Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just delayed the vote on the Senate “health care” bill known as Trumpcare. There’s only one reason for such a move: lack of Republican support. But supposedly objective Julie Banderas, covering the news during Fox’s 2 PM hour, was a vision of partisan talking points as she fumed at Democrats over it.

While waiting for an announcement from McConnell, Banderas welcomed Fox Business host Charles Payne. Banderas immediately tried to blame Democrats for the Republicans’ failure to craft a bill its own party could get behind.

BANDERAS: I want to first of all talk about what the Democrats have done because they have scared the Bejesus out of a lot of Americans and rural Americans, basically saying millions of people, tens of millions of people are going to lose their insurance. People are going to die.

Believe me, if you are someone who relies on Medicaid or Obamacare guarantees of essential health benefits (as my family does), you definitely feel you could die. But don’t take just my word or feelings for it. There is solid research that validates such worry.

But Banderas, who boasted about having read the CBO report, ignored that research as she proceeded to suggest that taking away health insurance from Americans is just giving people what they want - while ignoring proof that Americans don’t want Trumpcare. Health professionals hate it, too.

BANDERAS: “It [the CBO report] talks about the millions of people that potentially will be uninsured under the GOP plan. And, according to this, it is estimated that in 2018, 15 million more people would be uninsured under this legislation than under the current law primarily - and I want to emphasize that word – primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated.

A lot of people that are signed up for insurance are signed up because there’s a mandate. If you don’t sign up for Obamacare, you pay a penalty. A lot of those people don’t want to pay it so we’re gonna dump it so of course the number’s gonna go down.

Instead of pointing out that we should be looking for ways to get people covered instead of shrugging our shoulders and pretending lack of coverage is a good thing, Payne said the “central problem” was the “so-called red states” that accepted federal money and went along with Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

“They don’t have faith in free markets,” Payne groused. “They were warned not to do it, they were warned it was a trap and now they find themselves in a tough predicament where they need that federal money and they don’t trust anything else.”

Nobody seemed to care that millions of low-income Americans were able to get health insurance thanks to Obamacare. If anything, Banderas seemed to resent it as an overpriced extravagance

BANDERAS: The question is, does that paint the full picture because let’s just talk about Medicaid spending. That is something again, that you don’t see widely being reported. Today, it’s 393 billion, as you know. Under the Senate GOP plan, it rises to 464 billion. But under Obamacare, it skyrockets to 624 billion. So then the question is why are Democrats emphasizing so much on Medicaid cuts?

This is a right-wing talking point which, unfortunately for Banderas, is simply not true. Think Progress explains:

"The bill would in fact massively cut Medicaid, threatening to completely phase out the program as we currently know it. The legislation would roll back Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, starting in four short years. It would also make deeper cuts to Medicaid by placing “per capita caps” on the program such that states will receive only a set amount of money for each recipient, no matter how much their care actually costs.

Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicaid in the Obama administration, said on Twitter that “the main event in the Senate bill is the destruction of Medicaid,” characterizing it as “far, far worse than even the House bill.” And the House bill, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, would leave 23 million more people without coverage."

But Banderas seems to think truth is as expendable as millions of Americans’ health when it comes to Republican Party fortunes.

Watch anchor Banderas make Republican politics her first priority above, from the June 27, 2017 America’s News HQ.

Crossposted at News Hounds.
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