Bill O’Reilly seems to think that the kind of affordable, decent-quality health insurance available to lower-income people via Obamacare is some kind of freebie that undeserving slackers are mooching.
In a discussion with Brit Hume about the Republican Death-To-Americans plan aka Obamacare repeal, neither multimillionaire O’Reilly nor the well-heeled Hume gave a moment’s thought to the harm those less fortunate will suffer under the Republican plan.
Analyzing the Death-to-Americans plan in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik wrote:
The truth is that the GOP measure would destroy the ability of millions of Americans to access any healthcare worth the name. The Congressional Budget Office reportedly warned the Republicans that their proposals would lead to lost coverage for millions and higher costs for millions more, but the GOP is pushing ahead anyway.
So it’s no wonder that Republicans are trying to ram it through without having hearings or the Congressional Budget Office estimate its cost.
In fact, O’Reilly acted as if those benefitting from Obamacare deserve to suffer.
O’REILLY: Obamacare subsidies are repealed so nobody gets free health care any more and the liberals gonna go wild on that.
Hume acted as though the current assistance with paying health insurance bills is some kind of drug people need to be weaned from.
HUME: The Republican leadership is worried about removing the Obamacare subsidy and leaving people who were depending on those subsidies without the ability to pay for insurance. So that was a problem. This is what happens with entitlements. Once people become dependent on them, it becomes extremely difficult, politically, to take them away. So what they’re doing here is they are providing a different kind of subsidy in the form of a tax credit.
Let’s be clear. If you’re a TV pundit, a tax credit may be a subsidy. But if you’re a middle-class person who doesn’t earn enough to make use of a tax credit - well, too bad. Furthermore, older people will pay more under the GOP Death-to-Americans plan, even with the tax credit.
And in addition to Congress’ suspiciously hasty moves, neither of these two elitists mentioned how the GOP bill is a gift to wealthier Americans and insurance companies at the expense of others.
Indeed, Hume pretended it was a gift to everyday Americans, not a serious detriment to their health.
HUME: There will be under this plan, it seems, a wider variety of plans available because a lot of the mandated items that were to be included in Obamacare-approved plans are gone and people can go out and get as much or as little insurance as they think is right for their family which I think is a big selling point.
Sure it is. If you can afford as much insurance as you want. Because, as Hiltzik notes, “Essential health benefit rules are repealed.”
As of Dec. 31, 2019, ACA rules that required qualified health plans to provide hospitalization, maternity care, mental health services and other benefits would be sunsetted at the federal level. States would have the authority to set them instead. The impact on private, non-Medicaid plans would therefore vary by state.
In other words, the plan you may be able to afford may not include hospital benefits or maternity care.
Hume did acknowledge one problem for the Republican Death Plan. Not a problem for anyone worried about obtaining good-quality, affordable health insurance. No, Hume was concerned about enough conservatives getting on board to enact the GOP Death Plan.
HUME: A lot of conservatives who wanted Obamacare repealed didn’t like the subsidies and they’re not going to like this kind of subsidy any better than they did the ones in the original act. So it’s gonna be a challenge for the Republicans to gather the votes necessary to pass the bill because the Democrats seem very unlikely to help them.
O’REILLY: Yeah, unless you give the free health care, they’re going to vote against it.
Apparently, multimillionaire O’Reilly is so out-of-touch with “the folks” that he doesn’t even know that even with Obamacare, many Americans still can’t afford health care. But the majority of Americans want Obamacare fixed, not repealed.
By the way, the Indivisible group is suggesting that everybody call their members of Congress today and demand hearings plus a CBO score on the GOP plan before voting on it. That applies to those living in the reddest as well as the bluest states.
Meanwhile, watch O’Reilly and Hume look out for the minority of Americans below, from the March 5, 2017 The O’Reilly Factor.
I’m so sorry to hear about all your troubles, especially losing your son like that. I can only imagine the heartache.
I’m glad you got good, affordable health insurance. We need to fight like hell to keep it right now.
I barely make enough to pay federal tax, but the little I do, I hope it’s going to some one who needs the help as much as I did.
(Being a companion of mentally disabled people and getting them – into the community, teaching life skills having them participate in social activities, taking them to Dr. appointments and grocery shopping etc., – here in FL pays under $10. an hour and no gas reimbursement, but is very satisfying. The clients get money that goes to pay an agency that pays us through a Medicaid waiver )
Anyway, I started with getting my allergies and asthma under control finally, then a balloon sinuplasty to take care of the years of bi-monthly sinus infections because of the allergies. Moved onto the cardiologist, and a free colonoscopy, and culminated in a hip replacement in May 2016 (walked around on and worked for ten years with a dislocated hip. I had no insurance to do anything about it) and woke up from anesthesia with drop, I call it flop, foot because of nerve damage during the hip replacement. Spent two weeks in a rehab nursing home because of the foot, lots of in- home and out patient therapy and braces.
