If you have been following the Sunday shows, post-inauguration—and really, we don't recommend it—you will recognize the pattern. Members of Team Trump show up; members of Team Trump lie their asses off on national television; hosts say thank you for joining us today and we all move on with our lives. Today's topic was the Republican repeal of healthcare reforms.
Top officials from Donald Trump’s administration fanned out across political talk shows on Sunday to sell the merits of the American Health Care Act, the House bill intended to replace former President Barack Obama’s signature health law.
Incidentally, calling it the American Health Care Act is peak Republicanism. How should we reform the Affordable Healthcare Act? Why, we'll take out the affordable and replace it with American. American healthcare isn't supposed to be affordable, it's supposed to be [loud screeching eagle sounds.]
Tom Price, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said in a pre-recorded interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that under the administration’s plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, more people will have health insurance coverage, and costs will fall.
This is hokum. Not even the Republican architects of the bill believe this; Paul Ryan is going around saying of course the Republican bill is going to result in fewer Americans have health insurance, but that's just because freedom 'n stuff; the notion that costs will fall depends entirely on who you're talking about. The cost to individuals will absolutely increase, because it's written into the Republican plan. The cost to hospitals will increase, because they'll be dealing with more uninsured Americans. The cost to the federal government will increase, and so much so that Republicans have been mounting preemptive attacks on the Congressional Budget Office in anticipation of that office's report spelling out just how much this whole charade will be costing. Tom Price isn't just blowing smoke, Tom Price is rollin' coal from the confines of his office chair.
“If you create a system that’s accessible for everybody and you provide the financial feasibility for everybody to get coverage, then we have a great opportunity to increase coverage over where we are right now,” Price said. “Nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we’re going through, understanding that they’ll have choices.”
If nobody will be worse off financially means the people who will be worse off financially will probably die quickly enough we don't have to count them, that might check out. Any other interpretation is, again, proven false by the actual text of the actual plan. The plan is to reduce subsidies and reduce coverage requirements; the whole point of repealing "Obamacare" is to wipe clean the new rules that led to millions of Americans being able to finally afford coverage. Being pinned with a preexisting condition is not a choice. Being unable to afford desired health insurance is not a choice.
Which is, among other things, one of the main reason we keep getting these obsequiously sympathetic news stories about all the salt-of-the-earth Trump voters who are going to lose the health insurance currently keeping them alive and golly gee, who could ever have foreseen such an outcome.
Tom Price seems to be under the impression that nobody will be checking up on these things, after the repeal goes through—that there will be no newspaper stories, anywhere, following up with the millions of people who currently have insurance and who will not have it after the repeal. Perhaps the cancer patients and diabetes sufferers will be dismissed as paid protesters.
Again, the whole point of "repeal" is to strip away the coverage provided by the Affordable Care Act. There's no budgetary reason to do so: Repeal is expected to cause a huge hit to the deficit and weaken Medicaid dramatically, perhaps fatally. There's no moral reason to do it: For all the whining about Americans having the freedom to die alone in a ditch if they want to, those people can pay a small penalty and plop themselves down in whichever ditch they like. But rich people want the tax cut, and insurance companies want to be able to reduce coverage, and Republicans who labeled reforms Obamacare in an effort to demonize them as part and parcel of the scary black man's supposed reign of tyranny have now backed themselves into the corner of needing to strip healthcare from their own voters in order to keep their campaign promise of doing exactly that.
So Tom Price goes on the Sunday shows and lies his behind off on national television, over and over, trying to spin a story where repeal doesn't end up in catastrophe for all the people who finally were able to gain health insurance only because of the reforms Tom Price is attempting to strip from them.
Thank you for being with us today, Tom Price. What an asset to your party you are.