‘Democrats will start calling me’ if turmoil hits insurance markets, President Donald Trump tells The Wall Street Journal
In suggesting that he isn’t willing to proceed with changes to the tax code until health care was addressed, Mr. Trump sent a strong signal to members of his own party.. He didn’t rule out the possibility of a tax bill passing before the congressional recess in August, though many White House officials and lawmakers believe that timeline is unrealistic... Mr. Trump said he had mixed feelings about creating turmoil in the insurance markets… A federal judge in 2016 ruled the government payments were improper but let them continue while Mr. Obama’s administration pursued an appeal. After Mr. Trump’s election, Republicans requested and received an initial delay in the case.
.. “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Mr. Trump said. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt….What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”
.. House Speaker, Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has said he would prefer to see the administration continue to fund the payments.
.. Mr. Trump said Mr. Schumer “should be calling me and begging me to help him save Obamacare, along with Nancy Pelosi.”
.. Mr. Schumer said the president was “threatening to hold hostage health care for millions of Americans…to achieve a political goal of repeal that would take health care away from millions more. This cynical strategy will fail.”
Can Trump Take Health Care Hostage?
Mr. Trump, as you may have noticed, isn’t big on accepting responsibility for his failures. Instead, he has decided to blame Democrats for not cooperating in the destruction of their proudest achievement in decades.
.. in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he openly threatened to sabotage health care for millions if the opposition party doesn’t give him what he wants.
In that interview, the president of the United States sounded just like a mobster trying to extort protection payments from a shopkeeper.
.. Mr. Trump is trying to bully Democrats by threatening to hurt millions of innocent bystanders — ordinary American families who have gained coverage thanks to health reform.
.. remember, we’re talking about a man who once cut off health benefits to his nephew’s seriously ill 18-month-old son to gain the upper hand in a family dispute.
.. Implicitly, he’s saying that hurting innocent people doesn’t bother him as much as it bothers his opponents.
.. So the Trump health care threat is, as I said, stupid as well as nasty.
.. he may already have done much of the threatened damage. Insurers are deciding right now whether to participate in the 2018 Obamacare exchanges. Mr. Trump’s tough talk is creating a lot of uncertainty, which in itself may undermine coverage for many Americans.
Populism and the Politics of Health
Obamacare helped a large number of people at the expense of a small, affluent minority: basically, taxes on 2% of the population to cover a lot of people and assure coverage to many more. Trumpcare would reverse that, hurting a lot of people (many of whom voted Trump) so as to cut taxes for a handful of wealthy people. That’s a difference that goes beyond political strategy.
.. Obamacare was and is a truly populist law, while Trumpcare is anti-populist. That’s reflected in the legislative struggles.
.. what we call populism is really in large degree white identity politics, which can’t be addressed by promising universal benefits. Among other things, these “populist” voters now live in a media bubble, getting their news from sources that play to their identity-politics desires, which means that even if you offer them a better deal, they won’t hear about it or believe it if told.
.. Trumpism is faux populism that appeals to white identity but actually serves plutocrats. That fundamental contradiction is now out in the open.
The Limbaugh Health Care Reform Plan
Because I don’t think it really has anything to do with health care. I think it’s just the redistribution of wealth, the power.
.. Well, what do you think liberalism is, in part? About making these people feel good about the messes that they’ve made, all because they care and they have great compassion. And they’re great at using other people’s money, which is what Medicaid and Medicare are, to take care of people and keep ’em away from you. If put everyone on Medicaid and Medicare then you can assume they’re gonna have health care, problem solved. You don’t have to hear them complain anymore, you don’t see ’em, you don’t run into ’em.
.. it seems simple to fix this. Just use a little common sense, trust the free market, get the players that have made the mess out of the way
.. Trump is probably finding out just how deeply intertwined the tentacles of this are throughout our society.
.. And what happens when you remove one tentacle? Yeah. And then you find six more pop up that you didn’t know were there. That nobody knew were there, is how deeply embedded some of this stuff is.
.. Providing health care for people with preexisting conditions is the equivalent of selling somebody a homeowner’s policy for a hundred dollars while the fire is burning their house down. It just doesn’t happen, yet in health care we’re doing it. And it screws up all of the actuarials. It screws up all the calculations, it screws up all the numbers, it screws everything up.
.. I’m just saying that once you include people with preexisting conditions in the pool with everybody else and then you go get premiums based on that, it’s not gonna work. You just can’t do it because you’re not talking insurance on preexisting conditions; you’re talking welfare. And nobody in Washington has the guts to eliminate coverage for preexisting conditions.
.. I have no desire to run anybody else’s life. I don’t care whether somebody can run theirs or not; that’s their responsibility and their problem.
.. I do not live under any illusions that I should tell everybody how to live.
.. My health care reform plan is real simple. For everybody who can, and we would have to have a very, very honest assessment of that, you buy your own. You can either get it from your employer as part of your deal there, or you don’t and you go out and make your own deal. You’ll be able to make your own deal because the government’s not involved and there are insurance companies all over this country selling health insurance, and they’re competing with one another
.. “But Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbaugh, what about the people that can’t afford it?”
.. Well, what’s made it different today than the way it was then? And I would argue it’s a bunch of people dipping their hands in it and being involved in it who are not in the business. Trying to buy votes with it, trying to insure and secure power with it and trying to basically tell people, “You know what? You don’t have to be responsible. We’ll do that for you. Just vote for us.”
.. if it’s this bad, how in the world can the people in charge of it not know it’s this bad? If it is this bad, then why do the Republicans want to hand power back to the Democrats? Why do the Republicans want to hurt Trump’s base?
.. this bill makes it illegal to check an enrollee’s immigration status. You ask why would they do that? Well, well, we’re talking about the open borders crowd. We’re talking about a party that’s been telling us for the last 10 years they don’t think they will ever become a political majority without paying homage to Hispanics.
.. They’ll hire actors to portray these old people and indigents who’ve been left behind. That’s just what they do.
.. to compare subsidies and tax credits is purposefully misleading, and you can’t compare the value. They each have different political values and so forth, but tax credits end up — that’s money you get a credit for on your tax, you don’t pay as much, so that leaves you with more money to spend theoretically shopping for a better deal on health care. Subsidies just help you pay for something. You never see the subsidy, somebody else writes the check or sends the money or what have you.
.. one of the new CEOs, it was either General Motors or Ford took over and after about six weeks this guy said, “I thought I was getting in the business to make and sell cars. I didn’t know I was getting into the health care business.”
Because his job, the number one cost at his automobile manufacturing company was health care for his employees.
.. make it single payer, where nobody worries about cost except they theoretically do as they ration and deny certain people, but in reality they don’
.. If employers are going to be given tax credits for the health insurance they buy for their employees, why shouldn’t individuals get it? Why shouldn’t it become a deductible item?
.. Tax credits end up you having a little bit more money in your back pocket, which, if we’re gonna start applying degrees of conservatism, that’s a pretty conservative thing to do, have a policy where people get to keep more of their money in this.
.. So how can the Democrats complain about tax credits for the self-employed? Poets, painters, and that’s who Pelosi talked about. Free from job lock so you can become a poet, so you could become a painter.
.. Job lock, as though everybody was locked in a job they didn’t want because they needed the health care. So Obamacare was gonna come along and free you from all that.
.. people like Obama, Hillary, they love subsidies because it makes you dependent. You never see the money.