Then in October our son died from a heart defect no one knew he had. My big strong Marine and only child. On the day he and his fiancee closed on a house, a day that also happened to be my husbands birthday, they was walking through their new back yard, excited and happy. He was telling her about how he was finally going to use all those Christmas lights he’d been buying during the after Christmas sales for years, and have his Griswold Family Vacation Christmas light show, and have us come to NH for Christmas and see his new house. He was dead before he hit the ground the doctors said. He was 29.
Then I needed a shrink.
And that was covered too.
So, yea I’m very appreciative of Obama and his Obamacares, and tell everybody I am and I say it proudly too.
Thank you Mr President.
In the meantime, I think it important to call these guys out on their fairly direct attack on both working people in this country and on lower income people in this country. The current bill is designed and intended to slap both of those groups as hard as the Right can get away with today – all while telling everyone how wonderful and fairly this bill treats them. In reality, the attack on Medicaid and the viciousness about the employer-covered plans is nothing more than revenge against the rest of the country for voting for things that the Right did not want to discuss.
Our current health insurance system traces it’s roots back to WWII. When FDR froze industrial wages, industry wanted a bargaining chip to hire better workers. Enter the job health care plan. Big mistake. Good idea at that time, disastrous in the long haul.
Something that EOF has pointed out is that republicans would do away with mandatory participation. That, by itself, would unravel Obama care. Health insurance premiums for the greater population has to be mandatory, not optional. Like any combine or collective. Listen to me, I sound like a commie. But that is what socialism is: everyone contributing for the greater good. It’s also a distillation of most insurance plans.
Tying our health insurance to our jobs was a big mistake a long time ago. It needs correcting.
I do wonder if there may be another goal of the GOP at this time regarding the ACA. On the one hand, their hardline members are absolutely committed to destroying it, as noted above. What of the more pragmatic Right Wingers like Paul Ryan – who would destroy the ACA if they could but also want to politically position themselves in the best way for the midterms? From what I can see, these guys were hoping to kill the ACA while President Obama was still in office. Their intent throughout his terms was to obstruct him at every possible turn and to sabotage anything they couldn’t obstruct. When they realized that the ACA depended on a large number of people being in its system, they systematically worked to starve it of as many people as possible. Nearly all GOP governors made a point of staying out of the exchanges and refusing to use any part of the ACA, clearly to limit the membership and thus drive up the costs, which would thus allow the Right Wing pundits to denounce the higher premiums, and the continuing drag would thus drive more insurers out of the exchange. If the strategy had worked, the system would gone into an actual death spiral during Obama’s second term, and the Right could have triumphantly declared it a failure at that time and avoided responsibility for their behavior. But this strategy did not work. The ACA is still working today, even in its hobbled condition. So when the GOP tries to ram this bill through, they will actively own the consequences for millions of Americans. It’s clear that this problem has given the Right a little pause – not out of concern for those people but out of concern for how the consequences will be presented as the fault of the Right.
It’s clear that the hardline members would actually vote to pass this bill if all the various tax credit ideas were removed and it were retooled to be a flat repeal of the ACA with no replacement whatsoever. But the less shrill members know this would spell doom for them in 2018, since they’d be holding the bag. If the bill is put forth in anything close to its current form, it’s pretty clear that it would fail in both houses – almost no Dems would vote for it, and several key GOP members in each house would join the Dems in opposition. I wonder if Paul Ryan thinks it better to have the current bill go down to defeat than to appease the Far Right. If he appeases them, the bill will likely pass, but the GOP will then be immediately responsible for exactly what Ryan and Trump said they would not do – taking health care away from 20 million Americans. On the other hand, if Ryan lets the bill fail in its current form, he can always blame the Dems for refusing to support it. This would allow the GOP and Trump to run for re-election under the banner that the Dems are responsible for everyone’s higher premiums, etc. Could this be Ryan’s true goal?
