Day 49: Donald Trump doesn’t care if you live or you die, as long as he doesn’t take the blame
Donald Trump is going all-in on health care reform bill that he probably hasn’t read a single page of and that’s really a not-so-disguised tax cut to one-percenters.
Doctors hate the bill, hospitals hate the bill, the American Medical Association hates the bill, the AARP hates the bill. No problem, though.
One of the key things that is typically done for bills of this magnitude is the getting a “score” from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO, independently of Congress, analyzes the costs and effects of legislation and allows comparison between bill on a more equal playing field.
Republicans demanded a CBO score for Obamacare before it was passed and got one. With many Republicans trying to jam through the new health care bill, some staunch Republicans are even noting the hypocrisy of such actions on issues as vial as health care.
Donald Trump doesn’t care. He wants to jam through any bill that effectively does away with Obamacare. The middle eight pages of the bill could be filled with a passage from Moby Dick and he would have no clue.
If this bill passes, no one knows the effect it will have. By most early accounts, scores of Americans will lose their insurance or be unable to afford the hike in premiums. They will also be disincentived from re-buying insurance if they lose it, thanks to a 30% penalty fee on premiums for anyone that goes without insurance for 63 days.
Seeing the wide pushback on the bill from various Republican members of Congress Trump is ramping up pressure on the various factions of the party to pass it, no matter how awful it is.
It’s axiomatic that more uninsured people means more people dying of preventable diseases: preventative care is ignored or treatments are unaffordable or seeking care is delayed.
The threat is explicit: do what I want, or else.
In this case, the “or else” is that everyone who signed up for an insurance plan through the public markets will lose coverage. So the option that Trump had laid out for Republicans is that some of these people will lose their insurance or all of these people will lose their insurance.
What’s particularly scary is he’s threatening Republicans to do something dangerous and premature or let the Democrats take the blame. American lives are mere politics to him.
He will accept zero blame for any errors or casualties on his watch, under any circumstances.
We’ve seen it before.
We’ll see it again.
49 days in, 1413 to go
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