Beauty is in the eye of the bondholder
Republicans imagine a return to halcyon days when America once was “great.” But they are rather vague about when that was, who it was great for, and what was so great about it.
There are clues, of course. Movement conservatism arose in the 1970s to roll back the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s: to before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts ended Jim Crow, before Medicare and Medicaid. Conservative moneyed elites have worked to roll back the New Deal since the 1930s: to before the U.S. banned child labor, before the minimum wage and the 40-hour week, and before Social Security. The felon-in-chief imagines a return to the Gilded Age of William McKinley over a century ago, a time when tariffs were big and beautiful. Before the income tax. Before direct election of senators. Before women could vote. Read between the lines.
But about Medicaid. While Donald Trump gushes with envy toward the Gulf State potentates pouring billions into his pockets, Republicans supporting Trump 2.0 are hard at work trying to make American non-billionaires’ lives nasty, brutish, and short again. Their proposed cuts are part of a bill the president himself named big and beautiful. But then, beauty is in the eye of the bondholder.
From The New Republic:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid in a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
“The math is not adding up. They’re trying to convince people that they are cutting millions of undocumented people from [Medicaid],” Ocasio-Cortez said. She noted that the GOP is claiming that one million undocumented immigrants are collecting Medicaid payments, but their cuts would result in 13.7 million people losing their health insurance.
“They’ve asked us to read this bill, and we have. This bill bans the people that they kick off of Medicaid from even buying their own insurance from the Affordable Care Act exchange,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, adding that the bill “increases costs for people they do deem eligible and who are low income and forces them to pay even more.”
It’s almost as if punishing people for needing health care is the goal.
The work requirements in the proposed bill, argue researchers Michelle Miller-Adams and Beth C. Truesdale, “will only achieve one goal: Kicking people off coverage.” As if in the minds of Republican authors that’s a bad thing.
“Under the proposed rules, states would also be allowed to ask recipients to document their eligibility every six months instead of annually and to remove people’s benefits if they do not comply,” the pair elaborate. “But the reality is that requirements like these move people off programs not by requiring work but by requiring more reporting of work.”
“And your point is?” the GOP might say. Anyway, all this is just misinformation (another from The New Republic):
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee went back and forth Tuesday on who exactly would be affected if conservative lawmakers trudge forward with $880 billion in cuts to the public health insurance coverage. At one point, a wheelchair-bound protester identifying herself as from Youngstown, Ohio, interrupted Alabama Representative Gary Palmer to express her fears.
“You will kill me, I’m HIV-positive,” she shouted as security rolled her out. “I have survived on my meds that are $10,000 a month.”
“It’s unfortunate that people are so enraged by the misinformation that they’ve been given,” Palmer said once security removed the woman and her wheelchair. “It’s a commentary on this Congress and how we treat people.”
No, congressman. It’s a commentary on you:
The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Republicans offered their own numbers, revealing shortly before the committee meeting was scheduled to begin that at least 7.6 million Americans would be affected.)
But not only recipients of care under Medicaid. Reduced funding means reduced work (and jobs) for caregivers. American health care workers who see the writing on the wall are leaving for Canada where care is universal:
More than 100 U.S. nurses are headed north to help alleviate B.C.’s shortage of health-care workers, after the province announced a new program last month that takes advantage of the “chaos” south of the border by streamlining credential checks.
Premier David Eby and Health Minister Josie Osborne said Monday that 113 nurses have already received registrations to practice here after the government made changes in April to make it easier for U.S.-trained health-care workers to work in the province.
They told reporters in Victoria that a total of 1,200 individuals have expressed interest, including 573 physicians, 413 nurses, 133 nurse practitioners and 39 other health professionals.
American health researchers are fleeing to Europe. Salaries there may be lower, but “Europe’s more generous social safety net can make up for a large part of the salary differential.” That’s beginning to look like a better deal for Ph.D. or postdoctoral students who wish to peruse their vocations now that Trump 2.0 policies treat them with disdain. But America’s most educated are not the only ones Trumpism treats with disdain.
Therefore, Democrat’s challenge is to paint for voters a vision of America where life is not as nasty, brutish, and short as Republican retrograde policies would make it again. But neither can Democrats defend what is not working. People see the game stacked against them and the so-called America Dream as a tired joke. The Great Recession wiped out what little wealth tens of millions of Americans had scraped together before 2008, and left Americans born in this century with a denuded future. The Gilded Age repeats itself, this time as farce.
Barack Obama promised “Change We Can Believe In,” and he delivered the Affordable Care Act with all its flaws. But he also bailed out the banking industry while average Americans paid for banker’s perfidy with their homes. Voters declared a plague on both major parties and voted in a clownish billionaire who promised to upend the system that failed them. He’s doing a bang-up job. Whether or not people will appreciate what they wished for when their children start dying of preventable diseases and their lives become still more brutish is doubtful.
What’s not in doubt is that Democrats will not save them (or themselves) by offering more of the same and less Trumpism. They must offer something better that’s not a return to the New Deal past. For that, they’ll have to start empowering younger people who will shape and own the future.
(h/t SR)
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