Paul Ryan’s round-the-clock dishonesty is well known (except to a certain contingent of D.C. pundits), but he outdid himself during his appearance on Face the Nation today. The number of dishonest statements as he tried to sell his his health care bill were particularly notable, and I invite folks to read the full transcript for completeness. (Note that he appears in two separate segments.)
But what really stood out to me this morning was the juvenile but destructively insidious nature of his lies about the number of people who are going to lose their heath insurance coverage under Mr. Ryan’s bill — people who are going to suffer and, in many instances, die as a result. Mr. Ryan’s lies on this point have moved to scandalous because he is now openly denying that any health insurance coverage crisis even exists.
1. The Republican plan doesn't cover less people; those people don’t want the coverage.
DICKERSON: . . . Among the big questions that remain unanswered about the Republican health care bill are how much will it cost and how many people might lose coverage if enacted in its current form?
RYAN: . . . The one thing I’m certain will happen is CBO will say, well, gosh, not as many people will get coverage. You know why? Because this isn’t a government mandate. This is not the government makes you buy what we say you should buy, and therefore the government thinks you’re all going to buy it. So there’s no way we can -- you can compete with on paper a government mandate with coverage . . . . we’re not going to make an American do what they don’t want to do. You get it if you want it. That’s freedom.
Republicans have long played semantic games trying to confuse and replace the crucial fact of “coverage” with a vague, meaningless notion of “access” to health insurance. But Mr. Ryan above goes beyond this simple lie to assert that the only people who don't have health insurance are those that didn't want it in the first place. Indeed, as he lies: “You get it if you want it. That’s freedom.”
2. It’s unknowable how many will lose their insurance under the Republican plan because that population only consists of people who choose not to have coverage.
DICKERSON: How many people are going to lose coverage under this new —
RYAN: I can’t answer that question. It’s up to people. Here -- here’s the premise of your question. Are you going to stop mandating people buy health insurance? People are going to do what they want to do with their lives because we believe in individual freedom in this country. So the question is, are we providing a system where people have access to health insurance if they choose to do so? And the answer is yes. But are we going to have some nice looking spreadsheet that says we, the government of the American -- of the United States are going to make people buy something and, therefore, they’re all going to buy it? No. That’s the fatal conceit of Obamacare in the first place.
So it’s not our job to make people do something that they don’t want to do. It is our job to have a system where people can get universal access to affordable coverage if they choose to do so or not. That’s what we’re going to be accomplishing.
Here, we see Mr. Ryan take his lies to their logical conclusion — there is no health insurance crisis in this country for policymakers to even discuss or comprehend. Whether or not coverage exists is “up to the people,” a personal “choice,” and a problem that the government “can’t answer.” After all, government shouldn’t “make people do something that they don’t want to do.”
These lies are no longer meant to sell or disguise an inadequate solution. Rather Mr. Ryan’s lies are intended to convince that there is no problem in the first place. That is a scandal.
On this point, Mr. Ryan was at least honest about one thing: Republicans are not proposing a healthcare bill; they are only proposing a tax cut:
RYAN: And we are taking another entitlement, Obamacare, which is crashing and blowing up our fiscal problem, and repealing it, and replacing it with good tax policy that equalizes the tax treatment of health care and gives people more choice and more freedom.
I am not overly critical of John Dickerson’s interview here because it plainly fell into the model of “give them enough rope to hang themselves,” and on that score Mr. Dickerson’s interview was a success.
But something different happened here today, and a new type of egregious lie was publicly introduced by the Republican Speaker. In that case, and with the lie repeated so unapologetically, Mr. Dickerson should have tackled the problem directly. Q. How can you pretend that the tens of millions of people lacking health insurance coverage merely reflect personal decisions? Q. What evidence do you rely on that people under Obamacare didn't want health coverage but were “mandated” to buy it? What percentage of that group consist of such people? Q. By denying that health insurance coverage is financially out of reach for many people under your plan, aren’t you just lying to yourself . . . trying to hide your culpability? Q. You are arguing that we don't have a health insurance coverage problem at all. That this is just a question of personal freedom. How can you possibly make such an argument?
When a politician like Speaker Ryan is this brazen and open about his intentions, the obvious necessity is to simply report it. Just let the headline read:
House Speaker Says Healthcare Bill Not Designed To
Increase Coverage; Asserts That Coverage Crisis Does Not Exist
Report that headline honestly once or thrice and I think Republicans won't feel as comfortable giving the performance that Speaker Ryan gave today. Either way, the public debate will at least be honest.