Trump And Your Healthcare

The battle over impeachment has become everyone's favorite entertainment fare-- even Trump's. "Like an aging rock star, the president is now reprising many of the greatest hits from his hellion days. He has bullied and projected-- at times leveling against others the very charges he faces-- while simultaneously depicting himself as a victim. And he has turned to ominous depictions of America, and in moments sounded an authoritarian tone... Staring down impeachment, Trump has seemed to play the role of the nation’s Shakespearean monarch. At a rally Thursday night in Minneapolis, Trump boasted about his own fortitude in surviving so many scandals. Raising his hand and twirling his fingers to point to his right temple, the president mused, 'Maybe I’m a little different up here. I don’t know.' ... In moments, Trump seems to understand the peril he faces-- and acknowledges the differing ways he has responded to the impeachment threat engulfing his presidency. 'What they did to this country is unthinkable,' he said Monday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. 'And it’s lucky that I’m the president, because I guess-- I don’t know why-- a lot of people said very few people could handle it. I sort of thrive on it,' he concluded."

Yes he does-- and it's quite a distraction from what he doesn't thrive on: policy discussions. Take healthcare. His pollsters told him that healthcare was the most important to the most voters in 2016. So, without giving it any thought, he promised voters he would oversee the best healthcare system the world had ever seen. Healthcare in the U.S.-- especially for many of his blue collar voters-- has gotten far worse since he took over the White House.

All lies. In fact, healthcare concerns have grown since Trump took over and a new Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll shows that voters aren't buying his bullshit about delivering a "phenomenal health plan." Most voters now realize-- if they didn't from the beginning-- that he's been lying about doing anything to improve the country's healthcare system-- and that includes 61% of independents, which is fatal, not just for Trump, but for Republicans in congressional district that aren't deep, dark red. Even old people finally realize Trump is their enemy when it comes to protecting Medicare.

McMurray is running for Congress in western New York

Last week, writing for Axios, Caitlin Owens reported that Trump may be telling voters everything that they want to hear when it comes to health care, but most of it is just flat-out lies. "Trump is claiming victories he hasn't achieved and making promises he's not prepared to live up to, all on an immensely personal subject that voters consistently rank as one of the most important issues of 2020. And foremost among his endlessly repeated lies is his claim that he has lowered drugs prices. He hasn't and, in fact, drug prices for all but the most commonly used medicines have sky-rocketed since Trump got into the White House.

Trump's most demonstrably false claim is that, as he put it in May "we will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions."

• The Trump administration is currently urging the courts to strike down the Affordable Care Act, including its protections for pre-existing conditions.
• Trump and congressional Republicans' efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in 2017 didn't include the same level of protection as the ACA does, nor have they ever proposed a plan that would.

...On defense-- attacking Democrats over "Medicare for All"-- Trump is also making some dubious claims.

• "Almost every major Democrat in Washington has backed a massive government healthcare takeover that would totally obliterate Medicare.... They want to raid Medicare to fund a thing called socialism," he said last week.
• Sen. Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" bill would indeed replace traditional Medicare, but seniors' health care benefits would get more generous under that plan, as written-- not less. However, critics of the plan say it would likely reduce seniors' access to care.
• And though it's true that Sanders' bill would eliminate private health insurance, other plans would retain it as an option.

Eva Putzova, the progressive Democrat running for an Arizona seat held by Blue Dog Tom O'Halleran, a former Republican state legislator pretending to be a Democrat, is eager to debate her opponents on expanding Medicare into a single payer system that covers everyone and all medical procedures, since she backs it and they don't. She told us that she believes that "the only way to bring down drug prices, ensure universal healthcare coverage, improve access to quality healthcare and bring down costs is to enact a Medicare-for-All program. It is no surprise that Trump lied to the American people and his own supporters about how he would fix the healthcare system and bring down costs.  It is also no surprise that the Republican Party wants to gut the ACA and ensure that only the wealthy can access and afford healthcare. This has been their agenda for decades. What is more surprising is that too many Democrats in congress propose half-measure that would leave millions uninsured and allow prices, dictated by private interests, to continue their upward climb. My opponent, the incumbent congressman, refuses to support Medicare-For-All or any type of single payer healthcare system and supports the current system dominated by insurance companies and drug companies. Maybe that is because he receives campaign contributions from corporate PACs like Cigna, one of the major health insurance companies who are fighting everyday to defeat a publicly funded, single payer system as described in the Jayapal and Sanders Medicare-for-All bills, or that his staff attends retreats at luxury resorts funded by that same industry."

Marie Newman is also running for a seat held by an anti-healthcare Blue Dog, Dan Lipinski, in a blue Chicagoland district. "I frankly, do not understand why my opponent does not support Medicare For All," she said last night. "He calls it 'socialism', a Republican talking point, and he shares that frequently. I support it because I know it will work if rolled out over time and we CAN pay for it vis a vis wealth tax and a Wall St. tax." By the way, that thermometer on the right is a way to help candidates who are running on Medicare-for-All.

Betsy Sweet is the progressive Senate candidate taking on Susan Collins and the corporate candidate Chuck Schumer is pushing, none of whom support Medicare-for-All. "We need," said Betsy, "to fix the system in which 30 cents of every health care dollar goes to profits of executives instead of to patient care. When we remove profits from health care as we do in Medicare for All then it not only cuts costs but it also changes the incentive of care to focus on preventive care and focusing on health, not illness. There is no room for a profit based system when millions of people who can't afford health care. Medicare for all is the path. We cannot be the only country in the world who cannot figure this out. We need a structural change in our system. But unless we eliminate the huge money that the health care industry and pharmaceutical companies give to politicians we will never move forward. It is why Susan Collins will never vote for structural change. This is a national crisis. It is not time to nibble around the edges. We must stop asking 'if' we should have health care for everyone and get busy on the details of the 'how.'"

Trump and Biden (and that little shit, Buttigieg) are getting immense contributions from Big PhRMA to help them bash Medicare-for-All and twist the meaning, the goals and the implementation. Watch Pramila Jayapal explain what Medicare-for-All really is on this NPR show aired last year: