the ACA was, for it's inception, an olive branch to conservatives that they slapped away sight unseen. It was a conservative plan nearly identical to ones pushed by the Heritage Foundation and the plan implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was governor.
The ACA (obamacare) is the best thing there is for conservative plans. It's easy to get a better plan if you aim towards a more liberal plan, it's impossible to go more conservative and get a better plan.
There is no way to offer a better conservative plan because Obamacare is the best there is for conservative plans.
@jjstraka34 "This is a good time to point out that the ACA was a nearly 14-month process that the country was able to judge and follow for a LONG time. I remember the town halls of that summer vividly. More importantly than that, unlike now, the bill was given (I believe) 29 days of debate in the Senate before the final vote. There hasn't been 29 minutes of debate about the AHCA, because no one knew the first thing about it til Wednesday"
I know, that is what ol Chuck from NY was arguing about with the TX whip Cornyn. He basically told Chuck to 'go scratch'.
I don't support the ACA because I think the exchanges and premium rates are great. I support it because it eliminated pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps, mandates essential benefits, and expanded Medicaid. The exchanges and rising premiums exists because for-profit health insurance exists. If someone can point me to the reasonable and realistic path Obama and the Democrats could have taken in 2008 to basically destroy the health insurance industry, I'm all ears, but it didn't exist. Insurance companies will raise their rates whenever they feel like it, and I see no evidence they would ever lower them for any reason. Hell, the price of an extra value meal at McDonald's has nearly doubled in the past 15-20 years. 20 ounce sodas used to be 79 cents when I was in high school. Nothing besides gas, milk and eggs ever goes down in price, and that fluctuates.
Health insurance lobbies pay millions to Democrat and Republican lawmakers alike. I fundamentally reject the narrative that the Democrats have long been sincere in their desire to fundamentally change the system with their hands being tied. As long as they finance campaigns they will get what they want, which isnt what is best for the people.
If Trump ever has another press conference, the very first question out of a reporter's mouth should be "Mr. President, can you explain, to the best of your ability, what Medicaid does??" And then watch him devolve into a mushed up word-salad of nothingness.
Another major obstacle of Medicare for all is what exactly we would do about the massive amount of jobs that would be lost in the health insurance industry. I'm not talking about the executives, because as far as I'm concerned they can all be exiled to an island in the Pacific and live out their own version of "Lord of the Flies". It would be a necessity that the new government jobs created by the expansion of Medicare to look to fill the positions needed with the rank and file workers, otherwise we would be looking at a serious problem just from people losing their jobs. And this is THE major issue that is stopping this from happening and keeping it (basically) in the realm of science fiction at the moment: health insurance companies are immoral and a massive parasite on this country, but they are a parasite that is so deeply embedded in the core of our economy that simply trying to rip it out would also cause massive damage to the host itself.
Well, not many cared much (it seemed) with jobs(accept those out of work) associated with gutting the furniture and clothing mills in NC, along of alot of other manufacturing in the US, why would the same worry about the dern insurance companies. Some of it is advances in tech, and alot is just making it cheaper with no consequences somewhere else.
I think THAT caused massive damage as well. But yeah, insurance is in the business of making money and making money is not always about morality, like so many business out there.
Well, not many cared much (it seemed) with jobs(accept those out of work) associated with gutting the furniture and clothing mills in NC, along of alot of other manufacturing in the US, why would the same worry about the dern insurance companies. Some of it is advances in tech, and alot is just making it cheaper with no consequences somewhere else.
I think THAT caused massive damage as well. But yeah, insurance is in the business of making money and making money is not always about morality, like so many business out there.
I'm simply saying that while we SHOULD have and many people WANT Medicare for all, the steps to get there at the moment seem insurmountable. Believe me, I'm a major proponent of the idea that free trade had nothing near as much to do with losing most manufacturing jobs as automation, and I'm certainly also all for the trade-off in covering everyone from cradle to grave at the expense of destroying a bad industry, but something WILL have to be done to get the rank and file people who handle claims and answer the telephones back to work. But do I think it's a good trade-off in the long run?? Absolutely.
And, again, there are proponents (on the left, sadly) who think that letting this bill happen and become a disaster will wake people up and usher in a massive wave of popular support for single-payer. Most of the people making this argument (if not all of them) are probably quite secure in their own health care situation and aren't thinking of the countless people who will be hurt NOW as they try the "burn it all down to see how bad it gets" method. This is the kind of nonsense Susan Sarandon was spouting all the way up to the election, as if Susan Sarandon will ever have to worry about not having health-care or paying for anything ever again. But it's a growing sentiment on the far-left I am not at all comfortable with, #1 because people will be damaged in their quest for purity, and #2 because it won't work the way they think it will anyway.
@jjstraka34 I reckon there are too many folks making far reaching conclusions in DC with butts in the shape of the seat of their chairs (special chairs, that make em money just by sittn in em and even handin them their drinks as well). Yeah, some, but not all, celebrities have no clue how their lifestyle often has nothing in common with the risks other real folks go through, so, they don't mind saying whatever, as you mentioned.
Automation hurts manufacturing, and now service, jobs for sure. In fact automation over a long period of time is going to kill a lot of jobs but thats a whole other topic. But the effects of NAFTA and other policies can not be unrelated to the wholesale gutting of U.S manufacturing. For example, Germany lost a lot less employment in manufacturing in recent decades despite using just as much if not more automation. Policy definitely matters in my view
As I recall (could be mistaken!) Germany has a made a deliberate policy decision to keep wages & living standards down in order to keep its export based economy as competitive as possible.
Another major obstacle of Medicare for all is what exactly we would do about the massive amount of jobs that would be lost in the health insurance industry.
Well, if you ever did go for a national insurance model there would be a lot more jobs required to deliver that.
Apart from the problems you've outlined I think cost would be a major problem in moving away from the current system. The US currently spends a ridiculously large amount on healthcare as a result of having such an inefficient system and could probably slash current costs by at least a half with little or no change in outcomes (though part of that potential benefit would be lost by the cost of extending coverage from the current position). However, though health outcomes wouldn't be affected significantly, service standards would reduce and I would expect that to cause significant resistance to a change. In addition there would need to be some reining back on pay within the health sector - not just relating to the insurance industry - in order to get closer to international norms and I would imagine that would not be easy to implement ...
Edit: here's a summary report describing the problem for the US - huge costs, but indifferent to poor outcomes.
As I recall (could be mistaken!) Germany has a made a deliberate policy decision to keep wages & living standards down in order to keep its export based economy as competitive as possible.
