by digby
I think promising people they’ll all be millionaires is one way to explain Ryan’s weird health care plan:
The director of the Office of Management and Budget said Wednesday that Republicans wouldn’t use insurance coverage numbers as the ultimate metric for the success of the proposal to replace Obamacare.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mark Halperin asked Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s OMB director, for a “range of estimate of how many fewer people will have health insurance” under House Republicans’ proposed Replacement for Obamacare.
“We’re looking at it in a different way, Mark, because insurance is not really the end goal here, is it?” Mulvaney responded. “It’s one of the conservatives’ – one of the Republicans’ complaints about the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning: It was a great way to get insurance and a lousy way to actually be able to go to the doctor.”
“So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people: Can they afford to go to the doctor? And we are convinced it will be possible for more people to get better care at the doctor under this this plan than it was under Obamacare.”
So, is the argument going to be that Trump is going to make everyone so rich that they won’t need health insurance because they can pay for their health care out of their pocket? How else can we explain the fact that they are not interested in whether people have insurance? To a normal person this is gobbldygook.
Sadly, their voters won’t know the difference until they start getting the bills. Then the Republicans will blame it on Obamacare and more than a few of them will be happy to go along. They will not want to blame their man Trump and changing their minds about Obama is probably impossible. But they might take it out on their GOP congressman who “failed” to stop Obama from ruining everything. That’s Tea Party logic.
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