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Senators have moved to salvage Obamacare following Donald Trump’s decision last week to scrap critical subsidies that underpin the health law.

The president – who last week announced he was ending the subsidies to insurance companies while claiming the ACA was “imploding” – said he approved of the plan and that the White House had been involved in the negotiations.

Democrats have accused him of scrapping them to “sabotage” Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law following repeated failed attempts by Republicans to repeal it, and the president’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has praised him because the decision is “gonna blow that thing [Obamacare] up”.

Carlson argued that white supremacy is a fake crisis cooked up by Democrats as a campaign ploy. “It’s actually not a real problem in America,” Carlson said, adding later, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

violence tied to far-right ideologies have killed roughly as many Americans since 9/11 as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State combined.

The president has often called Hispanic migration an “invasion” — language echoed in a manifesto police believe the accused El Paso shooter posted online decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Democrats were already talking about health care before the coronavirus, but the outbreak gives new urgency to a central issue for the party.

The future of America’s health insurance system has already been a huge part of the 2020 presidential race. At campaign events over the past year, voters have shared stories of cancer diagnoses, costly medications and crushing medical debt.

“Health care was always going to be a big issue in the general election, and the coronavirus epidemic will put health care even more top of mind for voters,”

House Republicans narrowly passed a controversial bill to revise Affordable Care Act, helping to fulfill a major campaign promise but sending the measure to an uncertain fate in the closely divided Senate

Passage in the House by a vote of 217 to 213 capped weeks of fits and starts for the GOP and represented an enormous victory for President Trump, who repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail last year to repeal and replace Obamacare but has struggled to secure legislative wins early in his president

Democrats, meanwhile, predicted that the measure would be devastating for Americans’ health-care coverage but also, on a political level, for Republicans who voted for it

it would confirm the fears of Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman, who wrote in a July 2016 column in The Wall Street Journal that poor reporting about pre-discount premium increases led people to believe that their own out-of-pocket costs were increasing. “People may read news stories on premium increases as validating criticisms they have heard about the ACA,” Altman wrote. Eighty percent of the people in that month’s Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll had seen reports on premium increases, and over two-thirds of those falsely believed that the increases applied to all plans or just to employer-based coverage. Poll respondents also consistently overestimated premium spikes, mistaking the highs reported for average increases, which in major cities hovered around 10 percent.

The second piece of Kogan and Wood’s argument is that premium increases would likely have been smaller without what they term Republican “sabotage,” and that the sabotage also affected the election independent of information gaps.

A campaign by Republican legislators to block market-stabilizing provisions and payments to insurers, block all legislation designed to tweak the health-care law, and promise a full repeal of the bill in 2016 almost certainly contributed to market instability in the exchanges and rising premiums.

Five men and two women -- half the jury -- had been chosen to serve during the trial in Minneapolis by the time court adjourned on Friday.

Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, a White former Minneapolis Police officer, placed his knee on Floyd's neck for an extended period while Floyd pleaded, "I can't breathe." His final moments were captured on video, and his death led to widespread protests against police brutality and racism under the banner Black Lives Matter as well as incidents of unrest and looting.

Eric Nelson is questioning the prospective jurors for the defense, while Steve Schleicher is questioning them for the prosecution. Judge Peter Cahill is presiding over the trial.

Polls show Democrats are favored to expand their control of the House on Tuesday night. Nonpartisan analysts predict Democrats will win a net of somewhere between five and 20 seats and GOP strategists said keeping Democrats’ gains in the single digits would be a victory for them.

Both parties are closely watching the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Susan Brooks in Indiana. Donald Trump won this district, located in the northern Indianapolis suburbs, by 12 points in 2016, and a Democratic victory there could signal that his weakness with suburban women is weighing down Republicans lower on the ballot.

Polls show some races are tight in places that President Trump won in 2016. They include two open seats currently held by Republicans: Virginia’s Fifth District, where Democrat Cameron Webb is running against Republican Bob Good, in a mostly rural district currently held by Republican Rep.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought health care to the forefront of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump has backed a lawsuit to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health care law also known as ObamaCare, and repeatedly pledged to nominate Supreme Court justices who would rule against it. 

Biden, meanwhile, has laid out a plan to expand the ACA by adding a public option that's open to all Americans but preserves the option for individuals to keep their private insurance.

