I don’t understand why it helps to have the Secretary of Health & Human Services go on television and lie through his teeth while making promises that his bill can never keep. It might be more sensible if the lies could pass the laugh test, but they don’t even come close to doing that. What he says is the exact opposite of the truth in every respect:
No one will be adversely affected by the Republicans’ new health care bill once it’s enacted and more people would be covered, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
“I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we’re going through,” Price insisted when pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd during Sunday’s “Meet The Press.” “They’ll have choices that they can select the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their family, not the government forces them to buy.”
It’s hard to even devise a theory under which anything Price is saying could come true, but it seems to be premised on the idea that if you abandon all standards for what a health insurance plan must cover, it will be possible to sell really cheap plans even to 60 year olds. So, the reason a 60 year old won’t be negatively impacted by the changes in the health care law isn’t because he’ll pay less for the same coverage or because he’ll get a bigger subsidy than a younger person regardless of need. He’ll be better off because he can buy some really inexpensive plan that doesn’t cover anything.
An analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation also found that the bill would broadly offer less help to Americans living in rural areas, as well as older people and those on lower incomes. According to Kaiser estimates, a 60-year-old making $30,000 a year would receive a $4,000 tax credit under the AHCA — nearly $8,000 less than what he or she would receive under Obamacare.
Price claimed that analysis is “looking at it in a silo.”
“If you look at it in the way that the market will allow, then, for individuals to have choices, who knows what that 60-year-old wants?” he asked.
What’s lost in that delusional rhetoric is the possibility that you’ll be worse off financially because your health care coverage doesn’t come close to covering your health care costs. Maybe it will have gigantic deductibles or it will have an annual or lifetime cap on how much it will pay. These are the ways that insurance companies offered “affordable” plans in the past, and they were rip-offs that left people broke, homeless and dead.
It’s not just that Secretary Price is saying that no one will be worse of financially. He’s arguing that more people will have health insurance. But the experts expect that somewhere around 15 million people will lose their coverage.
The bill’s cost is still unclear, and the Congressional Budget Office has yet to declare a price estimate. But external organizations have weighed in, including the Brookings Institution, which estimated that “at least 15 million people will lose coverage under the American Health Care Act (AHCA) by the end of the ten-year scoring window.”
Price rejected that assertion.
“I’ll tell you that the plan that we’ve laid out here will not leave that number of individuals uncovered. In fact I believe, again, that we’ll have more individuals covered,” he said.
This is the rough equivalent of responding to a question about rat poison killing humans by responding that you don’t believe that’s true and that, in fact, you think people who ingest rat poison will live longer and healthier lives than those who don’t.
What’s even more infuriating is that the way Price is framing his argument is inconsistent with the rhetoric that so many other Republicans are using, including the White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Price is saying that it doesn’t matter what kind of care you get, or even if you get care, as long as your premiums are cheaper. And here’s what Spicer said last week, which was a widely used talking point among supporters of Chumpcare.
Spicer: How many people are going be covered — that's not the question that should be asked
What kind of care they get is what matters
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) March 8, 2017
When I saw that tweet, I called it, “The most Republican answer to anything, ever.” I said that because you can’t get care if you’re not covered without going broke, becoming homeless and dying. You can’t talk about the quality of care people get if they are unable to get any care at all.
As I’ve said, Spicer’s talking point is the exact opposite of Price’s argument that a 60 year old man who makes $30,000 a year, and will see his subsidy go from $12,000 to $4,000 a year, will still somehow be unaffected financially because he’ll be able to buy a shit plan that doesn’t cover anything.
So, out of one side of their mouth they say that it doesn’t matter what kind of care (if any) you get under their plan as long as you have a health care plan.
And, out of the other side of their mouth they say that it doesn’t matter how many millions of people lose their health coverage and long as the quality of care that is provided is improved.
It’s not hard to suss this out. Their plan works for the person who doesn’t need health insurance because they can afford to pay for even catastrophic care by dipping into their stock portfolios. It doesn’t work for anyone else. Either people are priced out of having coverage at all, or they’re priced into buying rip-off plans that abandon them when they actually go to use them.
I don’t think this should even be a contentious point. They don’t really argue otherwise. They try to throw sand in people’s eyes by saying a little of this and a little of that, but their argument is still fairly straightforward. They want to make health insurance affordable by making it legal to offer plans that won’t have to pay out when you need them. And, insofar as that won’t work, they think it’s more important that health care quality is good for the rich guy with a stock portfolio than that millions and millions of people will be left vulnerable and unable to access health care of any quality.
If anything, I’m sugarcoating this, since their plan would basically cut off addiction treatment in the midst of a nationwide opioid epidemic, would drastically undercut women’s access to preventative care, and have other lethal repercussions that really amount to murder by policy.
But I don’t want to get too far down in the weeds here. Secretary Price is saying no one will be negatively impacted financially by losing health insurance, losing subsidies to buy health insurance, or by being screwed over by their cheapo insurance plans that won’t come close to fully covering their health care costs.
If those lies actually work well enough to get Chumpcare enacted into law, the day of reckoning will come the next day and every day after, like Groundhog Day, without end.
A Republican who values his job would be nuts to say what Price is saying. It’s incredibly short-sighted to make promises that will seem like the cruelest of jokes once they are tested against reality.