David is correct to note that the other driver behind this is the extreme form of Right Wing libertarianism that we regularly see on Fox News and hear on angry AM radio shows these days. The notion of IGMFU. Which basically says that the Right Wing would rather see everyone cover their own individual health care bills and not do anything collective about the situation – a rollback to even before Eisenhower. Under this thinking, if you can’t afford to pay for your own doctor bills and procedures, that’s your problem. The notion of HSAs is a big part of this – since HSAs are really just you putting your own money in a savings account in advance. And that’s what we just heard from Jason Chaffetz with his interesting thoughts about how Americans should think about putting their money into paying for their individual health care rather than buying toys like the new iPhone. (Of course, I do need to acknowledge that in general life terms, he’s not wrong about some people living beyond their means, but that’s not a health care issue for the 20 million people whose health care he is happy to eliminate.) The O’Reilly position on this is basically that health care is not a human right, and it’s not even a component of the notion of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. From this perspective, the right to “life” simple connotes a right to existence – not to any particular quality of existence. And working out a collective system of health coverage isn’t a way of saving everyone money and keeping the country healthier – it’s an “entitlement” for lazy people who should be handling it themselves. This libertarian notion is one that I heard tossed around on AM radio just this morning and yesterday morning – that if a senior cannot afford health care, it’s their own fault for not saving enough money throughout their life. That a government-facilitated health management system is just a way of stealing tax money from self-sufficient people who shouldn’t be asked to bother with this. (One of the hosts actually said that if they heard about a senior needing help with health care, they wanted to see how many vacations the person took during their lifetime and if they ever bought a new car – idea being that they should have saved all their money over the years. Again, there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to live within their means, but the emphasis in this case is frankly cruel.)
First, we must keep in mind that the Right has no real interest in whether or not most Americans have health insurance. This discussion was never about health care for them at all. They don’t care whether you can afford to see a doctor or not. If the Right cared at all about health care, they would have legislated something when they had the opportunities over the past 40 years.
But what they DO care about is their absolute hatred of Barack Obama and all those who voted for him. The point of this exercise is not to “repair” the Affordable Care Act. It is to destroy it, and by doing so, obliterate the only real legacy of President Obama’s eight years in office. By destroying it, the Right gets a double win. First, they can retroactively prove themselves correct in pronouncing Obama a failure. And more happily, they can exact sweet revenge on Obama for having the temerity to win two terms as President and on all his supporters for having the temerity to vote for him. The hope of the Right is to teach everyone else a lesson that they better not try to make any positive change in this country, since it can be erased as though it never happened.
The actual substance of the new bill goes even farther than I had thought they would attempt with a simple repeal. They’re actually taking things backward from where they were in 2009. The new bill guts the ACA exchanges by eliminating the mandate that anyone be a part of it. And it makes it nearly impossible for poorer seniors who really need it to actually afford any coverage. It’s also intended to destroy the Medicaid expansion that was a large part of the ACA, which would effectively eliminate that coverage. Right Wing pundits are trying to deny the last point, saying that this elimination wouldn’t affect those already covered under it today – but they’re being intentionally deceptive here. That carry-over only applies if the person getting expanded Medicaid coverage is CONTINUOUSLY COVERED. If you were to go on and off the coverage, as happens with most people on Medicaid, the new bill has a little penalty for you – to get back on the coverage after a break, you must pay a charge of 30% of your annual premium – something that those people could never afford. So this is a false promise, and the Right Wing knows it. They’re just hoping most people won’t notice until it’s too late.
The actual result of this bill, if it makes it to the Pence White House for signature, will be to effectively destroy the ACA and eliminate the coverage currently being used by 20 million Americans. And that doesn’t include the gratuitous swipe at Planned Parenthood, which the Right intends to defund. Both moves are clearly driven by sheer malice. It’s Scut Farkus all over again, beating up the smaller kids in the neighborhood and laughing while he does it. The funniest part of this move is that they are trying to present the scenario as though it will not wipe out all that coverage – with the code phrase “access to health care”. Just last night, I heard multiple Right Wing politicians being asked the direct question “Will this cause Americans to lose their coverage?” and giving the dodgy answers “All Americans will have access to quality health care under this bill.” “Access” is NOT “coverage”. The question was whether people will lose their existing health insurance, and the direct answer is yes, they will. Everyone will have some “access” to health care – but that just means that everyone has the ability to go see a doctor and ask to be treated. Of course, not everyone can afford to pay the doctor’s fee plus the test fees plus the medication prescription, and that’s assuming we’re not discussing a hospital stay or an ambulance ride. Which means we go back to the way things were for much of our lives – millions of people will have no health care unless they finally go to an Emergency Room, and even then they will be unable to pay the bill. And that’s exactly what President Obama was trying to address.
Did you mean a salary of $30,000/year?
That’s republicans in a nutshell. ‘I got mine! Screw everyone else!!’ Republicans would like Americans to suffer, especially those Americans with less money than themselves. Even the GOPiggies don’t want to touch the third rail, the ones with sense and po folks in their districts.
Sure, it sounds good — tax credits mean you pay less taxes — but not if you make 30k.
Rubes, all, who believe this nonsense.
Which is hardly a surprise since it’s long been pointed out the red states are the biggest leaches of federal largesse. 🤔
I’ve given up pointing out to right-wingers the Social Darwinism they champion will screw them first. Watching rival CNN there’s a huge division with the Republican Party with the Tea Party crowd arguing against #Trumpcare handouts (subsidies).