As everything falls apart on The Hill tonight, again, Sen. Ted Cruz’ speech writer and senior communications adviser Amanda Carpenter just had the temerity to tweet this…
It's almost November and I have no idea what my health plan will be or what it will cost in January. This. Is. Awful.
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) October 15, 2013
She must be joking, right? Apparently, she isn’t. Just completely and entirely tone deaf. Or just plain stupid. Congressional staffers are being forced to buy their health care on the Affordable Care Act exchanges because Republicans in the Senate added that requirement in an amendment during the fight over the ACA’s passage in 2010, hoping that it would be a poison pill to kill the bill. The Democrats called their bluff and said, ‘Okay, fine.’ And now Carpenter is whining about the uncertainty it appears to be causing her.
That, while she and her boss are bringing down the U.S. government and potentially the global economy, in an attempt to keep some 50 million Americans from getting health care at all. Amazing.
UPDATE: With Fitch issuing a warning tonight that they may soon be forced to downgrade the U.S. government’s AAA credit rating, thanks to the GOP’s Cruz-inspired threats to default on the debt limit, maybe Carpenter will soon have the chutzpah to whine about the drop in value of her 401k plan.
I take no schadenfreude for someone with health care uncertainty, but one must appreciate the irony…
Cry me a river.
When your core beliefs or your paycheck depend on your denial of reality, then eventually you crash into contradiction. If you are a typical partisan, you’re not aware of the impact, you don’t learn anything, and you don’t change.
But the open-minded can still have a good laugh. Too bad they are a vanishing breed (due to propaganda, distraction, and hardship).
I’ve had Twitter exchanges* with Amanda Carpenter, and I’d say “stupid” describes her best. She’s not exactly got an open mind.
*(like a lot of rigid ideologues on Twitter, her way of getting out of a back & forth discussion was to nick me as a spammer and I very briefly got suspended)
She’s as stupid & selfish as that creep Cruz and backwards as the ideology she & her lying boss advocate. The public option would have alleviated much of the discourse over healthcare in this country.
As we say, in Texas, to be kind to people who may be “intellectually challenged”.
Bless Her Little Heart.
Sometimes we add: “Who cares?”
If you think Amanda Carpenter is both tone deaf and hypocritical, consider this little segment from today’s Los Angeles Times column by Michael Hiltzik entitled “Does Congress deserve a raise?”, which, curiously, does not appear in the paper’s on-line version.
she should try relocating to cuba –
I called my Rep. Tom McClintock. His aide told me her husband is self-employed, and she went to work for government so she could get health insurance. She told me that I had chosen to be self-employed. I told her that not everyone can work for government!
I’m finding a lot of smug government workers these days who can’t figure out that I am paying for their paycheck, so why should I have to pay five to ten times what they do for health coverage?
hey, if you live in a red state that didn’t do their own state exchange, I’d be concerned about the federally run state exchanges, apparently they enrollment process to the private insurers is messed up…I think its a good thing congressional staffers will have to use exchanges, hopefully means they will get fixed quicker..
but I do hate people who try to detroy govt, do nothing to contribute to it complaining when some aspect govt isn’t working perfectly…put up or shut up
Dumb or not, this hypocritical scumbag is coping with the reality that many are discovering as they begin to crunch the numbers on the ACA.
A quick ACA calculation on the Kaiser Family Foundation site shows that a family of 2 making 100k/year in California (Placer County) would owe over 5,542/year each for healthcare. That is under the Bronze plan, which would only cover 60% of costs and the rest is out-of-pocket (which doesn’t include the 5k premium). It is over 7,447 for the silver plan. And you aren’t entitled to tax credits unless you make less than 400% of the Fed poverty line
This whole program is a joke. I am 100% in agreement that everyone should have healthcare, I just don’t understand why anyone would support this plan, especially the part that forces you, at the threat of thousands of dollars in fines to buy insurance. Why the fuck is this so expensive for people? Why can’t we just have universal healthcare funded in a responsible way?