Germany is probably not the best comparator to choose because of the process of reunification there (estimated to have cost around 100 billion euros a year since 1990). I think you're right that has had the effect of keeping wages down in what was West Germany, but I don't think a desire to promote exports was the main factor there.
Five months into Donald Trump’s administration, only the unwise doubt the president’s intelligence.
Just ask former FBI director James B. Comey, who, in addition to being fired by Trump, has been redefined by the president as a dishonest leaker who might have lied were it not for nonexistent tapes of their conversations.
Wait, what?
It takes a craven sort of cunning to pull that one off. One day, Comey, a man admired for his brilliance and integrity, is investigating possible collusion in the 2016 presidential race between Russia and the Trump campaign. The next, he’s watching his professional life unravel on television and reading that he’s not to be trusted.
Trump didn’t stop at upending the man’s career, cutting short his FBI directorship by six years. He next tweeted that Comey better hope there were no “tapes” (quotation marks his) of their private conversation that subsequently became the focal point of congressional investigations.
There were tapes?!
Of course, there were no tapes. Did anyone really think there were? Well, yes, there could have been tapes — just as there could have been a legitimate Trump University. To the credulous goes the nation.
But no president ever admits to tapes, at least not until a subpoena becomes inevitable. Or, as in this case, when the House Intelligence Committee demands such tapes, if they exist.
They don’t, Trump finally tweeted after more than a month of suspense-building hedging. But caveat trumptor: The president says he doesn’t personally have any recordings of the conversation, but who knows, what with all the surveillance around these days?
The media, alas, had no choice but to entertain the possibility that there were tapes. Like it or not, there’s no ignoring a president’s statements. Thus, television anchors and pundit panels have devoted hundreds of hours to examining the what, ifs and buts of the illusory tapes: What would it mean if they existed? What would it mean if they didn’t? Was Trump bluffing? Was he trying to intimidate Comey?
No doubt enjoying the scramble to his latest manufactured distraction, Trump chided reporters: “You’re going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer.” Perhaps. But then, life with Trump is a roller coaster of anticlimaxes.
Trump supporters, I suspect, knew all along that he was bluffing. They’re in on the joke, which is actually a Southern tradition — goofing on the media, saying outrageous stuff for the pleasure of watching reporters write it down. Who cares what reporters think, anyway, goes the thinking.
To them, Trump was taunting Comey the way they wish they could, giving him the what-for. You think you’re so tall. Toying with media and other elites has become the sport of both “commoners” and the king these days. When Trump isn’t playing king, he’s happy to be the court jester. With a shrug of his shoulders and a smirkish smile, he conveys “whatever.”
We tend to forget, too, that Trump is a professional bluffer. We keep thinking he’s the president of the United States. That’s his title, but his identity is Donald J. Trump, television star, celebrity wheeler-dealer, a man who grabs what he wants. Everything he says or does should first be considered in this context.
Poor Comey. Burdened with seriousness, he wore a black tie to a circus.
When he testified earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that Trump suggested that he drop his investigation of Michael Flynn, that he wrote memos about his interactions and leaked them to the media because he feared Trump might lie about them — he was obviously telling the truth.
Otherwise, why admit to the leak — otherwise known as discreet information-sharing, which, you may as well know, makes the world go ’round. It also occurred post-firing and after Trump’s tweet about the tapes.
Yet Trump, who denies everything, has managed to create a fictional narrative that not only justifies his dangling bluff but also gilds it as a moral victory: He tweeted about tapes to make sure “leaker” Comey would be honest when he testified.
Well now.
It takes a certain kind of intelligence to spin a yarn so counterintuitive and defiantly false that some people will believe it anyway. Alternatively, Trump could be just as confused as he hopes others will be.
NY Times article about Trump's stance on illegal immigration. As someone who lives and works around areas where a number of horrific crimes have recently taken place at the hands of gangs that are heavily populated with illegal immigrants, this is a particularly important issue for me.
For Grieving Parents, Trump Is ‘Speaking for the Dead’ on Immigration
The families could reel off all the times they had called the media and written to Washington, but after all that trying, they had never heard anyone who mattered say anything like it: Most Mexican immigrants, Donald J. Trump declared in his first campaign speech, were “rapists” who were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” across the border.
Now he had come to meet them, the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants, and they wanted to tell him he was right.
One son had been struck by a truck, another shot just around the corner from home. Different causes of death, but the driver, the gunman, all the perpetrators were the same, the parents said: people who never should have been in the country in the first place.
Sitting alone with them at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in July 2015, the candidate distributed hugs as the families wept. When the campaign had called, most of them had been told only that they were going to meet with Mr. Trump. But then the group was ushered into the next room, where the campaign had invited reporters to a news conference.
It was a surprise, but no one seemed to mind. Several stepped up to endorse Mr. Trump.
“He’s speaking for the dead,” said Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose teenage son was shot to death by a gang member in Los Angeles in 2008. “He’s speaking for my son.”
Mr. Shaw wanted the news media to know that Mr. Trump could have gone further when he called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals.
“I would have said they were murderers,” he said.
Hailed for bravery, accused of racism, scorned as puppets, these are some of Mr. Trump’s most potent surrogates, the people whose private anguish has formed the emotional cornerstone of his crusade against illegal immigration and clouded the futures of America’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants.
Their alliance came down to this: To parents parched for understanding, Mr. Trump was a gulp of hope. The Trump campaign flew them to speak at rallies and at the Republican National Convention, put them up in Trump hotels and kept in touch with regular phone calls and messages. After his victory, Mr. Trump invited at least one to the Inaugural Ball and seated three more with the first lady during his first address to Congress.
Then and since, they have defended him on social media and in the press, assuring the world that, with President Trump in office, their children will not have died in vain.
This week, the House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill that would intensify penalties for immigrants who re-enter the United States after being deported. The bill is named for a woman fatally shot by a man who illegally crossed the border at least five times.
Sabine Durden, the mother of another victim, recalls dropping to her knees and sobbing when she first heard Mr. Trump warn of the dangers of illegal immigration. Then his campaign called.
“It was almost an out-of-body experience after being so deeply hurt and nobody listening and nobody wanting to talk to you about this,” she said. “It’s almost like I put on a little Superwoman cape because I knew I was fighting a worthwhile fight.”
In Washington in April, they sat in the front rows as Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary unveiled an office for victims of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants: of the many promises the new president had made in their names, one of the first kept.
To Mr. Trump’s critics, the office and the people it was supposed to represent were little more than pawns in his crude attempts to make monsters out of a largely law-abiding population — one that research has shown to comit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans. But here before the cameras, the secretary, John F. Kelly, was putting his hand over his heart and thanking families.
