as incomes have stagnated and health-care costs have accelerated, Medicaid has turned into an essential support mechanism for millions of Americans who can’t be classed as poverty-stricken, strictly speaking, but who also can’t afford to bear the costs of private health coverage.
.. 74.6 million people were enrolled in plans supported by Medicaid or its sibling, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. That’s more than one in five of the U.S. population.
.. sixty per cent of all nursing-home residents now receive some sort of assistance from Medicaid.
Kids are also big beneficiaries: Medicaid and chip now help to provide medical coverage for about a third of all the children in America.
.. the Party doesn’t merely want to roll back the Obamacare reforms; it wants to shrink the entire program, transferring it to the states and imposing tight caps on the payments they receive from the federal government.
.. the bill would reduce over-all federal spending on health care by about $1.1 trillion over ten years. Of that,
- eight hundred and thirty-four billion dollars—fully three-quarters of the savings—would come from cuts to Medicaid.
.. spending on Medicaid would be reduced by a quarter compared to current spending. In the same time period, the number of people covered by Medicaid and chip would fall by about fourteen million
.. Donald Trump appeared to understand this when, from the beginning of his campaign, he promised not to cut Medicaid.
.. If you view the modern G.O.P. as basically a mechanism to protect the wealthy, Medicaid is an obvious target for the Party.
.. recent expansion was financed partly by an increase in taxes on the richest households in the country.
.. They also dislike that it’s working. As medical costs have risen and the private sector has failed to cover an increasing number of Americans, the Medicaid and chip programs have filled some of the coverage gap, and have done so relatively cheaply.
.. For any politician who loathes government interventions in the economy, and whose real goal is to head off socialized medicine, the expansion of Medicaid represents a serious threat.
.. Here is an embryonic single-payer system that is growing fast and could be further expanded pretty easily. That means it has to be crippled now, before it gets more firmly established.
Trump’s Moral Holiday
The Florida-based Republican, Aaron Nevins, received and published Russian-hacked material—and in return, advised the hackers how to release their material to increase its damage to Democratic candidates. Nevins was not himself a high-ranking person in the Republican world. But the information Nevins obtained from Guccifer 2.0 was used by other Republican campaigns, including the national Republican congressional effort and Paul Ryan’s own super PAC. The earlier claim that Republicans were purely passive and unwitting beneficiaries of Russian espionage in the 2016 election has now been pierced.
In at least one instance, the cooperation was active, conscious, and initiated on the American side, not the Russian: collusion, in a word.
.. At the time, Kushner had already spent months trying to arrange fresh financing for a troubled building his family owns, 666 Fifth Avenue.
After one of those meetings, Kislyak arranged a meeting between Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, the powerful chief executive of a major Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB.
The U.S. had imposed financial sanctions on VEB because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military incursions in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. (During this period the Russians were also meeting with Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser.)
VEB has close ties to the Kremlin, and Gorkov attended a training academy for members of Russia’s security and intelligence services. A Trump spokeswoman has described Kushner’s meetings with the Russians as routine, which they may have been given his role at the time as Trump’s liaison to foreign powers.
But given the significance of 666 Fifth Avenue to Kushner and his family’s fortunes, it’s also possible that he saw the Russians as potential investors.
.. A remarkable number of those talkers condoned the attack, either outright or by pointing to other bad things that have happened elsewhere on earth at various points in the past. Rush Limbaugh went furthest, theatrically condemning the attack—but denigrating the reporter as a “smug and arrogant” Millennial “pajama boy” (a hugely derisive term in the conservative political lexicon) and praising Gianforte as “manly and studly.” (It’s hard to miss in some of the commentary from Trump’s elderly base a nostalgic yearning for lost physical prowess—and intense resentment of the vitality of younger generations with different views.)
.. Half a century ago, conservative commentators often blamed the riots of the 1960s on the “moral holiday” declared by permissive authorities. Leaders who might have delegitimized violence instead acquiesced in it, thus inviting more of it. For many conservatives, May 25 was a moral holiday of their own.
