Trump wrote a column for USA Today Oct. 10 that claimed “Democrats want to outlaw private health care plans, taking away freedom to choose plans while letting anyone cross our border.”
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post noted that “almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood,” including many claims that already had been debunked.
“Medicare-for-All is a complex subject, and serious questions could be raised about the cost and how a transition from today’s health-care system would be financed,” Kessler wrote. “Trump correctly notes that studies have estimated that the program — under the version promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — would cost $32.6 trillion in costs to the federal government over 10 years.”
But if that means Medicare for All Would cost an average of $3.26 trillion per year, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that the US already spends nearly $3.5 trillion on health care annually. And that’s with nearly 10% of the population uninsured, and the uninsured portion expected to increase after Republicans last year upended Obamacare’s “individual mandate” and removed subsidies to health insurance companies that kept premiums down.
Under Medicare-for-All, costs in theory would go down for individuals, state governments and others, so overall national health expenditures may not increase and could even decrease.
On paper at least, Sanders’ plan would improve benefits for seniors, not take them away. He would eliminate deductibles and cover dental and vision care and hearing aids, which are not covered under current law. Then, over the course of four years, the eligibility age would be lowered in stages until every American was covered.
Trump claimed he kept his campaign promise to protect patients with pre-existing conditions. In fact, he lobbied the Republican Congress to repeal the ACA, which would have gutted regulations prohibiting insurers from charging more, withholding benefits or denying coverage to people with serious medical conditions.
The ACA repeal failed by one vote in the Senate, but Trump used his executive authority to undermine pre-existing protections in other ways — by reversing regulations that kept cheap, skimpy plans off the insurance market, for example, and by asking the federal courts to deem the existing regulations unconstitutional.
Trump claimed “Democrats have already harmed seniors by slashing Medicare by more than $800 billion over 10 years to pay for Obamacare.”
In fact, the ACA strengthened the near-term outlook of the Medicare Part A trust fund. The law includes a 0.9% payroll tax increase on wages and self-employment income of wealthier Americans — above $250,000 per couple or $200,000 for a single taxpayer. That was estimated to raise an additional $63 billion for the Part A trust fund between 2010 and 2019. The net result was that the “insolvency” date was extended by 12 years.
Far from protecting Medicare, Trump proposed $350 billion in cuts to the Medicare budget — and about $540 billion in Medicare cuts were assumed in the budget plan the House GOP approved. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently said Congress would need to cut back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to reduce the federal deficit that has soared since the Republican Congress approved $1.5 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires.
For years, House Republicans, led by Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have pushed for a significant overhaul of Medicare that would switch the program to “premium support” — or vouchers for retirees to pay for a range of plans offered by insurance companies through a “Medicare exchange.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that, under the House Republican Medicare plan, by 2030 the government would pay just 32% of health care costs, less than half of what Medicare currently pays. The other 68% would have to be shouldered by retirees.
Republicans recognize that the protections for pre-existing conditions are very popular and they are now trying to rewrite history on their opposition to the regulations.
US Rep. Martha McSally, Republican nominee for Arizona’s open Senate seat, last year voted for repeal of the ACA, including regulations that blocked insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. She reportedly stood up in the GOP conference meeting May 4, 2017, and told her colleagues it was time to “get this f***ing thing done!” In an Oct. 16 debate with US Rep. Krysten Sinema, the Democratic nominee, McSally insisted that she voted to protect people with pre-existing conditions, because the GOP replacement bill included some funding for states to help people with pre-existing conditions pay for higher premiums insurance companies would be allowed to charge — and she accused Sinema of lying when she brought up McSally’s ACA repeal vote.
The Republican animosity toward the ACA caused 20 Republican state attorneys general to file a lawsuit trying to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions. and the Trump administration is declining to oppose the suit — in effect endorsing it. One of the attorneys general suing to dismantle the ACA is Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who is now running for the Senate posing as a defender of Missourians with pre-existing conditions. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nevada, voted for a similar bill that would have destroyed Obamacare but he’s also misrepresenting himself in his re-election campaign.
And the Republican assault on affordable comprehensive health care continued Oct. 22 when the US Department of Health and Human Services announced new rules that will give state governments more leeway to gain waivers from some of the federal health-care law’s core requirements, giving residents access to cheaper, skimpier plans
The mainstream corporate media must step up its efforts to hold Trump and other Republicans to account for their reckless disregard and even contempt for the truth. But even when a Democrat calls Trump on his lies, pundits make excuses for Trump. That happened when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called Trump’s bluff and published results of a DNA test that showed evidence of her Native-American ancestor. As her mother had told her and her siblings, Warren’s grandparents had to elope to get married, because her grandfather’s family didn’t approve of her grandmother’s Native blood. Trump mocks her as “Pocahontas.”
Vote Democratic Nov. 6; or vote early if you can, and get a couple frienda to vote, too. This is no time to complain about “the lesser of two evils.” A Democratic Congress at least can mitigate the damages Lying Donnie would do during the next two years, and they might just save your health care. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2018
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