“To say the least, my heart goes out to you,” Mr. Kelly told them.That night, they celebrated what felt like their achievement over dinner and drinks at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was expensive, they admitted, but it felt right.It was strange that one of the sweetest moments of their lives was about reliving the single bitterest. But there had been a lot of that over the past year or two, as they searched for a way to make it all mean something: the startled and painful pride of finding themselves booked on national television and welcomed to the White House to talk about the blight of illegal immigration, all because of their sons and daughters, who were gone.An Overnight AwakeningThe local news reports said Dominic Durden’s motorcycle was hit by a pickup truck as he rode down Pigeon Pass Road in Moreno Valley, Calif., on his way to his job as a 911 dispatcher. He was 30.They identified the other driver as Juan Zacarias Tzun, who was charged with vehicular manslaughter. It was July 12, 2012.Sabine Durden had last seen her son at the airport the day before, when he dropped her off for a trip to Atlanta. Across the country, she said, she nearly blacked out at the moment of his death. Later, after her phone lit up with messages from his friends, she was sure she knew why.
Not until later, she said, did she find out from some of her son’s friends in law enforcement that Mr. Tzun had come to the country illegally from Guatemala, and that he had been convicted twice of driving under the influence. He had been released on bail several weeks before the collision.
At his sentencing in 2013, Mr. Tzun blamed God for the crash. Ms. Durden blamed the immigration system.
“If it was an accident, I could deal with it, but this wasn’t an accident, because if that guy wasn’t in the country at 5:45 on July 12, 2012, my son would still be alive,” she said. (Mr. Tzun was deported in 2014.)
But nobody overseeing her son’s case seemed willing to view his death that way, she said. “You feel like you got the runaround,” she said.
Ms. Durden, 59, had come to the United States from Germany when she married an American in the Army, eventually becoming a citizen. He was a Democrat, so she was a Democrat. She had never thought much about the immigration debate before Dominic died. Now it was her whole life.
Then came Mr. Trump. Whenever she saw him, he greeted her with a “great big hug,” she recalled. “Dom’s mom,” he called her.
“He would say, ‘You’ll never be alone again. You’ll never have to fight this alone,’” said Ms. Durden, who went on to speak at three of his rallies.
[Video: Sabine Durden on undocumented immigrants: "Build the wall!" Watch on YouTube.]
The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was out there talking about the need to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When Ms. Durden heard that, she changed her voter registration to Republican the same day.
In a series of recent interviews, the families described a similar trajectory: The death of a loved one. The spasm of realizing that the other driver, or the gunman, was living in the country illegally. The political awakening — for the Republicans, a hardening toward illegal immigrants; for the Democrats, a quick, grim conversion. The relief, when another “angel mom” or “angel dad” saw them on the news and found them online.
Most of all, the fear that their children would diminish into fading news and Facebook tributes, horror stories circulated in the outer boroughs of the American right — until Mr. Trump thundered into their lives, bearing cameras.
Immigration was “one of those issues that, it didn’t affect me — I was busy working,” said Steve Ronnebeck, 50, whose 21-year-old son, Grant, was shot and killed as he worked overnight at a convenience store in Mesa, Ariz., in January 2015.
“As time went on and the more angry I got, that’s when I got more active,” he said. “This is how I deal with my grief.”
For another parent who came to the Beverly Hills meeting, Don Rosenberg, a self-described lifelong liberal from Westlake Village, Calif., it was hard to embrace Mr. Trump, even if he had the right idea about immigration.
As he watched Mr. Trump announce his presidential bid on TV, “I’m saying to myself, he’s talking about illegal immigration — why did it have to be Trump?” said Mr. Rosenberg, 64, whose 25-year-old son died in a motorcycle accident in 2010. He had been struck by a Honduran man in the country illegally. “To me, an immigration policy isn’t, ‘Build a wall, Mexico will pay for it.’”
Still, by the election, Mr. Rosenberg had come around. He said that he had not voted for either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump, knowing it was not likely to make a difference in California, but that if he had lived in a swing state, he would probably have cast his ballot for Mr. Trump.
V.I.P. Treatment
Here was the paradox of Donald Trump, the unfiltered tycoon who seemed as far away as Fifth Avenue and as close up as the living-room TV. Even as a legion of critics warned he was pandering to his fans on the way to betraying them, the alliance he had made with the families felt, to many of them, like an unshakable bond.
The thing was, he paid attention. And he never stopped.
After the Beverly Hills meeting, Mr. Shaw received a gift basket containing Mr. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” chocolates, and Trump-branded ties and cuff links, according to an account in The Wall Street Journal. At one point, Mr. Shaw flew on Mr. Trump’s private plane. At another, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, he cut a campaign commercial.
The other families received regular care from the campaign, too. A Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, would call or text at least once a month, inviting them to speak at rallies or just checking in. Some spoke regularly to Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, or to Hope Hicks, the campaign’s spokeswoman.
Mr. Miller, an advocate of restricting immigration and now a senior White House adviser, helped draft Mr. Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order directing the government to intensify immigration enforcement.
A few of the parents also regularly texted with Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime bodyguard and current Oval Office aide. It was Mr. Schiller whom the president sent to hand-deliver a letter to James B. Comey informing him he was no longer director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
To find some of the families, Mr. Trump’s team had help from the Remembrance Project, a nonprofit founded in 2009 to draw attention to the victims of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants. It caught the Trump wave early, bringing several families to the Beverly Hills meeting and other campaign events and hosting a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump in Houston last fall.
As the campaign offered a national audience to more of the parents, however, many of the Remembrance Project’s members abandoned the group, chafing at what several said were its founder’s attempts to dictate what they said and even what they wore. Mr. Trump, they said, had allowed them their own voice.
Before going onstage at some events, Mr. Trump would shoo aides away for a private moment with the families.
“To me, I find it much more personal when the president comes up to you and says, ‘Steve, how are you doing?’” Mr. Ronnebeck said. “He knows my name. He doesn’t just, you know, speak the whole time. He listens.”
For the Trump campaign, the private cultivation paid off. In public, the families became some of the campaign’s most compelling witnesses.
They could be picked out by what they carried, the talismans of absence: the T-shirts printed with photographs of the smiling dead. The commemorative buttons. The ashes held close in a locket.
At one rally in Phoenix in August, a hush muted the crowd when Mr. Ronnebeck and other family members approached the microphone, one by one, to speak about a lost son or daughter.
“I truly believe that Mr. Trump is going to change things,” Mr. Ronnebeck said, his voice catching.
