Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Trump's Big CON: 'Universal Health Insurance For Everyone'

UPDATE II: The still unanswered question is who is being conned by Trump, all Americans or just rabid Republi-CONs?

One solution to Trump's promise of 'universal health insurance for everyone' is 'Medicare for All'.

Read Forbes, Trump's Stealth Health Plan Could Be 'Medicare For All'.

If that happens, it will be the Republi-CON party that got conned by Trump.

UPDATE:  Read also the Washington Post, The magnitude of the health-care calamity Republicans are about to cause is becoming clear.

"We should begin with the assumption that nothing Trump says can be taken at face value; the “plan” that he claims is being devised could be no more real than the secret plan to defeat the Islamic State he used to claim that he had formulated. But that’s not the point. What matters is this: Donald Trump just emphatically promised universal health coverage. That’s an absolutely gigantic promise, and it’s one that Republicans have no intention of keeping. . .

That’s because the Republican plan, in whatever final form it takes, will absolutely, positively not cover everyone. Universal coverage isn’t even one of their goals. Republicans believe it’s much more important to get government as far away from health care as possible. In place of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for the purchase of insurance that have extended coverage to 20 million more people than used to have it, they’ll be offering some tax credits and health savings accounts, which would be very good for the healthy and wealthy, but not so great for other people.

They call this 'universal access,' which is meant to sound like 'universal coverage' but is actually nothing of the sort. The truth is that there are really only two ways you can achieve universal coverage: by having the government cover everyone in some form of single-payer, or with a set of extremely coercive mandates to carry coverage, much more coercive than the ones in the ACA. Republicans would rather pluck out their own eyes than agree to either one of those. So the trick is to make the public think they won’t take away coverage from tens of millions of people, while doing just that.

That requires some rhetorical subtlety, which is something Trump is just not capable of. . .

But Trump says whatever comes into his head, and whatever seems like it might be popular."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump may have just destroyed the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare