Trump: Our Plan Covers Preexisting Conditions. It Doesn’t.

President Trump Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

At her press conference Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders reassured the public about the issue that has become the Republicans’ premier campaign liability. “The president’s health-care plan that he’s laid out,” she said, “covers preexisting conditions.”

There are several lies embedded in this statement, beginning with the premise that Trump has a plan at all. Trump ran for president promising repeatedly he would cover everybody, and then confessed, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” He never came up with a plan that would cover everybody, or anything close to it. Republicans in both chambers devised plans that would cut health-care coverage and expose more poor or sick people to higher costs, or make access to medical care completely unaffordable. When the Senate failed to pass anything, the legislative initiative died.

Neither chamber of Congress has any plan to move forward with regard to health care. If Trump has such a plan, he has kept it completely secret.

Second, Trump has made a series of administrative changes designed to cripple Obamacare in general and specifically its ability to deliver affordable coverage to people with preexisting conditions. Republicans in Congress and Trump repealed the individual mandate in their tax-cut bill. (“We ripped the heart out of Obamacare with the individual mandate,” Trump boasted.) Second, he denied payments owed to insurers under the law, in order to prod some of them to exit the markets. Third, his administration flouted the law’s protections by allowing insurers to sell low-cost, bare-bones plans to healthy people, which can be sold at cheap rates because they exclude coverage for medical care needed by people with preexisting conditions.

Trump’s stated rationale for these moves was that he was destroying Obamacare (“It’s dead, it’s gone”) which would then pave the way for something he would like. (“We have essentially repealed Obamacare, and will come up with something that’s much better, whether it’s block grants or whether it’s taking what we have and doing something terrific.” At the time Trump and his allies were trying to repeal the law, the uncertainty caused by their actions made premiums skyrocket, and the failure of that repeal meant rates were higher than insurers needed to run a profit. They have come back down, but not as low as they would be if not for the sabotage.

These attempts to sabotage Obamacare did not destroy the law. Instead they merely hampered it, by luring healthy customers out of the exchanges, leaving behind a sicker population, resulting in higher premiums. A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds that premiums are 16 percent higher as a result of Trump’s combined sabotage attempts.

Finally, and most absurd of all, in place of a “plan,” the administration really does have a concrete course of action on health care. It’s a lawsuit to overturn federal regulations protecting people with preexisting conditions. The law, the true centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, prevents insurers from either charging higher prices to people with preexisting conditions or denying coverage for treatments they need.

Republican attorneys general in 20 states, joined by the Trump administration, are supporting an outlandish lawsuit to eliminate these protections. Their case rests on the fact that they originally envisioned having an individual mandate, and since Congress repealed the individual mandate, the protections for preexisting conditions should also be repealed. The legal absurdity of this argument can be seen simply by noting that, if Congress actually meant to repeal the insurance regulations when it eliminated the individual mandate, it would have said something to this effect at the time. It didn’t.

In any case, Trump’s “plan” for health care is a lawsuit to deny protections for people with preexisting conditions. This is the opposite of having a plan to protect people with preexisting conditions.

Republicans are doing this both because they viscerally despise Obamacare and because they ideologically believe the government should not regulate the insurance market. But their position is wildly unpopular. The dynamics of competitive democracy suggest Republicans should be forced to abandon a policy position that they cannot defend to the electorate. Instead they are obscuring their stance with wild lies without altering its substance whatsoever. Whether they succeed in doing so poses an important test for the democratic process.

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10/30/2018

The Washington Post refuses to let Jamal Khashoggi’s murder slip from the headlines

Jama Khashoggi walked in to the Saudi Consulate four weeks ago on Tuesday to obtain a simple document allowing him to marry. Instead, he was brutally murdered by a team of 15 agents sent from Riyadh. Saudi authorities now acknowledge the crime was premeditated. Yet much about it remains undisclosed, including what happened to Mr. Khashoggi’s body, which has not been returned to his family.

Rather than answer those questions, the Saudi government — and its de facto accomplices in the Trump administration — have gone silent, evidently hoping that demands for accountability will fade away now that the story has been pushed from the front pages. That should not be allowed to happen.

10/30/2018

The Pittsburgh Penguins are wearing this patch to honor the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting

Photo: @penguins

10/30/2018

The man accused of sending bombs to Trump critics made hundreds of death threats on Twitter

In April 2018, six months before he allegedly sent mail bombs to Soros, prominent Democrats and the offices of CNN, Sayoc moved from just tweeting about conspiracy theories to regularly threatening people.

In all, CNN’s analysis found, Sayoc tweeted more than 240 threats directed to at least 50 public officials, news organizations and media personalities. …

Your Time is coming,” “Your days are over,” “your (sic) next,” and “Hug your loved ones real close everytime U leave your home,” were some of Sayoc’s refrains. Sometimes he attached photos to his threats, including pictures of decapitated goats, photos of the homes and families of those he was threatening and a tarot card of a skeleton on horseback over the caption “death.” He frequently suggested that the people he was tweeting at would vanish in the Everglades, not far from where he lived in Florida.

10/30/2018

Kanye is taking a break from politics

My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in. I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!

10/30/2018

Pittsburgh protesters greet President Trump

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

10/30/2018

Odds Watch: FiveThirtyEight forecasts Democrats have less than 15 percent chance of taking Senate

10/30/2018

pittsburgh synagogue shooting

pittsburgh synagogue shooting

Trump Heads for Pittsburgh (Over Local Leaders’ Objections)

By Eric Levitz

The Steel City’s mayor asked the president not to visit until after the victims of the synagogue shooting were buried. Trump came anyway.

10/30/2018

Seems like a good development for the world

My eyes are now wide open and now realize I’ve been used to spread messages I don’t believe in. I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!

10/30/2018

A sobering poll for Tennessee Democrat Phil Bredesen

Republican Marsha Blackburn is now narrowly edging Democrat Phil Bredesen in Tennessee’s closely-watched Senate race despite Bredesen’s higher favorability with likely voters, a new NBC News/Marist poll finds. But both Blackburn and Bredesen have seen decreased popularity since the bruising campaign — including more than $50 million spent on television ads — kicked into gear.

The poll shows Blackburn with the support of 51 percent of likely voters, compared with 46 percent support for Bredesen. Among all registered voters, her advantage narrows to 49 percent to 46 percent.

Why don’t young people vote?

today we published a piece, coauthored by zak, in which several millennials discussed why they haven’t voted in the past. what in particular about their responses, which ranged from “democrats don’t represent me” to “voting is too much of a hassle” stuck out to you?

Everyone I spoke to personally lived in New York, and I was struck by how that fact influence their decision to vote. The perceived safety of living in a place where political outcomes feel preordained, at least in terms of whether it’s going D or R, I think made them a lot more comfortable in their stance. Most were clear that if they lived somewhere like Ohio, Florida, etc., they’d be more inclined to vote.

that strikes me as fairly rational, tbh

It does to me too. But it was also paired with a pretty firm indictment of how the electoral college subverts this notion of “one person one vote”

Separately, I think that a hazy…consumer activist…ethos has done a real number on many Americans’ ability to understand what voting is. A lot of people seem to see politicians as being indistinguishable from other heavily marketed products – you look for the one that best aligns with your personal brand/sense of identity, and if you don’t like any of the products, or have moral qualms about how they’re made, then the ethical thing to do is to boycott them.

but boycotting elected officials doesn’t work, because they have no incentive to maximize their support among the non-voting public (whereas corporations do have an incentive to expand market-share, even among demographics that aren’t currently buying what they’re selling) 

that’s an interesting way of looking at it

You’re not sending the message you maybe think you are by not voting. It’s not incentive for them to change. It’s incentive for them to keep fucking you over because they know you won’t do anything about it.

the answers I felt most sympathetic to were: it really is a non-trivial pain in the ass to register

it really underscored the extent to which voting is unnecessarily difficult in a lot of the country

it should be opt-out, not opt-in

full disclosure: I wasn’t on top of things in 2016 and got locked out of the Democratic primary

(because New York state makes you register with a party 6 months in advance) 

I was in london and my absentee ballot didn’t get there in time, so I feel your pain

zak, did you come away with any sense of what kind of tactics might actually make young people want to vote more? as one of the people said, shaming may not be the way to go

Yeah, I got the sense that a pretty aggressive pro-voting rights platform would actually appeal to some of the people I spoke to. Eliminating the electoral college, AVR, same-day registration.

(using the phrase “young people” makes me feel 60 years old, by the way)

They were literally all my age and I was like, “Wow, I remember when I was young.”

haha

yeah, I think the popular image of young non-voters tends to be that they’re completely apathetic. but in fact, many are more just disgusted with the current system – not that I think not voting is an appropriate way to express that disgust.

Yeah. Most I spoke to were pretty adamant about the importance of being politically involved otherwise. One guy was basically like, in my ideal system, we wouldn’t need voting in the way it currently operates.

It is also true that Democrats haven’t exactly done everything in their power to give millennials an affirmative reason to support them

the last time the Dems were in power, they passed a landmark health-care law – that was *designed* to increase the cost of health insurance for people in their 20s who don’t get health-care through their jobs

though, also kept those under 26 on their parents’ plans

don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eric

(but yes, your point is valid)

that plus the bipartisan complicity in the student debt nightmare and foreclosure crisis + the refusal to get right on a gimme issue like weed legalization = room for improvement.

I think the usual lesson of voter turnout is that people need to be excited about something, not just alienated by the opposition. And yet, millennial turnout this year is projected to be higher than it has been in a long time. If that holds up, will it be because people are excited to send Trump a message, or that Democrats recruited worthy candidates? It’s hard to untangle the two.

well, the usual lesson of midterm turnout is, in my understanding, that alienation from the people in power is all a lot of voters need 

from what I’ve seen though this is poised to be a historically high turnout election, across demographics. The current president’s singular talent for keeping himself at the center of national attention – and fomenting a sense of perpetual crisis in both red and blue America – seems to have increased popular engagement with politics across the board 

At the same time, there are some exciting/potentially history-making candidates in some places. Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum.

This Kemp-Abrams race has so many galvanizing dimensions going any number of directions

As a progressive in GA, you could be stoked to elect the first black woman gov in US history, excited about her platform, motivated because you feel an anti-GOP vote would be a referendum on Trump, or enraged by Kemp’s voter suppression tactics and conflicts of interest.

Any of those in isolation is enough to draw people to the polls

but combined, it’s a much bigger deal with much higher stakes 

definitely agree that Democrats have found some really excellent candidates this cycle

To Eric’s point about a sense of perpetual crisis driving engagement, I wonder how much voting might be motivated by just not wanting to think about politics so much

Like just please get this dude off my newsfeed

I know that’s my main motivation at this point

I remember listening to a podcast interviewing the guy who ran Doug Jones’ media strategy in Alabama and he was pretty confident that even among people who might like Trump, they still don’t want everyone to be like Trump

Seemed to think there’s a genuine and widespread desire for more balance. I don’t know how true that is. But it could at the very least be a consideration, if not a driving factor outright.

From what I’ve read, the psychic toll of having the worst human being in the country as a constant presence in your life, and that of everyone you know, has been a major force in spurring the politicization and mobilization of college-educated women in the suburbs (in addition, of course, to the GOP’s cartoonish misogyny)

soon enough, we’ll find out if this all adds up to a major Democratic victory. 

games

There Is a Professional Wrestling Angle to the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi

By Will Leitch

The WWE is forging ahead with its plan for a major event in Saudi Arabia this Friday.

10/30/2018

More details on the sordid, strange plot to discredit Robert Mueller

Multiple reporters were contacted over the past few weeks by a woman who said she had been offered money to say she was sexually assaulted by Mueller, the special counsel who is probing possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. After investigating, according to the political website Hill Reporter, the reporters each independently determined the assault allegation was likely a hoax and that it was unclear if the woman had been offered money to make the claim. The reporters then contacted the special counsel’s office to report that they had been approached about the scheme.

Around the same time reporters began to be contacted about the assault allegations against Mueller, Jack Burkman, a Republican lobbyist and radio host, began promoting, via his Facebook page, that he is investigating sexual misconduct and alcohol-related allegations against Mueller. On Tuesday morning he tweeted that he would hold a press conference two days later to “reveal the first of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sex assault victims.”

10/30/2018

pittsburgh synagogue shooting

pittsburgh synagogue shooting

Armed Guards Are Already Common in New York’s Synagogues

By Nick Tabor

After the Pittsburgh shooting, synagogues are rethinking their security measures. But armed guards are already surprisingly common among them.

10/30/2018

The L train apocalypse is nigh

The

begins Saturday, April 27, 2019 for a 15-month reconstruction says

. Mark your calendars. 🚆

10/30/2018

Facebook’s politics vetting leaves a lot to be desired

One of Facebook’s major efforts to add transparency to political advertisements is to require those paying for the ads to make a “Paid for by” disclosure, which appears at the top of the ad and supposedly tells users who is paying for political ads that show up in their news feeds.

But on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, a VICE News investigation found the “Paid for by” feature is easily manipulated, and appears to allow anyone to lie about who is paying for a political ad, or to pose as someone else paying for the ad.

To test it, VICE News applied to buy fake ads on behalf of all 100 sitting U.S. senators, including ads “Paid for by” by Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Facebook’s approvals were bipartisan: All 100 sailed through the system, indicating that just about anyone can buy an ad identified as “Paid for by” by a major U.S. politician.

10/30/2018

Ryan Zinke is the new Scott Pruitt

The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General has referred one of its ongoing probes into the conduct of Secretary Ryan Zinke to the Justice Department for further investigation, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

Interior Deputy Inspector General Mary L. Kendall, who is currently serving as acting inspector general, is conducting at least three probes that involve Zinke. These include his involvement in a Montana land dealand the decision not to grant two tribes approval to operate a casino in Connecticut. The individuals, who spoke of the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, did not specify which inquiry had been referred to the Justice Department.

10/30/2018

Robert Mueller’s enemies are going to extremes to try to discredit him

An alleged scheme to pay off women to fabricate sexual assault allegations against Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been referred to the FBI for further investigation, according to a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, Peter Carr. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” Carr said in a statement on Tuesday.

The special counsel’s office confirmed that the scheme was brought to its attention by several journalists who were told about it by a woman alleging that she herself had been offered roughly $20,000 by a GOP activist named Jack Burkman “to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.” 

2018 midterms

Steve King May Actually Pay a Price For Being a Blatant Racist

By Eric Levitz

Iowa’s favorite white nationalist is losing campaign donors — and a new poll shows him statistically tied with a Democrat in his deep-red district.

10/30/2018

Blatant Anti-Semitic image used in Connecticut campaign

10/30/2018

Prominent Republican issues rebuke to White Supremacist-friendly colleague

Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.

10/30/2018

As judicial experts have been saying all day…

BIG from PAUL RYAN: "You cannot end birthright citizenship
with an executive order." says on WVLK radio

10/30/2018

Axl Rose tells his Twitter followers “Vote Blue… Bitches!!”

10/30/2018

It’s almost as if they’re expecting the “comforter-in-chief” to do something inappropriate

The top congressional leaders from both parties declined an invitation from the White House to join President Trump on Tuesday in Pittsburgh in the wake of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Both House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) were unable to make the trip due to scheduling conflicts, with Ryan’s office noting he wasn’t able to make it on such short notice. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) also decided not to attend.

apple

Apple Tries to Woo Back the Creative Pros That Make Up Apple’s Core

By Jake Swearingen

Apple would like to remind you that it also makes computers and not just iPhones.

10/30/2018

just asking questions

just asking questions

Elaine Pagels on How Devastating Loss Influenced Her Groundbreaking Scholarship

By Nick Tabor

Why Religion? is her new memoir about personal calamities, revolutionary scholarship, and her own, sort-of faith.

long vs short

Long vs. Short: Does the New York Times’ Business Model Depend on Trump?

By Matt Stieb

The company has put up great growth numbers since November 2016, and its stock is soaring. Can it last?

10/30/2018

You’ll never guess which senator is all in on Trump’s effort to do away with birthright citizenship

In addition, I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President

.

fake news

Trump: Why Didn’t the Media Blame Obama for Dylann Roof Attacking Black People?

By Eric Levitz

The president says the media is biased because it associated him with Cesar Sayoc but “didn’t do that with President Obama, with the church.”