At the Republican National Convention, Mr. Shaw, Ms. Durden and another parent took turns speaking about their children. Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech was partly devoted to the story of Sarah Root, 21, who was killed in Nebraska the day after graduating from college by a Honduran immigrant who was driving drunk.
“I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family,” the nominee said. “But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting.”
[Video: 07/21/16 RNC The Story of Sarah Root Watch on YouTube.]
He also mentioned the case that, at least on the right, had come to define the dangers of illegal immigration: that of Kathryn Steinle, a 32-year-old woman shot to death on a San Francisco pier in 2015. The suspect was an ex-felon from Mexico who had been deported five times. A few months before Ms. Steinle’s death, the local authorities had released him from jail without notifying federal immigration agents.
“My opponent wants sanctuary cities,” Mr. Trump said, referring to local governments, including San Francisco, that limit their cooperation with immigration officials. “But where was the sanctuary for Kate Steinle?”
The president has since vowed to starve such cities of federal funding, but a judge has temporarily blocked his administration from doing so. The House is scheduled to vote this week on a bill, known as Kate’s Law, that would stiffen penalties for immigrants caught illegally re-entering the country after being deported.
For all the heat the Steinle case generated, however, her family kept a distance from the campaign, occasionally breaking their silence to voice discomfort with the way her death had become a political grenade. (Through their lawyer, they declined to comment.)
“For Donald Trump, we were just what he needed — beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a million times, a violent crime and yada, yada, yada,” Liz Sullivan, Ms. Steinle’s mother, told The San Francisco Chronicle in September 2015.
‘We’ve Chosen to Speak.’
Politics makes public playthings of private lives. As their losses came to eclipse everything else about them, the families became, in Mr. Trump’s telling, living testimonials to all that was broken about the immigration system.
Still, those who appeared on the campaign’s behalf said they had never felt like props. Mr. Trump was no more using them, they said, than Mrs. Clinton was using hardworking Hispanic families to humanize the issue.
“He’s never once asked us to speak,” said Michelle Root, 48, Sarah Root’s mother. “We’ve chosen to speak.”
It looked very different to the other side, of course. People on social media, and even some friends, did not hesitate to let them know that they thought they were being used. Lots of people called them racist. They insisted that they were not, emphasizing that they did not think all undocumented immigrants were bad.
A large body of research, accumulated over many years, has found that immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or to be imprisoned than native-born citizens.
For the families, such studies were beside the point. To them, illegal immigration was an epidemic of preventable deaths.
The glare of other people’s judgment did get to them sometimes. Mr. Ronnebeck took a break from social media for six weeks, as the anniversary of Grant’s death passed, then the inauguration, then Grant’s birthday.
“There’s people that think I’m a racist and there’s people out there that think I’m the devil,” he said. “It gets to a point where you just can’t do the negative anymore.”
Not for long, though. With Mr. Trump in the White House, they could take their message straight to the corridors of power. Some hope the president will revoke Obama-era protections for young undocumented immigrants; others pray to see the wall built.
“I think we could email or text or even pick up the phone, for some of them, and call them and have them pass it on,” Ms. Root said of her contacts in the White House. “And he would listen. He might not agree, and might not do it, but I know our voice would be heard.”
Automation hurts manufacturing, and now service, jobs for sure. In fact automation over a long period of time is going to kill a lot of jobs but thats a whole other topic. But the effects of NAFTA and other policies can not be unrelated to the wholesale gutting of U.S manufacturing. For example, Germany lost a lot less employment in manufacturing in recent decades despite using just as much if not more automation. Policy definitely matters in my view
Germany uses the exchange rate of the Euro to keep prices down. It uses the poor countries of Europe to balance their manufacturing strength.
Greece, for example, should be able to devalue their currency to attract manufacturing within Greece. But instead it's locked into the Euro, and the Euro is all about what suits Germany.
Last thing Trump's been saying is it's Obama's fault that the election was hacked in Trump's favor. Sounds like he would blame the victim of a rape for getting raped saying "hey you should have done more".
Listen to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin from this morning. Bear in mind, this is a guy who said less than a year ago that if you employer wants to provide health insurance that doesn't cover cancer treatment, they should be able to do that:
The Wisconsin Republican pointed to Obamacare rules that forbid insurance companies from charging more for people with preexisting conditions.
"We know why those premiums doubled," he opined. "We've done something with our health care system that you would never think about doing, for example, with auto insurance, where you would require auto insurance companies to sell a policy to somebody after they crash their car."
"States that have... guarantees for preexisting conditions, it crashes their markets," he continued. "It causes the markets to collapse. It causes premiums to skyrocket."
So there you have it folks. Having a pre-existing medical condition is apparently EXACTLY like getting in a car accident and then trying to buy insurance over the fact. And this highlights what I've been saying all along. Republicans are engaged in their own personal Calvinistic morality play, where if you get sick, you DESERVE to get sick, and you can essentially go f**k yourself. I'm not being hyperbolic, this is what they believe. They not only don't understand how the concept of insurance works, or how healthcare works in every other developed country on Earth, they also don't understand how humanity works. They actually think you DESERVE it if you have a pre-existing condition. That it is a divine measure of how good and worthy you are as a human being. Seriously, this shit is NOT new. Look up John Calvin and the concept of unconditional election, and you'll understand why this health care bill is written the way it is.
Listen to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin from this morning. Bear in mind, this is a guy who said less than a year ago that if you employer wants to provide health insurance that doesn't cover cancer treatment, they should be able to do that:
The Wisconsin Republican pointed to Obamacare rules that forbid insurance companies from charging more for people with preexisting conditions.
"We know why those premiums doubled," he opined. "We've done something with our health care system that you would never think about doing, for example, with auto insurance, where you would require auto insurance companies to sell a policy to somebody after they crash their car."
"States that have... guarantees for preexisting conditions, it crashes their markets," he continued. "It causes the markets to collapse. It causes premiums to skyrocket."
So there you have it folks. Having a pre-existing medical condition is apparently EXACTLY like getting in a car accident and then trying to buy insurance over the fact. And this highlights what I've been saying all along. Republicans are engaged in their own personal Calvinistic morality play, where if you get sick, you DESERVE to get sick, and you can essentially go f**k yourself. I'm not being hyperbolic, this is what they believe. They not only don't understand how the concept of insurance works, or how healthcare works in every other developed country on Earth, they also don't understand how humanity works. They actually think you DESERVE it if you have a pre-existing condition. That it is a divine measure of how good and worthy you are as a human being. Seriously, this shit is NOT new. Look up John Calvin and the concept of unconditional election, and you'll understand why this health care bill is written the way it is.
