Campaign Action
Apparently the strategy among Republicans for selling Trumpcare is to tell the most brazen lie they can come up with and just power through with it. In case you missed the Sunday shows, it's clear that the White House and Senate Republicans are coordinating their message, and that message is that no on will lose their healthcare under Trumpcare, and even more astonishingly dishonest, the $834+ billion that they would cut from Medicaid isn't a cut.
For example, presidential whatever-she-is Kellyanne Conway told George Stephanopoulos that slicing upward of a trillion dollars out of the program "are not cuts to Medicaid," and then gave the old "flexibility" argument: slows the rate for the future and it allows governors more flexibility for the future with Medicaid dollars, "This slows the rate for the future and it allows governors more flexibility for the future with Medicaid dollars." What she doesn't say, of course, is that flexibility is to decide whether to kill old and infirm people out of nursing homes or stop providing care for children. Then this: "If you are currently in Medicaid, if you became [a recipient] ... through the Obamacare expansion, you are grandfathered in. We’re talking about in the future." A future when, she finally conceded, they are making cuts. "We don’t see them as cuts, it’s slowing the rate of growth in the future and getting Medicaid back to where it was."
That's egregiously untrue—the bill ends the nature of Medicaid as an open-ended source of funding to states to help cover low income people as necessary. If there's a large natural disaster that forces people out of work, or an opioid epidemic, or a big economic downturn leaving lots of people unemployed, states respond with Medicaid. Trumpcare ends that, sending a fixed amount of funding to states, and making sure that the funding available shrinks every year in relation to the rate of inflation until it withers away and dies.
Make your Republican senator feel the heat. Call their office EVERY DAY at (202) 224-3121 to demand that they say NO to ripping health care away from millions of Americans. No on Trumpcare. Then, tell us how it went.
But that's the clear line that Republicans have settled on, since it's the same one Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) tried to use on Face the Nation. "The Senate bill will codify and make permanent the Medicaid expansion, and in fact we'll have the federal government pay the lion share of the cost." That's actually the current law, Obamacare, he's describing there. He continued, "Obamacare created a new category of eligibility: working-aged, able-bodied adults with no dependents for the first time became eligible for Medicaid if their income is below 138 percent of the poverty level. We're going to continue that eligibility. No one loses coverage." If by "no one" he means "no more than 14 million people."
As outrageous as Toomey's and Conway's lies are, they weren't the worst. Trump's HHS Secretary and fellow grifter Tom Price told CNN's Dana Bash that "the plan that we would put in place, would not allow individuals to fall through the cracks. […] We would not pull the rug out from under anybody. We would not have individuals lose coverage that they want for themselves and for their family. We want to make certain that health care is available to all Americans." And this man is in charge of the nation's healthcare system. We are so fucked.