In Ploy To Weaken Obamacare, GOP Geniuses Give Obama More Power Over Obamacare

Back in November, the United States held an election that you might have heard about. And in that election one B. Barry Bamz trounced the ever loving shit out of some dude, what was his name, the guy with the hair? Unfortunately, the hair guy’s party held on to the House of Representatives and its caucus of addlepated numbfuck children who couldn’t find their own dicks with both hands and a map. Great, we thought, four more years of shrieking about PIGFORD! and BENGHAZI! and most importantly, OBAMACARE!

But there was hope for a brief moment when the nominal head of this merry band of dimwits, Tea Party blow-up fuck doll John Boehner, told Diane Sawyer days after the election that Obamacare was now the law of the land, and though he still claimed he hated it and would do what he could to change parts of it, the people had spoken. Was it possible, we wondered, that at the very least the House would stop with the fruitless repeal votes and talk about something else?

Ha ha, no:  

The House will vote again next week to repeal the 2010 health-care reform law, a decision by top Republican leaders designed in part to appease GOP freshmen lawmakers who have not had an opportunity to take a vote on the issue.

Okay fine, give the babies their binkies so they can go home and tell their constituents they participated in a purely symbolic vote for a repeal that the Senate will never take up and the president would never sign if it somehow got to his desk. Although who knows, maybe 38th time’s the charm? Meanwhile, the nuts have reclaimed their orange-colored blow-up fuck doll from the Rayburn Building’s lost-and-found and are manipulating its mouth hole to say what they want it to say:  

The top two Republicans in Congress informed President Obama on Thursday that they will refuse to fulfill their duty under the Affordable Care Act to recommend members of a new board with the power to contain Medicare spending…

In a letter to President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted their original opposition to Obamacare, reiterated their intent to repeal it entirely, and declared that they would not make any appointments to the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

The IPAB is an important component of the ACA. In order to slow the growth of Medicare spending for America’s aging population of diabetic Barcalounger sloths, it is imperative that we find ways to trim some of the program’s bloat while not cutting benefits, because old people need lots of medical care and thanks to global warming the old method of putting them on ice floes and shoving them out to sea will cease to be an option in the very near future. The IPAB would have the authority “to change what Medicare pays and how it pays for it—all without direct congressional approval.” That last part is particularly important, since right now that authority only rests with Congress and the medical industry has powerful lobbies that scream bloody murder if an elected representative so much as nods in the direction of cutting off the federal-money spigot.

(Congresspersons can’t admit to that last part since everyone hates lobbyists and Washington insiders. Luckily the GOP is chock full of useful idiots who will get the rubes riled up by labeling the IPAB a death panel that will genocide your grandparents and special-needs children, bortion your unborn babbies, order your Stage IV lung cancer be treated with Kenyan Voodoo magic chanting, and voila! No more trying to find reasonable solutions to problems!)

What this action by Orange Julius and Yertle means is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will pick the IPAB members that the law gave the opposition party in Congress the power to appoint. So Boehner and Yertle the Turtle just handed more power over Obamacare to the administration, which seems to us sort of an odd way of stopping the law from going into effect. But it is consistent with the GOP’s continued refusal to participate in governing the nation as part of its grand “Fuck Everything Up Until 2016 At Which Time America Maybe Will Just Give Up and Elect Ted Cruz President ” plan.

[ WaPo / TPM / MotherJones]