That is actually how 'insurance' works. Car insurance, home insurance, insuring your valuables against theft, none of those companies would be in business if you could sign up AFTER the disaster, accident or robbery.
It's not insurance if you already have a condition. It's semantics but call it what it is, a subsidy, not insurance...
The distinction, of course, is that if you have a pre-existing condition... it's already there. At which point the question becomes, do you not deserve to have insurance because you were born with a genetic illness?
Because a pre-existing condition is not, "40 minutes ago I got hit by a truck; I want to buy insurance from your company to cover my bills."
A pre-existing condition is, "40 years ago, I was born with a genetic predisposition to heart disease. I already paid for your insurance, so why aren't you covering my heart disease medication?"
As a point of note, when I was a teen back in the early 80's I got Type I Diabetes. The...'insurance folks' were trying to say it was pre -existing BEFORE I got it, and did not want to cover it. That is STILL not 100& proven, so my endocrinologist at the time went and raised a big stink with them. At least I get covered before I kicked the bucket(close at diagnosis) and went into the hospital. Course my premiums were always higher, even with no major probs for a long time after that.
As @Grond0 was saying, it needs to change and it is not gonna be easy. But just because ppl are resistant to change and it is hard on top of that, shouldn't mean the US shouldn't get with the darn program. Just to darn profit driven, this health industry we have.
This country needs to quit being the sheriff of the world, makin messes, and look after its own darn ppl better, for a change.
Comments
This doesn't even address how exactly we would extract a multi-billion dollar predatory industry from our culture and, in essence, destroy it. What evidence is there the insurance industry, with unlimited access to wealth, lobbyists, and lawyers, would ever allow this to happen?? The public demand would have to be near 85-90%, and even if we agreed to get to that point, our current political divisions would ensure that the conversation and negotiations would break down into the same tribal disagreements we have now, simply over details rather than the broader idea.
There are proponents of the idea that "well, let the Republicans pass this and then everyone will see how bad it gets, ushering in single-payer". This is, in my estimation, not only delusional (since there is no evidence this is what would happen) but is also sacrificing the well-being of the millions of people who need health coverage NOW. I'm 110% behind single-payer health care, but that is simply pie-in-the-sky in our current climate. Right now, what we are facing is an attempt to use legitimate gripes with the ACA to not only decimate every worthwhile provision of THAT bill, but to take it a step further and gut Medicaid, which is one of the 3 pillars of the social safety net. And what's next after that?? You think Social Security and Medicare aren't next on their list?? They absolutely are. But take Democrats out of the equation entirely, even if you hate them. Deal right now with who is holding ALL power in Washington. And I promise you (to quote from "The American President") whatever your particular problems with healthcare are, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump aren't the slightest bit interested in solving them. All evidence suggests they are willing to make them exponentially worse to fund a tax cut for an income bracket that no one participating in this discussion will ever sniff in their lifetime.
Medicare for All should be what we're for. Will Republicans pass it? No. But it is the answer. It is better than Obamacare and better by far the Trump's Wealthcare.
Have you heard Repubs cherry picked arguments? "Obamacare is horrible and people are dying, costs out of control, and I knew one guy who lost coverage!".
How do Dems respond to that? "Well uh let's work together to fix it." That is almost agreeing it sucks which is their point and also defending a flawed system when there is a better alternative.
When Repubs say "Obamacare is teh wurst! Death spiral!" stand up and say it's superior to Trumpcare and if you want to replace it with something better - we'll vote for medicare for all. That is a true improvement over Obamacare and here's why....
This thing is a set of guidelines designed to make it easier to fire Department of Veterans Affairs employees .
The VA is already chronically understaffed firing more people and putting more stress on them is probably not the answer unless the question you are asking is can we get rid of the VA and privatize the VA so my buddies can make money off of Disabled Veterans?
Yes Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul are just grandstanding for attention and some cash bribes in the form of cash and extra attention from Republican donors. They will flip they are not really against it.
This is what I took away from watching the heated exchange on CSPAN yesterday between minority leader and majority whip.
Course the GOP response was , well, you did not want to help us with our plan before, so shove off. Jackwagons all.
As I said before, holding onto to positions and not looking out for the interests of all.
This is a key measure in a negotiation aimed at a win-win situation. But DC does not always think like that, its WE know best, WE are in power, you just sit n take it. They just dont care that acting like that comes back to bite whoever loses the majority of power.
Same ol, same ol. A real shame it is, and embarrassing.
CNN sent a sketch artist to draw the scene like they normally do in a courtroom to capture when villains speak. Why would the President ban cameras and video? Are they camera shy all of a sudden? Why do they have to hide from the american people?
But then Spicer had no problem appearing the same day on video on Fox News. Why are we ok with the President trying to hide and only appear on state run fox news? What are they hiding? Why are we ok with the President and his administration playing childish games? They support legislation that will cause people to die and they're playing games "haha there might be tapes might not be". come on.
This is a good time to point out that the ACA was a nearly 14-month process that the country was able to judge and follow for a LONG time. I remember the town halls of that summer vividly. More importantly than that, unlike now, the bill was given (I believe) 29 days of debate in the Senate before the final vote. There hasn't been 29 minutes of debate about the AHCA, because no one knew the first thing about it til Wednesday. And again, the ACA was, for it's inception, an olive branch to conservatives that they slapped away sight unseen. It was a conservative plan nearly identical to ones pushed by the Heritage Foundation and the plan implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was governor.
There is no way to offer a better conservative plan because Obamacare is the best there is for conservative plans.
I know, that is what ol Chuck from NY was arguing about with the TX whip Cornyn. He basically told Chuck to 'go scratch'.
Another major obstacle of Medicare for all is what exactly we would do about the massive amount of jobs that would be lost in the health insurance industry. I'm not talking about the executives, because as far as I'm concerned they can all be exiled to an island in the Pacific and live out their own version of "Lord of the Flies". It would be a necessity that the new government jobs created by the expansion of Medicare to look to fill the positions needed with the rank and file workers, otherwise we would be looking at a serious problem just from people losing their jobs. And this is THE major issue that is stopping this from happening and keeping it (basically) in the realm of science fiction at the moment: health insurance companies are immoral and a massive parasite on this country, but they are a parasite that is so deeply embedded in the core of our economy that simply trying to rip it out would also cause massive damage to the host itself.
I think THAT caused massive damage as well.
But yeah, insurance is in the business of making money and making money is not always about morality, like so many business out there.
