After Donald Trump rescinded the subsidies for millions of working-class Americans, Fox quickly trotted out Betsy McCaughey, a health care “expert” with a long record of misinforming, to suggest that Trump’s sabotage was no big deal.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reported in April on the effects of ending the cost-sharing reduction payments of the Affordable Care Act, which is what Trump did on Friday:
Many insurers might react to the end of subsidy payments by exiting the ACA marketplaces. If insurers choose to remain in the marketplaces, they would need to raise premiums to offset the loss of the payments.
[…]
We estimate that the increased cost to the federal government of higher premium tax credits would actually be 23% more than the savings from eliminating cost-sharing reduction payments. For fiscal year 2018, that would result in a net increase in federal costs of $2.3 billion. Extrapolating to the 10-year budget window (2018-2027) using CBO’s projection of CSR payments, the federal government would end up spending $31 billion more if the payments end.
Cavuto began his interview with McCaughey by noting concern that Trump’s move could “implode the markets.” But before he finished his first question, she interrupted to deflect from any thoughts about the harmful effects of Trump’s move on the insurance markets. Because Obama!
MCCAUGHEY: Let’s be clear what they are. First of all, the president hasn’t said that he will discontinue the subsidies to help people pay premiums when they buy Obamacare plans. Those subsidies, about $44 billion a year, are authorized and appropriated by Congress and they will continue. So people who go to the Obamacare exchanges this year to buy their plans will be as eligible as they previously were.
What he’s talking about is a different subsidy, a much smaller one but still a whopping big one seven to eight billion dollar a year that has never been authorized and appropriated by Congress. So it would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the president to continue to spend that money.
President Obama spent that money in defiance of Congress and against the Constitution.
McCaughey claimed she was “not arguing about” whether insurance companies should get the subsidy but, supposedly, only about the Constitution. “The beef isn’t with Donald Trump,” she said, suggesting that any problems that may arise out of his actions will be Obama’s fault. “I wouldn’t recommend that the president break Article II of the Constitution and seize authority that belongs to Congress under Article I.
McCaughey concluded by ignoring the increased costs to the federal government as the result of Trump’s move. “The president would argue that this is throwing bad money after good,” she misleadingly said. “Because this system is collapsing.”
The system was not collapsing, though who knows what will happen now.
Nevertheless, Cavuto neither corrected McCaughey nor noted her omissions and distortions.
Watch Fox show preference for wrecking Americans’ health insurance over challenging Trump below, from the October 13, 2017 Your World.
Trump himself made this clear today in a fairly vicious series of statements in his cabinet meeting, where he openly gloated about having destroyed the ACA, and firmly and angrily declared that it could never have worked and was a failure and a disaster. He also stated that it was only because of his latest attack on the ACA that Murray and Alexander were working together. Which was again, a blatant lie. And he went back to the playbook of saying the only reason reform hadn’t happen was because of Dem “obstruction” – again, a blatant lie.
The reality is that Murray and Alexander have been trying for months to find some common ground to stabilize the ACA, but they’ve repeatedly been stymied by Mike Pence’s demand that the GOP not negotiate with the Dems but instead ram through a 51 vote majority bill on their own to simply kill the ACA. Pence and Trump have been clear throughout that they do not want any Dem input, other than for the Dems to cave and beg for mercy while Trump kicks them in the face again. Since the Dems are not willing to do such a thing, Trump then makes noises about obstruction while making sure that no bipartisan work can happen. Once Trump realized he’d missed the 51 vote window for reconciliation protocols, he clearly decided to just kill the ACA on his own by Executive Order.
The Right Wing then campaigned, as they always intended, on the bill having been passed with no GOP votes (not acknowledging that they had threatened and intimidated any GOP members who were fine with the bill into voting in lockstep to oppose it). The result of that, plus the increasing hatred by the Right for Barack Obama, plus the gerrymandering tilt to the Right in 2010, allowed more GOP congresspeople to be voted in, and gave the GOP a majority again in the House. In 2014, the GOP stoked anger about the 2012 election results into a slight majority in the Senate as well. The GOP then worked in earnest to destroy the ACA, to erase it from having existed. The problem at the time was that Barack Obama was still the President, so he would never sign such a bill. But it is notable that the Right Wing did absolutely NOTHING to adjust or improve the ACA when they could have easily done so, and when President Obama repeatedly urged them to do so. Instead, they just voted over 50 times to flat out repeal it. They weren’t interested in negotiating – they just wanted to get rid of it. This was coupled with a series of Right Wing governors refusing to cooperate with the ACA in their states, thus sabotaging a system that was intended to be a large wide net that included everyone and thus could bring the costs down. (By starving the ACA of over 20 states, the Right Wing engineered a scenario that saw premiums go up when they should have decreased, since insurers didn’t have the larger pool of participants that would have made the situation work.) Given the GOP’s obstinance, President Obama made multiple adjustments to the ACA on his own, including adjustments to the various subsidies so that lower income people could obtain plans. The GOP then cried foul and screamed that President Obama couldn’t do that within the Constitution and that he should have just faced the wall for the rest of his tenure and done nothing. Obviously that was a nonsensical position, but the GOP would like you to think it was somehow reasonable. And we should remember that President Obama’s adjustments were intended to be ratified by Congress, particularly when saner people came into those seats and stopped just playing repeal games. Sadly, that will not happen in time, and the Right Wing will finally succeed in killing this program.