When Hurricane Maria struck, more than a week ago, it knocked out power to the whole of Puerto Rico, and it will be months before the electricity comes back. Lack of power can be deadly in itself, but what’s even worse is that, thanks largely to the blackout, much of the population still lacks access to drinkable water.
.. Until Thursday the Trump administration had refused to lift restrictions on foreign shipping to Puerto Rico, even though it had waived those rules for Texas and Florida.
.. although it’s more than a week since Maria made landfall, the Trump administration has yet to submit a request for aid to Congress.
.. Trump spent days after Maria’s strike tweeting about football players. When he finally got around to saying something about Puerto Rico, it was to blame the territory for its own problems
.. But while the Affordable Care Act survives, the Trump administration is openly trying to sabotage the law’s functioning.
This sabotage is taking place on multiple levels.
- The administration has refused to confirm whether it will pay crucial subsidies to insurers that cover low-income customers.
- It has refused to clarify whether the requirement that healthy people buy insurance will be enforced.
- It has canceled or suspended outreach designed to get more people to sign up.
.. These actions translate directly into much higher premiums: Insurers don’t know if they’ll be compensated for major costs, and they have every reason to expect a smaller, sicker risk pool than before.
.. the A.C.A. won’t actually collapse; it will just become a program more focused on sicker, poorer Americans — and the political opposition to repeal won’t go away. Finally, when the bad news comes in, everyone will know whom to blame.
.. A.C.A. sabotage is best seen not as a strategy, but as a tantrum. We can’t repeal Obamacare? Well, then, we’ll screw it up. It’s not about achieving any clear goal, but about salving the president’s damaged self-esteem.
Health Care in a Time of Sabotage
Even the A.C.A.’s supporters have always acknowledged that it’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg device. The simplest way to ensure that people have access to essential health care is for the government to pay their bills directly, the way Medicare does for older Americans. But in 2010, when the A.C.A. was enacted, Medicare for all was politically out of reach.
.. Or consider the problem of counties served by only one insurer; as a recent study noted, this problem is almost entirely limited to states with Republican governors.
.. Meanwhile, the department’s website, which used to offer helpful links for people seeking insurance, now sends viewers to denunciations of the A.C.A.
Rachel Maddow’s urgent warning to the rest of the media
Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it, trick news organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact blow that reporting up.
You then hurt the credibility of that news organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it’s true, right? Even if it’s true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent “who knows?” as to whether that too might be false, like that other story — whether that too might be based on fake evidence.
The phony document provided to Maddow is exactly the kind of thing that Columbia Journalism Review publisher Kyle Pope warned of, in May, when I asked him whether news outlets should be worried about making careless errors in their rush to advance the Trump-Russia story.
.. Later that month, conservative radio host Bill Mitchell proposed “flooding the NYTimes and WAPO tip lines with all kinds of crazy ‘leaks’ ” to induce false reporting.
.. It is a credit to Maddow’s sense of fairness that she — as vocal a Trump critic as there is — exercised enough restraint and skepticism to sniff out an elaborate hoax that she might have wished were true. Maddow likely was targeted on the premise that she personifies a press corps so bent on destroying Trump that it will publish any incriminating information it encounters without proper journalistic rigor.
That she didn’t publish is evidence that caricatures of what Sean Hannity calls the “alt-radical-left-propaganda-destroy-Trump media” (catchy, right?) are a bit inflated.But there is no glory in avoiding a mistake. There is only shame in making one, and it appears that bad-faith sources are working hard to increase the media’s error rate. Part of the Defense agains the Trump-Russia story is shopping fake evidence
Mitch McConnell just blew up one of Trump’s biggest lies
McConnell will be employing at least two tactics. First, he will use several hundred billion dollars that CBO says the bill would save to try to buy off moderate opponents with side deals, such as increased funding for Medicaid or opioid treatment.
Second, McConnell will press the argument that if this bill does not pass, Republicans will have no choice but to negotiate over the future of the Affordable Care Act with Democrats. Multiple reports have said that McConnell has privately warned Republicans that failure would mean they must enter into talks with Democrats on ways to shore up the individual markets, which would effectively mean that a chance to pass a partisan repeal bill is gone... But, in making this latter argument — which will likely gain more scrutiny in the days ahead — McConnell is effectively destroying one of President Trump’s most cherished false narratives... Trump has spent months making several intertwined claims. He has relentlessly asserted that Obamacare is collapsing on its own. He has offered a variation on this by threatening to cut off the cost-sharing reductions to insurers that subsidize out-of-pocket costs for lower-income people, which would drive insurers out of the markets; Trump has said this threat will force Democrats to the table to “deal” with him... concedes a number of points. It concedes that, despite Trump’s claim of a desire for talks with Democrats, Republicans cannot work with Democrats, as long as Republicans remain wedded to their own priorities — that there is simply no bipartisan consensus possible.. McConnell is basically conceding that Republicans can’t just let the ACA implode, as Trump seems to believe... The Trump administration is likely to continue trying to sabotage the exchanges if this happens, by employing, among others, tactics such as continually refusing to clarify whether it will renew cost-sharing reductions and generally sowing uncertainty over the ACA’s future.