And, again, there are proponents (on the left, sadly) who think that letting this bill happen and become a disaster will wake people up and usher in a massive wave of popular support for single-payer. Most of the people making this argument (if not all of them) are probably quite secure in their own health care situation and aren't thinking of the countless people who will be hurt NOW as they try the "burn it all down to see how bad it gets" method. This is the kind of nonsense Susan Sarandon was spouting all the way up to the election, as if Susan Sarandon will ever have to worry about not having health-care or paying for anything ever again. But it's a growing sentiment on the far-left I am not at all comfortable with, #1 because people will be damaged in their quest for purity, and #2 because it won't work the way they think it will anyway.
Yeah, some, but not all, celebrities have no clue how their lifestyle often has nothing in common with the risks other real folks go through, so, they don't mind saying whatever, as you mentioned.
Things are going to change, society needs to adjust somehow.
Apart from the problems you've outlined I think cost would be a major problem in moving away from the current system. The US currently spends a ridiculously large amount on healthcare as a result of having such an inefficient system and could probably slash current costs by at least a half with little or no change in outcomes (though part of that potential benefit would be lost by the cost of extending coverage from the current position). However, though health outcomes wouldn't be affected significantly, service standards would reduce and I would expect that to cause significant resistance to a change. In addition there would need to be some reining back on pay within the health sector - not just relating to the insurance industry - in order to get closer to international norms and I would imagine that would not be easy to implement ...
Edit: here's a summary report describing the problem for the US - huge costs, but indifferent to poor outcomes.
This was a recent Washington Post article that reflects some of the things I've been telling people about Trump from the beginning:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/opinion-how-can-you-still-doubt-trump’s-intelligence/ar-BBD5X71
How can you still doubt Trump’s intelligence?
Five months into Donald Trump’s administration, only the unwise doubt the president’s intelligence.
Just ask former FBI director James B. Comey, who, in addition to being fired by Trump, has been redefined by the president as a dishonest leaker who might have lied were it not for nonexistent tapes of their conversations.
Wait, what?
It takes a craven sort of cunning to pull that one off. One day, Comey, a man admired for his brilliance and integrity, is investigating possible collusion in the 2016 presidential race between Russia and the Trump campaign. The next, he’s watching his professional life unravel on television and reading that he’s not to be trusted.
Trump didn’t stop at upending the man’s career, cutting short his FBI directorship by six years. He next tweeted that Comey better hope there were no “tapes” (quotation marks his) of their private conversation that subsequently became the focal point of congressional investigations.
There were tapes?!
Of course, there were no tapes. Did anyone really think there were? Well, yes, there could have been tapes — just as there could have been a legitimate Trump University. To the credulous goes the nation.
But no president ever admits to tapes, at least not until a subpoena becomes inevitable. Or, as in this case, when the House Intelligence Committee demands such tapes, if they exist.
They don’t, Trump finally tweeted after more than a month of suspense-building hedging. But caveat trumptor: The president says he doesn’t personally have any recordings of the conversation, but who knows, what with all the surveillance around these days?
The media, alas, had no choice but to entertain the possibility that there were tapes. Like it or not, there’s no ignoring a president’s statements. Thus, television anchors and pundit panels have devoted hundreds of hours to examining the what, ifs and buts of the illusory tapes: What would it mean if they existed? What would it mean if they didn’t? Was Trump bluffing? Was he trying to intimidate Comey?
No doubt enjoying the scramble to his latest manufactured distraction, Trump chided reporters: “You’re going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer.” Perhaps. But then, life with Trump is a roller coaster of anticlimaxes.
Trump supporters, I suspect, knew all along that he was bluffing. They’re in on the joke, which is actually a Southern tradition — goofing on the media, saying outrageous stuff for the pleasure of watching reporters write it down. Who cares what reporters think, anyway, goes the thinking.
To them, Trump was taunting Comey the way they wish they could, giving him the what-for. You think you’re so tall. Toying with media and other elites has become the sport of both “commoners” and the king these days. When Trump isn’t playing king, he’s happy to be the court jester. With a shrug of his shoulders and a smirkish smile, he conveys “whatever.”
We tend to forget, too, that Trump is a professional bluffer. We keep thinking he’s the president of the United States. That’s his title, but his identity is Donald J. Trump, television star, celebrity wheeler-dealer, a man who grabs what he wants. Everything he says or does should first be considered in this context.
Poor Comey. Burdened with seriousness, he wore a black tie to a circus.
When he testified earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that Trump suggested that he drop his investigation of Michael Flynn, that he wrote memos about his interactions and leaked them to the media because he feared Trump might lie about them — he was obviously telling the truth.
Otherwise, why admit to the leak — otherwise known as discreet information-sharing, which, you may as well know, makes the world go ’round. It also occurred post-firing and after Trump’s tweet about the tapes.
Yet Trump, who denies everything, has managed to create a fictional narrative that not only justifies his dangling bluff but also gilds it as a moral victory: He tweeted about tapes to make sure “leaker” Comey would be honest when he testified.
Well now.
It takes a certain kind of intelligence to spin a yarn so counterintuitive and defiantly false that some people will believe it anyway. Alternatively, Trump could be just as confused as he hopes others will be.
NY Times article about Trump's stance on illegal immigration. As someone who lives and works around areas where a number of horrific crimes have recently taken place at the hands of gangs that are heavily populated with illegal immigrants, this is a particularly important issue for me.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/for-grieving-parents-trump-is-‘speaking-for-the-dead’-on-immigration/ar-BBDaUGO?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout
For Grieving Parents, Trump Is ‘Speaking for the Dead’ on Immigration
The families could reel off all the times they had called the media and written to Washington, but after all that trying, they had never heard anyone who mattered say anything like it: Most Mexican immigrants, Donald J. Trump declared in his first campaign speech, were “rapists” who were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” across the border.
Now he had come to meet them, the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants, and they wanted to tell him he was right.
One son had been struck by a truck, another shot just around the corner from home. Different causes of death, but the driver, the gunman, all the perpetrators were the same, the parents said: people who never should have been in the country in the first place.
Sitting alone with them at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in July 2015, the candidate distributed hugs as the families wept. When the campaign had called, most of them had been told only that they were going to meet with Mr. Trump. But then the group was ushered into the next room, where the campaign had invited reporters to a news conference.
It was a surprise, but no one seemed to mind. Several stepped up to endorse Mr. Trump.
“He’s speaking for the dead,” said Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose teenage son was shot to death by a gang member in Los Angeles in 2008. “He’s speaking for my son.”
Mr. Shaw wanted the news media to know that Mr. Trump could have gone further when he called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals.
“I would have said they were murderers,” he said.
Hailed for bravery, accused of racism, scorned as puppets, these are some of Mr. Trump’s most potent surrogates, the people whose private anguish has formed the emotional cornerstone of his crusade against illegal immigration and clouded the futures of America’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants.