.. These four events each represent one of the great themes of the Trump era:
- The anti-alliance pro-Russia tilt of administration policy
- Collusion with hostile foreign nations for domestic political advantage
- Use of political power for personal financial advantage
- The breakdown of inhibitions and the weakening of sanctions against political violence.
.. But Greg Gianforte is headed to Congress. Jared Kushner and Donald Trump will soon return to the West Wing. There, they’ll continue to deploy the powers of the presidency to protect themselves. They’ll leverage dark and dangerous forces in American society to help them. Someday, maybe, they will cease to get away with it. But not yet.
Montana’s Charles Sumner Moment
One hundred and sixty-one years ago, in retaliation for a blistering speech against slavery, Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a gold-tipped cane on the Senate floor until he was unconscious. The unapologetic Brooks (“Every lick went where I intended”) audaciously resigned his seat, and then was promptly re-elected in the subsequent special election, proving his constituents had his back.
Northerners were appalled, but Southern newspapers leapt to Brooks’ defense. The Richmond Whig hailed the caning as “a most glorious deed”; the Examiner said Sumner “ought to have nine-and-thirty [lashes] every morning.” The shocking attack, and the South’s fulsome embrace of it, became a rallying point for the abolitionist movement and fueled the rise of the nascent Republican Party.
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck has long warned that a polarized America would eventually suffer another violent and divisive “Charles Sumner moment.” Last June he said, “Mark my words. It will be someone like Ted Cruz or Louie Gohmert that gets the cane to the head. It will be a self-righteous progressive that will beat a liberty person almost to death.”
.. And he earned the approbation of President Donald Trump, who interrupted his trip to Italy to hail the “great victory in Montana.”
.. America’s already destabilizing political polarization has only gotten worse since November.
.. Gianforte’s solid win makes Trump’s election seem like less of a fluke. Trump encouraged beatings of protesters and was caught on tape bragging about groping women. .. But maybe we should be contemplating the awful possibility that perhaps he won because of it.
.. Gianforte didn’t win in spite of his violent outburst. He channeled a rage against the media that Trump routinely stokes. “You’re lucky someone doesn’t pop one of you” one Gianforte voter told a CNN reporter on Election Day. A caller to Rush Limbaugh’s show from Billings insisted, “If every Republican candidate in the country picked up a reporter and threw him to the ground, it would increase my chances exponentially of voting for them.”
.. It’s about time that people started sticking up for our side. If enough of this happens, those reporters are gonna learn to back off a little bit.” Keep in mind that the question the Guardian’s exceedingly polite Ben Jacobs asked was about Gianforte’s reaction to a CBO report.
.. The largely college-educated scribes are treated, fairly or not, as representatives of a cultural elite that sneers at working-class whites who lack bachelors degrees.
.. Those who thought some economic populism and down-home folksiness would bridge the cultural divide got a rude awakening on Thursday night.
.. Republicans still yoked him to coastal liberalism.
- After a report that Quist had once performed at a nudist colony, one super PAC ad snarked, “He’s not interested in Montana values. He’s more interested in Hollywood values.”
- He was also hit hard for not always paying his taxes, which Quist futilely tried to explain was a result of financial troubles following a botched surgery. But even that was treated as evidence of his ties to national Democrats: “Can you trust Quist and Pelosi with your money?” charged another super PAC ad.
The Republican Hypocrisy Hall of Fame
The security clearance of any officer or employee of the federal government who has exercised extreme carelessness in the handling of classified information shall be revoked.” — Senate Bill 3135, co-sponsored last year (to shame Hillary Clinton) by 16 Republican senators: Cory Gardner, John Cornyn, Shelley Moore Capito, Tim Scott, James Risch, Pat Roberts, Dean Heller, Kelly Ayotte, John Barrasso, David Perdue, Johnny Isakson, Thom Tillis, John Thune, David Vitter, Mike Rounds and James Inhofe
“Those who mishandled classified info have had their sec clearances revoked, lost their jobs, faced fines, & even been sent to prison.”
— Reince Priebus, tweet, July 6, 2016