Donald Trump Signs On to Paul Ryan's Let-Them-Die 'Health-Care' Crusade - Joy-Ann Reid
Now we know why the House speaker has been wearing that empty-eyed MAGA grin for months. Trump’s all in on his war on the poor.
JOY-ANN REID
03.10.17 1:00 AM ET
Well, it finally happened.
Donald Trump made his long-awaited pivot, and truly became a Republican this week. His spokesman, Sean Spicer, cast off any notion of daylight between the White House and the Obamacare “repeal and replace” bill put forward by the House once it was released from its secret basement birthing room and rushed through the Ways and Means committee at 4:30 Thursday morning on a party line vote. Spicer said the president is in “sell mode” for the plan. That means Team Trump now fully owns this mess—let’s call it TRyancare, a name as unwieldy as the plan itself—alongside the Republican Party.
It clearly doesn’t matter to Trump or to the drafters of the draconian bill, adorably named the American Health Care Act so that it sounds almost exactly like the Affordable Care Act, that it breaks every promise the president made to his supporters on the campaign trail. Or that it can only loosely be called a “health care plan,” because it actually reduces health care for the poor, the working class, rural hospitals, and the elderly to pay for a massive tax cut for the rich and large corporations and hands an extra $70 million or so a year to health insurance company CEOs. Or that the analysts at S&P Global Ratings estimate that Paul Ryan’s Rosemary’s baby will strip health care from 6 to 10 million Americans right off the bat. Or that pretty much everyone on Capitol Hill hates it. Trump sees the opportunity to demonstrate his “art of the deal” skills—perhaps he’ll finally get around to reading the book about it that Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for him—and so it’s time to sell, sell, sell!
Perhaps Trump can use Spicer’s trick and explain to all those coal miners who Paul Ryan wants to leave without coverage for black-lung disease that the bill is awesome because it prints out in a really short stack. Or maybe he can just scream “Planned Parenthood!” at some more “thank you rallies” to get the church people worked up in favor of TRyancare.
However he sells it, by fully backing Ryan’s bill, Trump has signed onto a Republican dream that’s older than he is—of stopping or killing universal health care and nearly every other form of federal assistance to the needy.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/10/donald-trump-signs-on-to-paul-ryan-s-let-them-die-health-care-crusade.html
