Slate - "Republicans Can't Defend Trumpcare on the Merits...So they're not even trying."
Republicans Can’t Defend Trumpcare on the Merits
So they’re not even trying.
By Jamelle Bouie
Over the past two years, Donald Trump has made clear, repeated promises to protect health insurance for those who have it and to expand it to those who don’t. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he said in May 2015 shortly before entering the race for the White House. Fast-forward to the presidential transition, and he made a similar promise in an interview with the Washington Post, pledging a health care plan that would feature “insurance for everybody” with “much lower deductibles” and help for those who can’t afford care on the private market: “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”
Except now that the time has come for an actual plan, it is happening. The Congressional Budget Office’s “score” of the American Health Care Act isn’t infallible, but its analysis is in line with other estimates. That analysis shows that Trumpcare will slash coverage for millions of Americans and force millions more to choose between basic necessities: health care or rent, medicine or food. What Americans get in return is a massive tax cut, to the tune of $600 billion, with the wealthiest 0.1 percent of taxpayers seeing the most dramatic benefits.
No politician who wants to stay in office would defend this bill on its merits. Which means its advocates—well-aware of its dire outcomes for low- and moderate-income people—have to obfuscate. On Tuesday, Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, took a different approach, blasting the CBO as inaccurate. “I don’t believe the facts are correct,” Mulvaney said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “I’m not just saying that because it looks bad for my political position. I’m say that based upon a track record of the CBO being wrong before and we believe the CBO is wrong now.” (An analysis of CBO forecasts on the Affordable Care Act found that they were “reasonably accurate.” The CBO is itself a nonpartisan office.)
Mulvaney’ choice to dispute the math pales in comparison with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s approach: deny that the report says what it says. “This report confirms that the American Health Care Act will lower premiums and improve access to quality, affordable care,” said Ryan in a statement released on Monday. “CBO also finds that this legislation will provide massive tax relief, dramatically reduce the deficit, and make the most fundamental entitlement reform in more than a generation.” His colleague, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, took a similar tack. “This report by the CBO confirms that this first phase of health reform, the American Health Care Act, uses conservative and free-market principles that will empower Americans with access, choice, and affordability.”
SNIP - much more.
A few zingers from further on -
To say that the CBO report shows that the AHCA will “improve access” or “empower Americans” is to brutalize the English language.
Instead of defending the bill on its merits, Ryan and Republican leaders have taken to vaguely proclaiming that it is offering “freedom” and “choice” to consumers.
One can’t reduce freedom to choice when those choices are bounded and circumscribed by income. A family that can’t afford health insurance hasn’t “chosen” to go without it; a person who lacks options for decent housing isn’t exercising his “freedom” when he is forced into a slum.
= new reply since forum marked as read