Another racial text—published by the nation’s premier social-science organization, the American Economic Association, and classified by the historian Evelynn Hammonds as “one of the most influential documents in social science at the turn of the 20th century”—elicited more shock in 1896.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind,” Frederick Hoffman wrote in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Hoffman concluded from “the plain language of the facts” that black Americans were better off enslaved. They are now “on the downward grade,” he wrote, headed toward “gradual extinction.”

Hoffman knew his work was “a most severe condemnation of moderate attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their elevated positions.” He rejected that sort of assimilationist racism, in favor of his own segregationist racism. The data “speak for themselves,” he wrote. White Americans had been naturally selected for health, life, and evolution. Black Americans had been naturally selected for disease, death, and extinction. “Gradual extinction,” the book concluded, “is only a question of time.

Barrett again declined to preview how she would rule on potential cases during her confirmation hearing, as she did for the previous two days, seeking to portray herself as an independent judge without an agenda.

Lindsey Graham seemed to suggest that Barrett would vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act in an upcoming case because of a judicial principle known as severability, defending himself from political attacks in his tough reelection race against Democrat Jaime Harrison.

"From a conservative point of view, generally speaking, we want legislative bodies to make laws, not judges," Graham said later. "Would it be further true that if you can preserve a statue you try to, to the extent possible?"

"You are moving ahead with this nomination because you can. But might does not make right," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on Thursday. "In your hearts, you know that's what's happening here is not right ... history will haunt this raw exercise of power." In 2016, Republicans used their majority in the upper chamber to deny then-President Barack Obama a Supreme Court nominee, waiting until after Donald Trump had been elected and he could submit a name of his own. And although senators including the Judiciary Committee's chairman, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had suggested they wouldn't do that again, they are.

In Democrats' telling, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., need Barrett confirmed as soon as possible so she will be in position to hear arguments in a case in November that could affect the Affordable Care Act.

She, Coons, Blumenthal and the other Judiciary Committee members warn that the Barrett-era Supreme Court could be consequential across a number of other issues, too, and they cited Barrett's unwillingness to give substantive answers about climate change, voting practices and even Trump's claim about his power to pardon himself.

"President Trump has — from Day 1 — pushed for repealing or overturning the ACA, and Joe Biden is pushing to build and expand on it,"

Biden would allow people to enroll in Medicare at age 60 and would also try to create a new federal health program similar to Medicare, which he calls a public option.

Biden has remarked often that he would "listen to science" in handling the pandemic, drawing a contrast with Trump, who has repeatedly contradicted his top health officials.

Biden ran a heavily policy-focused campaign, releasing dozens of lengthy and ambitious plans ranging from large-scale economic and environmental initiatives to broad actions on racial justice, education and health care.

Biden heads into office with strategies to address the COVID-19 crisis and the search for a vaccine as well.

The sheer volume of Biden's plans could make it a challenge to execute them all. On immigration alone, he has proposed more than a dozen initiatives to complete within 100 days of taking office, a feat that could prove difficult to execute.

WASHINGTON — The bulk of the Affordable Care Act, the sprawling 2010 health care law that is President Barack Obama’s defining domestic legacy, appeared likely to survive its latest encounter with the Supreme Court in arguments on Tuesday.

“It does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the law in place,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made a similar point. “Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero,” he said.

The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday

with the future of the 2010 landmark health care law championed by Democrats and attacked by Republicans

two justices on the conservative wing of the bench expressing skepticism toward arguments the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety.

Health insurance is supposed to provide financial protection against the medical costs of poor health. Yet many insured people still face the risk of enormous medical bills for their “covered” care. A team of researchers estimated that as of mid-2020, collections agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills, reflecting care delivered before the Covid-19 pandemic

that’s more than the amount held by collection agencies for all other consumer debt from nonmedical sources combined

three-fifths of that debt was incurred by households with health insurance.

President Biden has made Obamacare an even bigger deal, in a way that is improving life for millions of Americans.

The Biden administration just announced that 21 million people have enrolled for coverage through the A.C.A.’s health insurance marketplaces, up from around 12 million on the eve of the pandemic. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage that is standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, have gotten close.

And this gain, unlike some of the other good things happening, is all on Biden, who both restored aid to people seeking health coverage and enhanced a key aspect of the system.