Republican Empty Promises over Preexisting Conditions they'll never want to pay for!!!

Republicans can't seem to shake their biggest issue in 2016 that gave us Trump; repealing ObamaCare.

They failed badly at repeal because they never got close to an agreement on a replacement plan that didn't take 20 to 30 million Americans health care away, according to the CBO.

Desperate Election Year Hail Mary: They're now promising to support coverage for preexisting conditions, a very expensive requirement that even the ACA had a problem reigning in. Paul Ryan's disturbing and scary looking clone Bryan Steil doesn't mean a word of his support. By the way, Trump is trying to do away with coverage:

Bryan Steil is running to bring Wisconsin style solutions to Washington:1. Protect Pre-Existing Conditions

Republican Howard Marklein pretends he doing something about preexisting conditions, rural broadband, and fixing roads...nice try:



Where would the funding come from? High-risk pools were funded by taxing insurers who then passed that cost onto everyone's monthly premiums. And that made health insurance even more unaffordable to even healthy Americans. It even gave birth to those unaffordable high deductibles HSA's.

Covering Preexisting Conditions Impossible under Republicans, and they know it: WPR put together the best report detailing this GOP created mess, a mess they hope their voters never catch onto:

Republicans have been campaigning against the law known as Obamacare for nearly a decade. Despite all of its difficulties, for many people, the law is better than the health care system it replaced. 

"In so many ways, change aimed at creating more and lower prices for millions of Americans," said Trump during a White House ceremony last October. But short-term plans don't cover much because they don't have to. They're not even considered insurance under the ACA. They were meant to be temporary, used by people in between jobs.

Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has called them "junk plans" and the Wisconsin Medical Society is against them, saying the coverage often isn’t adequate.

Short-term plans don’t have to take people with pre-existing medical conditions or provide benefits like coverage for maternity, mental health, prescription drugs and substance abuse treatment. They can last up to 364 days and be renewed for up to 36 months. 

Republicans say they'd bring back a health care option known as high-risk pools. These high-cost plans were often the only option for people with expensive medical problems before the ACA. Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senate candidate Leah Vukmir says they worked before and they could work again. "I support protecting people with pre-existing conditions. We did it here in Wisconsin before it was even part of Obamacare. I support bringing health care decisions back to the states," said Vukmir during an interview on Wisconsin Public Television’s Here & Now special on the U.S. Senate race.

Wisconsin had a high-risk pool until 2014 that was touted as a national model. But it had high premiums and a lifetime limit on benefits. That worried cancer groups. 

Going back to that system could be especially difficult now, said Nancy Wenzel, the CEO of the Wisconsin Association of Health Plans. That's because more people have pre-existing conditions today compared to when Wisconsin's high-risk pool went away. "If we’re talking about the population today, it’s 10 times that amount. So we can’t just plug and play a solution of the past," she said.

The numbers bear that out. Wisconsin's high-risk pool covered 24,000 people at its peak.Today, 200,000 Wisconsin residents use the ACA's private marketplace today.

Democrats forcing Wisconsin Republicans to run on issues they've hated, ignored.

It's jaw-dropping, but not surprising, to see every Republican candidate touting their desire to bring rural broadband to all areas of the state. But they've done near nothing the last eight years of their supermajority to make that happen. They even turned back federal money to speed up the process.

Here's just one example: Republican Howard Marklein pretending he cares about rural broadband, preexisting conditions, and deteriorating roads...ah, no!:



We've seen how the "free market" works in Wisconsin, especially when it comes to rural broadband. Makes you wonder how Republicans can keep telling the same old lies about the wonders of the private sector:

Without government assistance, broadband providers say, they couldn't afford to extend the service to sparsely populated areas because there aren't enough customers to justify the cost.

The easily congested and not-so-fast wireless rural system now being installed has frustrated those who were told this was the solution. Funny how electric and telephone wires found their way into remote rural areas, huh?  It proves it can be done...why not today? But Walker Republicans didn't care until Democrats chose to run on this stuff:

Feb. 18, 2011: One of the governor’s first acts back in 2012 was to turn away nearly $23 million in grant funding that would have allowed the state to expand fiber optic broadband networks to 82 schools and 385 library facilities. We lost 150 full-time jobs that could have been created by this project.

"The state taxpayers would have been on the hook for the entire amount if the state could not meet the grant's precise requirements," Mike Huebsch said in a memo to school and library associations. "This is simply not an acceptable risk." 

The most recent state budget contains only $6 million spread over four years for broadband deployment.  

Imagine this from Scott Walker: Yet Minnesota's Democratic Governor took his billion dollar budget surpluses to expand broadband:

The Minnesota Office of Broadband Development has already managed $30 million in broadband investment in that state since it launched in January 2014. The legislature recently approved a $10 million annual investment in broadband expansion, and Gov. Dayton has proposed investing $100 million of the state’s nearly $2 billion budget surplus in bringing broadband to rural communities.