TRUMP'S EXPLANATION FOR REVERSING ON MEDICAID IS NONSENSE

…Unfortunately, Trump is now in Ryan’s camp, whether he likes it or not.

 

Trump has failed to separate himself from Speaker Ryan, and Ryan’s limited-government Republicans.

 

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just release its score of the GOP health-care bill, and the details confirm once again that the Republican plan would cut $8 billion from Medicaid.  It would also leave 23 million Americans uncovered.

 

This, plus the rest of President Trump’s budget would heap a pile of other cuts on top of all that.  The budget just demonstrates that Trump is fully committed to transform and downsize the social programs that help lower-income Americans.  All the while packaging an enormous tax cut for America’s super-rich.  The Wal-Mart, Walton family alone would receive a $7.8 Billion dollar tax cut, while American senior's health care premiums, if they had a previous health condition, could increase up to 800%.  (This not a joke!)

 

The truth for those that voted for Donald Trump, this budget will not only harm the group of those who didn’t vote for Trump, it will also definitely hurt all those individuals who did vote for Trump.

 

Hopefully, this evidence will show those that voted for Trump what their candidate of choice is trying to do to them, if they will just take the time to check it out.

 

To make the point, the Kaiser Family Foundation has conducted a survey of their members that shows large numbers of Trump voters and their families that rely on Medicaid.  And large numbers of these Trump voters oppose the cuts to the program that the budget proposes.

 

The survey’s polling, which comes from Kaiser’s February tracking poll was broken down and shows that 42% of Trump voters, and 51% of people who approve of Trump, they both say Medicaid is somewhat or very important to them and their families. More to the point, only 24% of Trump voters and only 20% of people who approve of Trump, want to decrease spending on Medicaid.  And please note that the majorities of both want to keep Medicaid the same and many more want to increase it. (A recent Quinnipiac poll also found that 54% of all Republicans oppose cutting Medicaid.)

 

Trump’s budget proposal would transform the structure of Medicaid and cut spending on the program by hundreds of billions of dollars on top of the GOP health-care plan’s hundreds of billions in cuts to the Medicaid expansion over the next 10 years. This would chop the Medicaid program by nearly ½ .

 

It’s hard to know exactly how many Trump voters would be hit by these Medicaid cuts, but judging by Kaiser’s polling, it appears we’re talking about most of them.

 

Reports on a new poll analysis show that in four key Rust Belt states that went from Obama to Trump, (And put trump in the White House), large percentages of those who benefit from Food Stamps and Social Security Disability Insurance (both of which would get slashed by Trump’s budget) are non-college whites.  That is Trump’s core constituency. Those states include Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Other data shows that large percentages of those who stand to lose health coverage under the GOP health plan in those same states are blue-collar Americans. (More Trump voters.) Many of them are most likely on Medicaid, and this toll would be made worse by the Trump budget.

 

Isn’t it ironic that Trump went to great pains to separate himself from House Speaker, Paul Ryan, and his limited-government Republicans.  He did this initially by vowing “no cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security”.  This obviously helped boost him among working-class white American voters.  Now he’s obviously lost that position. 

 

But do his supporters realize that?  I doubt it.

 

This week, the White House had an explanation for Trump’s reversal on Medicaid.  When asked by CNBC’s John Harwood to explain the Medicaid flip, Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney claimed the promise was supplanted by Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. Huh? This is total nonsense. As Brian Beutler of the New Republic explained, “Mulvaney layered a lie of his own on top of Trump’s lie,” because Trump’s budget cuts to Medicaid “go hundreds of billions of dollars beyond phasing out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”

 

But this is only the tip of a very large iceberg.

 

There are numerous Trump lies now being forced out into the open. Trump claimed he would not touch Medicaid and he simultaneously said that he’d repeal Obamacare and “replace it with something better for all”.  That has now become a pure lie for Trump to claim he wouldn’t touch Medicaid and the replacement would be better.  

It was also a lie to suggest that preserving Medicaid and repealing Obamacare were even compatible.  It was the bigger lie to claim that his repeal-and-replace plan would result in better coverage for every American.

 

If anything, the White House’s bogus justifications only throws the scale and audacity of these intertwined scams, lies and betrayals into even sharper view.

 

The Trump scams go even deeper when you consider that Trump promised his voters something even better than the nation's safety-net protections.  That being he promised good jobs with great benefits.

The Trump White House is defending its cuts by arguing that the real measure of success is “the number of people we get off of those dependency programs.” This is by the example of Trumpism’s promise to restore an old economic order with his promise of a revival of US manufacturing and coal mining.  In other words, jobs are better than government help, and surely many of his voters made this same miscalculation.

 

But, what if those promised jobs don’t ever materialize?

 

If this promise of Trumpism never comes to pass, all that would be left behind is the massive downsizing of guess what?  The nation’s safety net that is there today.  And this would all be justified by the classic GOP rhetoric about freeing people from Paul Ryan’s version of the safety net.  Ryan's dreaded, “hammock of dependency.”

 

As I had stated, Trump’s reasoning for his reversals on Medicaid are total nonsense along with all the other lies.  And it doesn’t take all the knowledge of the often quoted “rocket scientist” to figure it out.

But due to their fearless leader, the Republican leaders are finally coming to the conclusion that they may now end this Summer with no significant legislative accomplishments.  The coming Fall will probably be more troublesome than the first four months of Trump’s presidency. They are facing terrible budget choices and many potentially horrible news headlines, along with their painful effort of trying to re-work the nation’s healthcare, (presuming the House bill makes it out of the Senate).  And this is all occurring with Russian scandal-mania as the backdrop.

 

So, are you all of you now becoming tired of all that winning yet?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017