Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just delayed the vote on the Senate “health care” bill known as Trumpcare. There’s only one reason for such a move: lack of Republican support. But supposedly objective Julie Banderas, covering the news during Fox’s 2 PM hour, was a vision of partisan talking points as she fumed at Democrats over it.
While waiting for an announcement from McConnell, Banderas welcomed Fox Business host Charles Payne. Banderas immediately tried to blame Democrats for the Republicans’ failure to craft a bill its own party could get behind.
BANDERAS: I want to first of all talk about what the Democrats have done because they have scared the Bejesus out of a lot of Americans and rural Americans, basically saying millions of people, tens of millions of people are going to lose their insurance. People are going to die.
Believe me, if you are someone who relies on Medicaid or Obamacare guarantees of essential health benefits (as my family does), you definitely feel you could die. But don’t take just my word or feelings for it. There is solid research that validates such worry.
But Banderas, who boasted about having read the CBO report, ignored that research as she proceeded to suggest that taking away health insurance from Americans is just giving people what they want - while ignoring proof that Americans don’t want Trumpcare. Health professionals hate it, too.
BANDERAS: “It [the CBO report] talks about the millions of people that potentially will be uninsured under the GOP plan. And, according to this, it is estimated that in 2018, 15 million more people would be uninsured under this legislation than under the current law primarily - and I want to emphasize that word – primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated.
A lot of people that are signed up for insurance are signed up because there’s a mandate. If you don’t sign up for Obamacare, you pay a penalty. A lot of those people don’t want to pay it so we’re gonna dump it so of course the number’s gonna go down.
Instead of pointing out that we should be looking for ways to get people covered instead of shrugging our shoulders and pretending lack of coverage is a good thing, Payne said the “central problem” was the “so-called red states” that accepted federal money and went along with Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.
“They don’t have faith in free markets,” Payne groused. “They were warned not to do it, they were warned it was a trap and now they find themselves in a tough predicament where they need that federal money and they don’t trust anything else.”
Nobody seemed to care that millions of low-income Americans were able to get health insurance thanks to Obamacare. If anything, Banderas seemed to resent it as an overpriced extravagance
BANDERAS: The question is, does that paint the full picture because let’s just talk about Medicaid spending. That is something again, that you don’t see widely being reported. Today, it’s 393 billion, as you know. Under the Senate GOP plan, it rises to 464 billion. But under Obamacare, it skyrockets to 624 billion. So then the question is why are Democrats emphasizing so much on Medicaid cuts?
This is a right-wing talking point which, unfortunately for Banderas, is simply not true. Think Progress explains:
"The bill would in fact massively cut Medicaid, threatening to completely phase out the program as we currently know it. The legislation would roll back Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, starting in four short years. It would also make deeper cuts to Medicaid by placing “per capita caps” on the program such that states will receive only a set amount of money for each recipient, no matter how much their care actually costs.
Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicaid in the Obama administration, said on Twitter that “the main event in the Senate bill is the destruction of Medicaid,” characterizing it as “far, far worse than even the House bill.” And the House bill, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, would leave 23 million more people without coverage."
But Banderas seems to think truth is as expendable as millions of Americans’ health when it comes to Republican Party fortunes.
Watch anchor Banderas make Republican politics her first priority below, from the June 27, 2017 America’s News HQ.
Regarding the latest fun with the impending GOP repeal of the ACA, Rand Paul is now repeatedly throwing his delightful solution into the ring. He presented it as a brand new “breakthrough” idea yesterday on Fox News and tried that again today, but it’s the same thing he’s been saying for months. Namely, he wants the GOP to split up the “repeal” and “replace” notions into separate bills. To hear it from him, it will be much more reasonable this way, right? Because the GOP can have the repeal bill, which is what they all agree on and which the Dems won’t support, and the Dems and the weaker GOP members can have the spending bill, and that way both bills have a better chance, right?
Except that Paul is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He knows very well that only the first bill will go through – the repeal, which he and the Right have desperately wanted from the moment that the ACA became law. The replacement bill would unquestionably bog down in endless debates, even if some Dems tried to jump in to offer ideas – but the GOP could not pass it on their own and the Dems would not likely go along with the more draconian ideas the GOP would include. So what Paul is actually trying to do is have his repeal and make it look like he’s “the reasonable person”.
And if he gets away with this move (something I actually find quite likely given Pence’s desperation to get something, anything through the Congress this year), Rand Paul will give the Hard Right a series of big wins:
1. They get rid of the ACA – and all the Right Wing congresspeople get to say they’ve finally lived up to that promise.
2. The Pence White House gets to claim a “win” for signing this bill into law and appearing to get something done.
3. The Pence White House and the entire Right Wing get to retroactively declare President Obama a total failure. (Expect the sneering Obama retrospectives to begin moments after a repeal bill is signed into law)
4. The Right Wing gets to punish the Dems and GOP members who supported the ACA or signed up for it – basically the bullying mode of “You shouldn’t have signed up for this in the first place because you don’t deserve it.”
5. Wealthier Right Wingers get a major tax break and no longer need to pay the ACA premiums that had been imposed.
6. Right Wingers get to make major cuts to Medicaid, as a precursor toward attacks on Medicare and Social Security. (The entire notion of turning Medicaid over to the states means that the program would inevitably need to be slashed to a tiny fraction of its current budget – because individual states could never support Medicaid, and that’s the point.)
7. When the “Replacement” bill fails to go anywhere, the Right Wing gets to blame the morass on the Dems, under the notion that “they’re not doing anything to help us provide health care”, which will hide the reality that the Right does not want any such bill to succeed.
So a Rand Paul splitting of the repeal and replace notions will absolutely do what Rand Paul and the Right Wing actually want here – namely, just get rid of the ACA in one swell foop. And that is where they’re heading, given their inability to get anything else done. But we shouldn’t fall for the flattering unctions Rand Paul would like us to believe about his actual thinking here.
Faux specializes in hiring disgraced people who would have a hard time getting a prominent job in any respectable media organization – think Oliver North, the execrable racist Fuhrmann, Toe-Sucker Morris etc. In Julie’s case, she was caught in flagrente dilecto shagging someone (her cameraman?) in some New York TV channel’s OB van.
I should have known the fire was Obama’s fault! My neighbors blamed fireworks but I’ll have to tell them what has been uncovered. Undoubtedly, it was via an “explosive investigation” with “shocking details.” :)
The most important thing for the Pence White House is getting a “win”, meaning that they’ll be happy just to get something, anything through both houses of Congress. Which means that Rand Paul gets his way – they’ll just do the repeal and blame the situation on the Dems, like Trump has been doing.
It doesn’t matter that the Dems aren’t even part of the group passing the repeal. It just matters that there are Dems in both chambers, so that they can be blamed for anything that happens.
Fortunately, the fire seems to be under control now and no homes burned. It was scary, though, for many hours and I even packed up my valuables, put them in my car and parked my car at the end of the driveway so I could get out if I needed to. I was never formally evacuated but some of my neighbors were.
Blaming the (minority) Dems for the repubs going against their OWN bill??
Kinda goes against that whole “party of personal responsibility” thing, doesn’t it Julie?
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That will work really well with Trump and the Fox audience, but not so well with the general public who is expecting Trump to turn their economic tears and fears into billionaire gold with a flip of his magic hair.