All You Need To Know About The GOP Primary Candidates

As Texas Governor Rick Perry enters the 2012 presidential election race and Tim Pawlenty abandons it, we thought we’d remind you what you’re voting for if you decide to vote for any of them. We’re hoping that you won’t vote for any of them, of course, but there may be some Independent voters and disgruntled Republicans who are fed up with political posturing and want to see the country straightened out.

The list of things that the Republicans have blocked since gaining power in the House is long, ranging from denying benefits for 9/11 responders to benefits for homeless veterans. If anyone is “un-American”, it is surely the GOP. So, if you decide to vote for any of the Republican primary election candidates, here’s a list of just some of the things that they’ve pledged to do:

• Continue to give the richest Americans huge tax breaks at the expense of the rest of us.
• Continue to give corporations tax breaks for moving facilities and jobs offshore.
• Increase subsidies for oil and gas companies, some of our largest and the most profitable corporations.
• Rescind the healthcare reforms. Here are some of the new benefits that have gone into effect and that the Republicans want to take away:
• Relief for four million seniors who hit the Medicare Prescription Drug “Donut Hole.”
• Free preventive care – all new plans must cover certain preventive services such as mammograms and colonoscopies without charging a deductible, co-pay or coinsurance.
• Making lifetime limits on insurance coverage illegal.
• Annual limits on insurance coverage are no longer allowed, or strictly regulated.
• Insurance companies are prohibited from dropping coverage when people get ill or for technicalities.
• The law provides consumers with an easy way to appeal to their insurance company and to an outside board if the company denies coverage or a claim.
• Coverage for early retirees – the new law creates a $5 billion program to help people who retire before age 65 maintain the affordable care they need.
• Funds for rebuilding the primary care workforce.
• Seniors on Medicare can:
• Make an annual wellness visit with a doctor and get a personalized prevention plan, including end-of-live planning, at no cost.
• Get immunizations and many screenings without co-pays.
• Patients who are also on Medicare Prescription Drug Plans will now be eligible for a 50% discount on brand name drugs. That discount that will increase each year until the “donut hole” is eliminated in 2020.
• Community health centers that provide free or low cost care will see new federal funds to help support those centers. Specifically, for services that receive a Grade A or B from the United States Preventive Services Task Force, the health center will be reimbursed 100 percent, instead of the previous maximum of 80 percent.
• Insurance companies will now be required to spend 80 to 85% of the premiums they collect on medical care, or activities that improve the quality of care. Insurers who fail to meet that must provide policy holders with a rebate instead of pocketing the excess premiums.
• Parents can now keep their adult children on their health insurance until the age of 26, rather than 19 or upon graduation from college.
• All health care insurance plans must cover children under the age of 19, no matter what pre-existing conditions exist.
• Destroy the Social Security program by handing the funds over to the gamblers on Wall Street – the same ones who destroyed our economy in 2008 and caused the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression.
• Apply the same warped logic to Medicare and Medicaid, by removing benefits and handing the funds to Wall Street and all responsibility for providing services to the private health insurers. The same insurers who are gouging the rest of us and who are responsible for making health care in America twice as expensive and far less effective than health care programs in all other developed countries.
• Take away women’s rights to decide whether or not they want to go ahead with an abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.
• Cut funding for protecting and cleaning up the environment, enforcing nationwide educational standards and safeguarding our food supplies.
• Remove new regulations that were imposed on Wall Street and other financial institutions after the collapse of 2008 and rollback older ones to make it even easier for them to make money at our expense.
• Dismantle the labor unions to make it even easier for corporations to dominate all of American life, including the ability to exert massive influence on elections.
• Make it harder for minorities and the poor to vote against them by conjuring up false election fraud claims and making it harder for people to exert their constitutional right to vote.
• Eliminate the Federal Reserve Bank so that Congress can print its own money and hand as much of the government’s tax revenues to corporations as possible.
• Abolish all gun control laws, making it even easier for the mentally ill and convicted felons to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
• Modify the Constitution to bias it against religions that they don’t like.
• Allow schools to teach religious dogma, such as “Intelligent Design” (sic), rather than scientific theories, such as evolution.

If you’re OK with all of the above, go ahead and vote for your favorite GOP candidate. It’s your right. It won’t really matter which one, as they’re all equally bent on destroying our great nation. In any case, it will be the influence of the corporations, many of them foreign-owned, that will dominate our elections from now on. The Republican and Tea Party candidates are merely their puppets.