Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 28,773
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Trump appoints anti-gay Obamacare enemy as health secretary
Quote:
New York Times
If President-elect Donald J. Trump wanted a cabinet secretary who could help him dismantle and replace President Obama’s health care law, he could not have found anyone more prepared than Representative Tom Price[, who has been studying how to accomplish that goal for more than six years.
Mr. Trump has picked Mr. Price, a six-term Republican congressman, to be secretary of health and human services, according to a transition team official.
While some Republicans have attacked the Affordable Care Act without proposing an alternative, Mr. Price has introduced bills offering a detailed, comprehensive replacement plan in every Congress since 2009, when Democrats started work on the legislation. Many of his ideas are included in the “Better Way” agenda issued several months ago by House Republicans.
“Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration blatantly ignored the voices of the American people and rammed through a hyperpartisan piece of legislation that will have a disastrous effect on our nation’s health care system,” Mr. Price said shortly after Mr. Obama signed the bill in 2010.
The legislation Mr. Price has proposed, the Empowering Patients First Act, would repeal the Affordable Care Act and offer age-adjusted tax credits for the purchase of individual and family health insurance policies.
He has introduced legislation that would make it easier for doctors to defend themselves against medical malpractice lawsuits and to enter into private contracts with Medicare beneficiaries. Under such contracts, doctors can, in effect, opt out of Medicare and charge more than the amounts normally allowed by the program’s rules.
On the other hand, as secretary, Mr. Price would need a broader perspective. He would have to consider not only the interests of doctors, but also the needs of Medicare beneficiaries, Medicaid patients and taxpayers who finance those programs.
Speaking at a political conference in early 2010, Mr. Price said he was proud to join fellow conservatives in an effort to beat back a “vile liberal agenda.”
As secretary of health and human services, Mr. Price could carry out the advice he has given Mr. Obama: “Stop these mandatory demonstration projects.”
Mr. Price is also an outspoken opponent of abortion and has consistently received ratings of 100 percent from the National Right to Life Committee and scores of zero from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Gay rights groups have also been critical of Mr. Price. Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of GLAAD, formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said Mr. Price was “completely unfit” to be health secretary.
When the Supreme Court ruled last year that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage, Mr. Price said it was “not only a sad day for marriage, but a further judicial destruction of our entire system of checks and balances."
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Looks like they're going after Obamacare and Medicare after all
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