Multimillionaire Bill O’Reilly continued to prove he’s more interested in the giant tax cut his buddy Donald Trump wants to give him via the Death to Americans bill Trumpcare than the fact that millions of Americans will lose health insurance and probably die as a result. Some “looking out for you,” eh?
I don’t know whether O’Reilly is justifying his longing for more money or he truly despises the less fortunate – or both. But what we do know is that O’Reilly reportedly earns between $15-17 million a year and has an estimated net worth of $85 million.
Apparently, that’s not enough for him. And he resents having to pay more in taxes so that poorer people – who surely must make up at least part of “the folks” that O’Reilly claims to be looking out for – can get health insurance.
In his Talking Points commentary Monday night, O’Reilly feigned independence as he salted his remarks with pro-Trumpcare rhetoric and left out the very dire consequences for the millions who stand to lose coverage, if not their lives from the bill.
First, the suggestion that Americans getting Obamacare coverage are moochers (transcript via FoxNews.com):
O’REILLY: President Obama and the Democrats wanted to provide healthcare to Americans who could not or would not pay for it.
[…]
Here are the facts:
Eighty-one-percent of all Americans who signed up for the Obamacare health plan will receive government assistance this year.
Some will have their entire healthcare premium paid for by the government.
That cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion last year alone.
That’s the essence of Obamacare, that all Americans are forced to buy health insurance so that the have-nots can be subsidized and covered.
O’Reilly did note that 13 million people have gained health insurance via Obamacare and that 21 million will lose it under the Republican Death to Americans Trumpcare.
But that would be their fault or, as O’Reilly put it, “That would mostly be their choice” to give up health insurance. Even though O’Reilly claimed that it’s not known if insurance premiums would go down under Trumpcare.
Lower premiums is “the hope on the Trump side,” O’Reilly added, “But not on the left.” As “proof,” he played a clip of Senator Bernie Sanders describing Trumpcare as “a massive shift of wealth from working people and middle-income people to the very richest people in this country. It is a $275 billion tax break for the top two percent.”
Instead of addressing that very-favorable-to-O’Reilly issue, O’Reilly attacked Sanders as “angry” because the left hates any “kind of thing” that “helps the wealthy.”
O’REILLY: But the Trump administration has promised to lower taxes and their healthcare plan does that.
It is simply impossible for you, the American consumer, to know how this will all turn out.
As they say on the west coast, it’s complicated.
Summing up, liberals want a big entitlement culture. Some uber-conservatives want few, if any entitlements. More moderate Republicans want the states to handle healthcare entitlements with limits.
Actually it is not impossible for Americans to know how this will all turn out and O’Reilly is either lying to you or willfully ignorant. As Vox explains, under Trumpcare, the more help you need, the less you get:
The result isn’t just 24 million fewer people with insurance: Of those who remain insured, the pool is tilted toward younger, healthier people who need help less, because many of the older, poorer people who need the most help can no longer afford insurance. As German Lopez notes, a 64-year-old making $26,500 would see his premiums rise by 750 percent. 750 percent! And with that 64-year-old gone, premiums are a little bit lower, because the pool is a little bit younger.
Oh, and as for those mooching have-nots O’Reilly disdains? The bill could also mean that millions could lose coverage they get via their employers.
Meanwhile, O’Reilly would be sitting pretty. The New York Times notes:
[T]he plan provides a $600 billion tax cut over 10 years for wealthy Americans, because they would no longer be subject to the taxes that pay for the health care subsidies.
Watch O’Reilly look out for his own pocketbook (and his buddy Trump) while claiming to be looking out for you, below, from the March 13, 2017 The O’Reilly Factor.
The key to understanding conservatives – as several studies have shown – is a lack of empathy. So O’Reilly and his audience do the ’I’ve got mine, you get yours’ and ’what’s in it for me’ song and dance.