Their alliance came down to this: To parents parched for understanding, Mr. Trump was a gulp of hope. The Trump campaign flew them to speak at rallies and at the Republican National Convention, put them up in Trump hotels and kept in touch with regular phone calls and messages. After his victory, Mr. Trump invited at least one to the Inaugural Ball and seated three more with the first lady during his first address to Congress.
Then and since, they have defended him on social media and in the press, assuring the world that, with President Trump in office, their children will not have died in vain.
This week, the House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill that would intensify penalties for immigrants who re-enter the United States after being deported. The bill is named for a woman fatally shot by a man who illegally crossed the border at least five times.
Sabine Durden, the mother of another victim, recalls dropping to her knees and sobbing when she first heard Mr. Trump warn of the dangers of illegal immigration. Then his campaign called.
“It was almost an out-of-body experience after being so deeply hurt and nobody listening and nobody wanting to talk to you about this,” she said. “It’s almost like I put on a little Superwoman cape because I knew I was fighting a worthwhile fight.”
In Washington in April, they sat in the front rows as Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary unveiled an office for victims of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants: of the many promises the new president had made in their names, one of the first kept.
To Mr. Trump’s critics, the office and the people it was supposed to represent were little more than pawns in his crude attempts to make monsters out of a largely law-abiding population — one that research has shown to comit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans. But here before the cameras, the secretary, John F. Kelly, was putting his hand over his heart and thanking families.
“To say the least, my heart goes out to you,” Mr. Kelly told them.That night, they celebrated what felt like their achievement over dinner and drinks at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was expensive, they admitted, but it felt right.It was strange that one of the sweetest moments of their lives was about reliving the single bitterest. But there had been a lot of that over the past year or two, as they searched for a way to make it all mean something: the startled and painful pride of finding themselves booked on national television and welcomed to the White House to talk about the blight of illegal immigration, all because of their sons and daughters, who were gone.An Overnight AwakeningThe local news reports said Dominic Durden’s motorcycle was hit by a pickup truck as he rode down Pigeon Pass Road in Moreno Valley, Calif., on his way to his job as a 911 dispatcher. He was 30.They identified the other driver as Juan Zacarias Tzun, who was charged with vehicular manslaughter. It was July 12, 2012.Sabine Durden had last seen her son at the airport the day before, when he dropped her off for a trip to Atlanta. Across the country, she said, she nearly blacked out at the moment of his death. Later, after her phone lit up with messages from his friends, she was sure she knew why.
Not until later, she said, did she find out from some of her son’s friends in law enforcement that Mr. Tzun had come to the country illegally from Guatemala, and that he had been convicted twice of driving under the influence. He had been released on bail several weeks before the collision.
At his sentencing in 2013, Mr. Tzun blamed God for the crash. Ms. Durden blamed the immigration system.
“If it was an accident, I could deal with it, but this wasn’t an accident, because if that guy wasn’t in the country at 5:45 on July 12, 2012, my son would still be alive,” she said. (Mr. Tzun was deported in 2014.)
But nobody overseeing her son’s case seemed willing to view his death that way, she said. “You feel like you got the runaround,” she said.
Ms. Durden, 59, had come to the United States from Germany when she married an American in the Army, eventually becoming a citizen. He was a Democrat, so she was a Democrat. She had never thought much about the immigration debate before Dominic died. Now it was her whole life.
Then came Mr. Trump. Whenever she saw him, he greeted her with a “great big hug,” she recalled. “Dom’s mom,” he called her.
“He would say, ‘You’ll never be alone again. You’ll never have to fight this alone,’” said Ms. Durden, who went on to speak at three of his rallies.
[Video: Sabine Durden on undocumented immigrants: "Build the wall!" Watch on YouTube.]
The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was out there talking about the need to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When Ms. Durden heard that, she changed her voter registration to Republican the same day.
In a series of recent interviews, the families described a similar trajectory: The death of a loved one. The spasm of realizing that the other driver, or the gunman, was living in the country illegally. The political awakening — for the Republicans, a hardening toward illegal immigrants; for the Democrats, a quick, grim conversion. The relief, when another “angel mom” or “angel dad” saw them on the news and found them online.
Most of all, the fear that their children would diminish into fading news and Facebook tributes, horror stories circulated in the outer boroughs of the American right — until Mr. Trump thundered into their lives, bearing cameras.
Immigration was “one of those issues that, it didn’t affect me — I was busy working,” said Steve Ronnebeck, 50, whose 21-year-old son, Grant, was shot and killed as he worked overnight at a convenience store in Mesa, Ariz., in January 2015.
“As time went on and the more angry I got, that’s when I got more active,” he said. “This is how I deal with my grief.”
For another parent who came to the Beverly Hills meeting, Don Rosenberg, a self-described lifelong liberal from Westlake Village, Calif., it was hard to embrace Mr. Trump, even if he had the right idea about immigration.
As he watched Mr. Trump announce his presidential bid on TV, “I’m saying to myself, he’s talking about illegal immigration — why did it have to be Trump?” said Mr. Rosenberg, 64, whose 25-year-old son died in a motorcycle accident in 2010. He had been struck by a Honduran man in the country illegally. “To me, an immigration policy isn’t, ‘Build a wall, Mexico will pay for it.’”
Still, by the election, Mr. Rosenberg had come around. He said that he had not voted for either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump, knowing it was not likely to make a difference in California, but that if he had lived in a swing state, he would probably have cast his ballot for Mr. Trump.
V.I.P. Treatment
Here was the paradox of Donald Trump, the unfiltered tycoon who seemed as far away as Fifth Avenue and as close up as the living-room TV. Even as a legion of critics warned he was pandering to his fans on the way to betraying them, the alliance he had made with the families felt, to many of them, like an unshakable bond.
The thing was, he paid attention. And he never stopped.
After the Beverly Hills meeting, Mr. Shaw received a gift basket containing Mr. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” chocolates, and Trump-branded ties and cuff links, according to an account in The Wall Street Journal. At one point, Mr. Shaw flew on Mr. Trump’s private plane. At another, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, he cut a campaign commercial.
The other families received regular care from the campaign, too. A Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, would call or text at least once a month, inviting them to speak at rallies or just checking in. Some spoke regularly to Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, or to Hope Hicks, the campaign’s spokeswoman.
Mr. Miller, an advocate of restricting immigration and now a senior White House adviser, helped draft Mr. Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order directing the government to intensify immigration enforcement.
