He told us what he planned. But it was so cynical nobody believed it.
by digby
Trump at CPAC:
Now, I've been watching and nobody says it, but Obamacare doesn't work, folks. I mean, I could say, I could talk, it doesn't work.
And now people are starting to develop a little warm heart, but the people that you're watching, they're not you. They're largely -- many of them are the side that lost, you know they lost the election. It's like, how many elections do we have to have? They lost the election. But I always say, Obamacare doesn't work. And these same people two years ago and a year ago were complaining about Obamacare. And the bottom line, we're changing it. We're going to make it much better, we're going to make it less expensive. We're going to make it much better.
Obamacare covers very few people -- and remember, deduct from the number all of the people that had great health care that they loved that was taken away from them -- it was taken away from them.
(APPLAUSE)
Millions of people were very happy with their health care, they had their doctor, they had their plan. Remember the lie, 28 times. You could keep your doctor, you could keep your plan. Over and over and over again, you heard it. So we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
(APPLAUSE)
And I tell Paul Ryan and all of the folks that we're working with very hard, Dr. Tom Price, very talented guy.
(APPLAUSE)
But I tell them from a purely political standpoint, the single best thing we can do is nothing. Let it implode completely, it's already imploding. You see the carriers are all leaving. I mean, it's a disaster. But two years, don't do anything. The Democrats will come to us and beg for help, they'll beg and it's their problem.
He went on to make some perfunctory disclaimer that he couldn't do that because it would be wrong (like he cares.) But this was his plan. He thinks it's very clever.
Brian Beutler on the state of play today:
The American Health Care Act has managed to become the least popular aspect of the Trump government despite the fact that the ethical and legal scandals surrounding the president himself have largely obscured something remarkable: The central justification for the Republican health care bill is a lie.
Every legislative initiative is presented to the public as an attempt to solve some genuine problem or advance some credible moral cause. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was devised to address problems like widespread uninsurance, medical bankruptcy, the failure of the individual insurance market, and unsustainable growth of health care costs. The many bills that have been drafted over the years to price greenhouse gas emissions were meant to reduce the unacceptable risk of runaway climate change. The first Bush tax cuts were initially presented as a means of returning budget surpluses to taxpayers, then as a means of fending off a recession. Neither rationale honestly conveyed why Republicans sought permanent, regressive tax cuts, but at least the budget surpluses and the recession actually existed.
The AHCA, according to House Speaker Paul Ryan, is a “rescue mission” to save Affordable Care Act beneficiaries from the system’s inevitable collapse. That premise is so commonly held on the right—and so commonly repeated as though it were incontrovertible—that it’s seldom challenged by the press. It forms the strategic basis not just of plans to repeal the ACA, but of plans to leave it in place for now.
It is also completely false. The main public justification for the Republican Party’s top legislative priority isn’t some fact-based pretext, like the justifications for the Bush tax cuts, but a complete fabrication.
This is not to say that many ACA marketplaces don’t have challenges, some of them serious. But the AHCA isn’t what anyone credible would formulate as a solution to those problems. If Republicans intended their health care bill to be a “rescue mission” for those who live in markets with zero or one insurers, it would be a targeted bill, rather than one that would disrupt and perhaps destroy ACA marketplaces that are functioning well.
The disingenuousness of Republican efforts to pass this bill—which would render many insurance markets dysfunctional, and suck a trillion dollars out of the health care system—is now manifesting as a direct assault on expertise in government and policymaking. And the most distressing thing about it is that the stakeholders with the most influence over GOP legislators—the power to stop a bill they know is bad for the public interest, and to clarify that the ACA isn’t collapsing on its own—are largely content to let them get away with it.
Brad Wilson, the president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, is the exception that proves the rule. He’s seeking to increase premiums for ACA plans 22.9 percent—significantly more than the 8.8 percent he says he’d seek if Republicans weren’t injecting immense uncertainty into markets across the country.
In an interview with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent last week, Wilson sourced the proposed rate increase specifically to the fact that the Trump administration won’t promise to meet the government’s cost-sharing obligations, which allow insurers to reduce out-of-pocket costs for poor and near-poor beneficiaries, and congressional Republicans won’t force Trump’s hand.
“The failure of the administration and the House to bring certainty and clarity by funding [cost-sharing reduction payments] has caused our company to file a 22.9 percent premium increase, rather than one that is materially lower,” Wilson said. “That will impact hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians.”
This isn't just on Trump. It's every last Republican who knows that this is an outrageous lie but is doing it anyway.
There's more at the link. It's so depressing I can hardly read it. They may succeed in doing this. And I will personally be in serious trouble if they manage to destroy the program. But that's a feature not a bug. The Republican party clearly wants people like me to die if at all possible but at the very least to suffer.
Here's Prince Eric just yesterday talking about Democrats:
I've never seen hatred like this, and to me they're not even people. It's so, so sad, I mean morality is just gone, morals have flown out the window we deserve so much better than this as a country. You know it's so sad. You see the democratic party -- they're imploding. They're imploding. They have no message. You see the head of the DNC who is a total whack job. There's no leadership there. And so what do they do? They become obstructionists because they have no message of their own. They have no solid candidates of their own. They lost the election that they should have won because they spent 7 times the amount of money that my father spent. They have no message so what do they try and do? They try and obstruct a great man, they try and obstruct his family, they come after us viciously, and its truly, truly horrible.
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