No. of Recommendations: 13
Good conversation (with transcript) about the ACA, and the “coming premium apocalypse”.
I was planning to post some excerpts from this——thanks for beating me to it.
It's a very good history and summary of where we are today and how we got here since the ACA passed in 2010. Especially clear explanation regarding the three big "buckets" that comprise American health care: Medicare, Medicaid, and the premium subsidies; and clearly details why the subsidy cliff that is approaching on December 31 of this year is going to be much more destructive for older and rural voters in red states.
One pullout:
"You could see this narrative bubbling up in the places where these things bubble up—in the conservative media here and there. But it was very prominent a week ago. JD Vance went on Fox and said, “Democrats want to spend a trillion dollars on free care for illegal immigrants.” And Speaker Johnson said something almost exactly the same, which is ludicrous.
The single most important thing to remember when you hear this repeated is that by law, undocumented immigrants cannot get Medicare. They cannot get Medicaid. They cannot get federally subsidized insurance through the exchanges. They are not eligible for these things. Federal dollars cannot provide direct insurance under those three programs for undocumented immigrants with a tiny, tiny little asterisk I’m going to get to in a second.
The second thing to realize is that not only can undocumented immigrants not get those programs, many people who are here legally cannot. So for example, if you’re on your way to get a green card for permanent residency, there’s a five-year waiting period in general before you can get on these programs.
In general, people like Medicare. And it turns out they really like Medicaid. They like the Affordable Care Act now. They don’t want to cut these programs. They want to keep these programs going, if anything, and they want them to be more generous with less bureaucracy and more organized, all of which Democrats have lots of proposals to do. Republicans don’t believe in it, which again, I think that’s why we have politics. We should debate that. And if they want to go out and say, “We think it’s bad. We think the money is better spent on our tax cuts,” or, “This is causing healthcare quality to go down,” which they said, we can have that argument, but they don’t want to have that argument because they know they’re going to lose that argument.
So they are trying to plant the flag somewhere where they have an advantage. Immigration is an issue. So they’ve come up with this argument that “what Democrats really want is free care for illegal immigrants.” And I use that phrase deliberately because it’s the phrase the Republicans are using.
So that is the big lie they’re telling. JD Vance was out on TV this morning and then he was at the White House just before we got on to record this. And I noticed they’re kind of walking it back a little bit. They’re trying to narrow it down to something where they feel it’s more defensible. I would say JD Vance is the most enthusiastic proponent of administration lies.... It’s a lie in the sense that it is fundamentally untrue. They know it’s untrue. They are trying to create a misperception and distract from what the real issue is, which is that they don’t want to spend the money on Medicaid and Obamacare that would help millions of people get insurance."