A few of the parents also regularly texted with Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s longtime bodyguard and current Oval Office aide. It was Mr. Schiller whom the president sent to hand-deliver a letter to James B. Comey informing him he was no longer director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
To find some of the families, Mr. Trump’s team had help from the Remembrance Project, a nonprofit founded in 2009 to draw attention to the victims of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants. It caught the Trump wave early, bringing several families to the Beverly Hills meeting and other campaign events and hosting a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump in Houston last fall.
As the campaign offered a national audience to more of the parents, however, many of the Remembrance Project’s members abandoned the group, chafing at what several said were its founder’s attempts to dictate what they said and even what they wore. Mr. Trump, they said, had allowed them their own voice.
Before going onstage at some events, Mr. Trump would shoo aides away for a private moment with the families.
“To me, I find it much more personal when the president comes up to you and says, ‘Steve, how are you doing?’” Mr. Ronnebeck said. “He knows my name. He doesn’t just, you know, speak the whole time. He listens.”
For the Trump campaign, the private cultivation paid off. In public, the families became some of the campaign’s most compelling witnesses.
They could be picked out by what they carried, the talismans of absence: the T-shirts printed with photographs of the smiling dead. The commemorative buttons. The ashes held close in a locket.
At one rally in Phoenix in August, a hush muted the crowd when Mr. Ronnebeck and other family members approached the microphone, one by one, to speak about a lost son or daughter.
“I truly believe that Mr. Trump is going to change things,” Mr. Ronnebeck said, his voice catching.
At the Republican National Convention, Mr. Shaw, Ms. Durden and another parent took turns speaking about their children. Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech was partly devoted to the story of Sarah Root, 21, who was killed in Nebraska the day after graduating from college by a Honduran immigrant who was driving drunk.
“I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family,” the nominee said. “But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting.”
[Video: 07/21/16 RNC The Story of Sarah Root Watch on YouTube.]
He also mentioned the case that, at least on the right, had come to define the dangers of illegal immigration: that of Kathryn Steinle, a 32-year-old woman shot to death on a San Francisco pier in 2015. The suspect was an ex-felon from Mexico who had been deported five times. A few months before Ms. Steinle’s death, the local authorities had released him from jail without notifying federal immigration agents.
“My opponent wants sanctuary cities,” Mr. Trump said, referring to local governments, including San Francisco, that limit their cooperation with immigration officials. “But where was the sanctuary for Kate Steinle?”
The president has since vowed to starve such cities of federal funding, but a judge has temporarily blocked his administration from doing so. The House is scheduled to vote this week on a bill, known as Kate’s Law, that would stiffen penalties for immigrants caught illegally re-entering the country after being deported.
For all the heat the Steinle case generated, however, her family kept a distance from the campaign, occasionally breaking their silence to voice discomfort with the way her death had become a political grenade. (Through their lawyer, they declined to comment.)
“For Donald Trump, we were just what he needed — beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a million times, a violent crime and yada, yada, yada,” Liz Sullivan, Ms. Steinle’s mother, told The San Francisco Chronicle in September 2015.
‘We’ve Chosen to Speak.’
Politics makes public playthings of private lives. As their losses came to eclipse everything else about them, the families became, in Mr. Trump’s telling, living testimonials to all that was broken about the immigration system.
Still, those who appeared on the campaign’s behalf said they had never felt like props. Mr. Trump was no more using them, they said, than Mrs. Clinton was using hardworking Hispanic families to humanize the issue.
“He’s never once asked us to speak,” said Michelle Root, 48, Sarah Root’s mother. “We’ve chosen to speak.”
It looked very different to the other side, of course. People on social media, and even some friends, did not hesitate to let them know that they thought they were being used. Lots of people called them racist. They insisted that they were not, emphasizing that they did not think all undocumented immigrants were bad.
A large body of research, accumulated over many years, has found that immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or to be imprisoned than native-born citizens.
For the families, such studies were beside the point. To them, illegal immigration was an epidemic of preventable deaths.
The glare of other people’s judgment did get to them sometimes. Mr. Ronnebeck took a break from social media for six weeks, as the anniversary of Grant’s death passed, then the inauguration, then Grant’s birthday.
“There’s people that think I’m a racist and there’s people out there that think I’m the devil,” he said. “It gets to a point where you just can’t do the negative anymore.”
Not for long, though. With Mr. Trump in the White House, they could take their message straight to the corridors of power. Some hope the president will revoke Obama-era protections for young undocumented immigrants; others pray to see the wall built.
“I think we could email or text or even pick up the phone, for some of them, and call them and have them pass it on,” Ms. Root said of her contacts in the White House. “And he would listen. He might not agree, and might not do it, but I know our voice would be heard.”
Greece, for example, should be able to devalue their currency to attract manufacturing within Greece. But instead it's locked into the Euro, and the Euro is all about what suits Germany.
There was a reason the UK never joined.
Total lack of integrity.
The Wisconsin Republican pointed to Obamacare rules that forbid insurance companies from charging more for people with preexisting conditions.
"We know why those premiums doubled," he opined. "We've done something with our health care system that you would never think about doing, for example, with auto insurance, where you would require auto insurance companies to sell a policy to somebody after they crash their car."
"States that have... guarantees for preexisting conditions, it crashes their markets," he continued. "It causes the markets to collapse. It causes premiums to skyrocket."
So there you have it folks. Having a pre-existing medical condition is apparently EXACTLY like getting in a car accident and then trying to buy insurance over the fact. And this highlights what I've been saying all along. Republicans are engaged in their own personal Calvinistic morality play, where if you get sick, you DESERVE to get sick, and you can essentially go f**k yourself. I'm not being hyperbolic, this is what they believe. They not only don't understand how the concept of insurance works, or how healthcare works in every other developed country on Earth, they also don't understand how humanity works. They actually think you DESERVE it if you have a pre-existing condition. That it is a divine measure of how good and worthy you are as a human being. Seriously, this shit is NOT new. Look up John Calvin and the concept of unconditional election, and you'll understand why this health care bill is written the way it is.
*A person hit with a condition that exists
It's not insurance if you already have a condition. It's semantics but call it what it is, a subsidy, not insurance...
Because a pre-existing condition is not, "40 minutes ago I got hit by a truck; I want to buy insurance from your company to cover my bills."
A pre-existing condition is, "40 years ago, I was born with a genetic predisposition to heart disease. I already paid for your insurance, so why aren't you covering my heart disease medication?"
As @Grond0 was saying, it needs to change and it is not gonna be easy. But just because ppl are resistant to change and it is hard on top of that, shouldn't mean the US shouldn't get with the darn program. Just to darn profit driven, this health industry we have.
This country needs to quit being the sheriff of the world, makin messes, and look after its own darn ppl better, for a change.