With crumbling public education, crumbling infrastructure, low wage, insecure jobs and sky rocketing health care costs survival for the poorest Americans can only be managed on a day to day basis. Australian professor Philip Alston, a United Nations special rapporteur on extreme ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

When the great turn-of-the-twentieth-century labor leader Samuel Gompers was quoted as saying “Reward your friends, punish your enemies,” he was putting forth a practical if somewhat Machiavellian approach to dealing with politicians on behalf of the little guy. Flash forward to ...read more

• By Rich Herschlag
  Nov 9, 2018

It's finally over folks. Senate Republican leaders who have spent the past god knows how many years attempting to destroy Obamacare have officially pulled the plug on their latest ridiculous ACA replacement plan. They had planned a vote on the measure at the end of the month, ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

You can almost always be completely certain that whatever policy proposals the Republicans come up with, they will hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest. From social welfare to health care, the Republican answer to everything is less government, more private industry, ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

The Trump administration's announcement that it is slashing the Affordable Care Act advertising budget by a whopping 90% is the kind of move that wins support from his ignorant base, but results in people dying and health care costs going up for everyone else. Reported Vox: ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that a free market ideologue and political hack would distort the truth and omit inconvenient facts to make their point, but House Speaker Paul Ryan's latest Obamacare lie takes Republican dishonesty to new, truly repellant levels. ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

Rather than work with Democrats to reform Obamacare so that it works more efficiently, covers more people, and keeps the cost of care down, Trump and the GOP have engaged in a terrifying "burn it to the ground and offer nothing as a replacement" strategy that has failed on ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

We'll have more on this tomorrow, but great news for the millions of Americans who stood to lose their health care during the epic drama that unfolded in the Senate tonight. From CNN:  The Senate has dealt a devastating setback to the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

John McCain has brain cancer and if the diagnosis is correct, his remaining life expectancy can range anywhere between 12 to 60 months in the best case scenario. As an eighty year old man who was in the armed services, fought for his country in Vietnam, suffered through torture ...read more

• By Robert Covington, Jr.
  Nov 9, 2018

Every rational analysis of every version of Trumpcare the GOP has attempted to replace Obamacare with leads to the horrifying prospect of thousands of Americans dying because they can no longer afford health insurance. These are not fictional statistics, but real world effects ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Jul 25, 2017

No matter how many meaningless superlatives Donald Trump blurts on Twitter, and no matter how many times the congressional Republicans try to pass something, Trumpcare will always amount to a de facto repeal of Obamacare and, with it, tens of millions of Americans will lose ...read more

• By Bob Cesca
  Nov 9, 2018

You really don't need to know too much about the Senate Health Care Bill that has now been shelved until at least July 11th. Why? Because there really isn't too much to it, as Paul Krugman pointed out on Twitter today in a very simple yet brutal chart:  You can discount Trump ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

If you think that the Republican health care bill proposed in the Senate only affects poor people and minorities, you would be completely wrong. The New Republic's Brian Beutler makes a powerful point about just how important the Affordable Care Act has been for everyday ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

The only way to stop the GOP from wrecking health care in America is to get as much information out about their ludicrous plan as possible, and then act on it by demanding your congressman or woman doesn't vote for it.   Yesterday, President Obama weighed in on the bill proposed ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

Trump began his remarks in the Rose Garden by saying Trumpcare -- the American Health Care Act -- wasn't passed for the Republican Party, it was passed for everyone.... To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you access to the magazine and all ...read more

• By Bob Cesca
  Nov 9, 2018

The Washington Post's Paul Weldman accurately describes the health care bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives that guts funding for states to help those with pre-existing conditions pay for insurance:  The health-care bill that the House of Representatives ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

The Right wing's never ending war on poor Americans and the sick is far from being over. After last month's monumentally embarrassing set back for the Trump administration, the president is now looking for another deal that would woo hard right House Republicans who thought the ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf explains why the right wing media helped tank Trumpcare and the repeal of the ACA: Over the last eight years, lots of responsibly written critiques of Obamacare have been published in numerous publications, and folks reading the aforementioned ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

The Republican healthcare plan called the American HealthCare Act suffered a monumental defeat of historic proportion on Friday March 24th, 2017. The bill was promoted by President Donald Trump and Republican leadership as repeal and replace legislation that would finally rid ...read more

• By Robert Covington, Jr.
  Nov 9, 2018

If you’ve been following the Republican’s spectacular failure with the American Health Care Act (a.k.a. Trumpcare — He loves to put his name on things. Make him own that shit.), then you’re probably already aware of the now-inescapable revelations from this endeavor, but they ...read more

• By Mike Redmond
  Nov 9, 2018

Speaking with Frank Rich at the NY Mag, Alex Carp outlines why Trumpcare is essentially finished, no matter what plays out over the next few weeks:  But let’s say this bill does limp its way to the Senate. There, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are lying in wait to trash it as Obamacare ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

One of the reasons why people like myself spent the better part of 18 months desperately pleading with the American public to vote for whoever won the Democratic primary was to protect millions of Americans from Republicans destroying Obamacare and booting them off of their ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018

One of the many reasons why Donald Trump has been such a disaster, and will continue to be a disaster, is because the only rules he follows are the whimsical, ignorant demands of his loyalists. In other words, Trump doesn't care about any boundaries on the presidency other than ...read more

• By Bob Cesca
  Nov 9, 2018

Whether you call it AHCA, Trumpcare, Ryancare, Whocares, or Obamacare-lite, one thing is certain about the new Republican sponsored healthcare bill—it’s not as draconian as most of these heartless, self-righteous geezers wanted it to be. Because when you get a bunch of hypocrite ...read more

• By Rich Herschlag
  Mar 20, 2017