Politics/Republicans? This is a great bullshit excuse for the one-party system to pretend to try to represent people while horrible policies get implemented under the guise of compromise. Not like politics matters anyway, who knows to what extent the election system is totally compromised and how many politicians are now in office who didn’t actually get the majority of the vote. I’m sure this will be getting worse over the years, if the reporting on this site is any indication.
Barring truly universal humane health coverage, how about laws regulating the cost of medical procedures and drugs so that insurance would be more affordable? Then a modest program to subsidize premiums for those who really can’t afford insurance but don’t qualify for medicare. Then increase medicare payments to doctors so that more doctors will accept medicare patients. How about making these things part of the effing ACA in the first place so it would live up to its name?
All of this could be funded with decreases in the defense budget, a 1% (or some tiny amount) financial transactions tax (“Wall Street Tax”), increased capital gains and corporate taxes, among other things.
There are a million other ways that creative thinkers really looking to help the most amount of people possible with hurting the least amount of people possible.
How are you supposed to get ahead in life unless you are making at least 80-100k for each adult household member? How can you put money away for kid’s college or emergencies, buy a home, start a business, eat high quality organic foods (i.e. stay healthy instead of eating the toxic shit most of our food supply has become), go on a vacation every couple of years? What can you accomplish when you owe 10k + per year, not to mention the 30-35% you are paying in Federal and State income taxes. So after all is said and done, around 45% of income is gone off the top. That’s socialist Euro status, and they get WAY better benefits than you or I under the ACA. Then you have to pay student loans, credit card debts racked up during the hard times before getting a decent job, rent, utilities, car costs, food, etc.
I don’t know what the average Bradblog reader makes in a year, but I think you would agree that a 50,000 salary does not a rich man make. After all income taxes are counted, and FICA taxes, you would walk away with roughly 30k for the year in a city like NYC. Add ACA costs and you are taking home 24,500. That is 50% of your salary to taxes and health insurance, which we can now officially consider a tax since you have no choice in the matter.
I hope this all doesn’t come off as callous, but I don’t understand a political system that bails out banks to the tune of trillions and allows there executives to keep tens of millions in bonuses nonetheless, but which isn’t increasing SS benefits or providing universal healthcare. At the same time, the system is enormously draining on people above the poverty line but still living paycheck to paycheck. The only part of taxes that I feel good about paying is SS and Medicare, because I know exactly what they are going for and those purposes are both practical and humane. I would gladly pay another thousand or fifteen hundred a year towards medicare, expand the rolls and increase quality of service available to medicare recipients, and scrap the ACA entirely.
But I guess nothing better could possibly have come out of a bill that basically no one who voted on it read in its entirety, whose final draft was provided six hours before the vote.
is it just me or does ted cruz look alot like joe mcarthy? hmmm?
SH, that’s about $650 per month for two people. I’m not sure what you’re used to paying, but that’s not that bad at all. My spouse and I, after my employer contribution, would actually pay about $200 more per month than that (if he were on my plan).
I am used to not buying any health insurance. However I am lucky recently to have insurance through my wife’s company which costs 300 for two and completely covers all doctor visits except 20 dollars copay. I don’t have to pay 40% of each service out of pocket and it is half the cost to us. If some relatively small NY based posthouse can pull this off why cant the entire fed govt give us this kind of deal? ACA is not a good deal. Two healthy people should not be forced to spend 650 per month on health insurance. Or lower our tax burden proportionally. So yeah I could probably swing it but I would have almost no money left over each month and shitty health insurance. How is that a good deal? The only way it is a good deal is if you hapoily accept the medical industry and insurance industry screwing us over big time. In that case, ignoring any thing else the gov’t could have done to control the crazy costs, ACA doesn’t look horrible.
Checked the math. At 5500 each per year 2 people would owe around 950 per month.