"AM Joy," hosted by the unflappable Joy Ann Reid, is perhaps the best news and information source to help us shuffle through all the half truths and outright lies we face from the Conservative/Both-Siderist media.
After thoroughly exposing the disturbing complacency of most of the Republican Party, and their complete disinterest in preventing further attacks by Russia in hour one, hour two featured Joy taking the Heritage Foundation's designated liar-du-jour (Director of Congressional and Executive Relations Tommy Binion) to task on his fallacies about Trump'care.' This plan is known as the BCRA, or the Better Care Reconciliation Act (or perhaps Brutal Conservatives are Abusive is much more fitting).
REID: Just minutes after Republican senator Ben Sasse proposed repeal and delay, Fox & Friends' number one fan tweeted his endorsement, "If Republican senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately repeal and then replace at a later date." A few things about that:
1. Republicans will likely need 60 votes to wholesale repeal the ACA. That's ten more votes than the 50 votes they haven't been able to get for their proposed bill;
2. Just repealing the ACA would leave 33 million more people uninsured than under the current law. That's even worse than the Senate version of Trumpcare, which would leave 22 million more uninsured;
3. Repealing Obamacare without having a replacement ready would likely further destabilize the insurance markets and lead to even more insurers pulling out of the exchanges; and
4. Who actually believes Republicans would ever get around to the "replace" part?If Republicans do what they say they're going to do.
Joy asked Heritage Foundation's Tommy Binion a few questions about his faulty premise. Binion claims that people would get more affordable healthcare and only pay for what they want, as if they'll get to choose what form their illness will manifest itself as.
REID: If it was a robust market to insure the people who were added to the insurance rolls under the Medicaid expansion, these are basically the working poor, if there was such a robust market to offer them insurance, why wasn't it there before Obamacare?
BINION: If we're speaking about those people on Medicaid --
REID: We are.
BINION: The CBO assumes some would leave Medicaid, but Medicaid is free.
REID: What?
BINION: They're required to be on it under Obamacare, and the CBO assumes some of them would leave despite --
REID; Not leave. No, no, I'm sorry, they would not leave.This is not people voluntarily saying, you know, I choose to go uninsured. It's people losing their health insurance essentially not having health insurance anytime. I want to get into how the CBO came up with their numbers...
BINION: First, I didn't say that, the CBO said that.
Funny how the Republican-appointed CBO is no longer credible. Joy isn't buying it.
BINION: [What] those people will have under the Senate bill is more choice. We know when they have more choices, they're going to exercise that choice.
REID: That's a great bumper sticker. Because remember, we're still only talking about non-group market --
BINION: That's not true.
REID: Hold on. You're basically saying if people can buy more junk insurance, insurance that really doesn't cover much --
BINION: Insurance that covers the things they want.
REID Like basic things and most people like the services that they're getting under Obamacare, the free mammograms, et cetera -- hold on a second.
BINION: I think they would like to pick, not have the government pick for them.
REID You keep saying people would voluntarily dis-enroll from insurance. Would you voluntarily dis-enroll from insurance?
BINION: I didn't say that, the CBO said that.
REID: No, the CBO said they would lose insurance. Said very specifically they would lose insurance.
As if a few million would voluntarily leave.
Joy asks fellow panelist, HuffPo's Michael Cohen, what he thinks about kicking off the rolls over 20 million Americans:
COHEN: But the key thing to remember to pan out just like you did to say, look, this is taking $1 trillion away from programs that help people pay their medical bills. It's coming out of Medicaid. It's coming out of subsidies to help people buy private insurance. If you take that much money out of federal healthcare programs, $1 trillion over ten years, one way or another you are telling millions of people they are not going to be able to pay their medical bills. It's just a reality. That is what we are looking at with this bill, and that is why this bill is so hard to pass, because every time you look at it, they tinker with the pieces. They move a little money here, they move a little money there, but at the end of the day, there are millions of people who won't have health insurance. There are millions of people who will have health insurance but will have even higher deductibles than today. Obamacare's not perfect. Everybody admits that. It needs improvement in a lot of areas. but relative to what we have today, pass the Senate bill, pass the House bill, you will have substantially more Americans in the millions who will be struggling relative to today.
JOY REID: Tommy Binion? [It seems Joy is expecting the forthcoming false Heritage Foundation narrative, and he doesn't disappoint]
BINION: It's faulty logic to say every dollar the federal government spends on health insurance is the only dollar that could help people. We know from 200 years of American history that the free market and free enterprise delivers the best products. Why would we take that out of the care market?
REID: You're giving us theoreticals when we're telling you if you take the absolute dollars that you spend to cover people with Medicaid, to give people insurance cards and you reduce that by $1 trillion, that if -- I mean absolute dollars, that means fewer people can be helped by the program. If you repeal the Medicaid expansion, everyone who was added to Medicaid because of the expansion comes off Medicaid because the expansion isn't there. The theoreticals about the free market don't give people health care. I want to come to -- it doesn't give people health care for you to talk about the free market. Talk about the free market makes you feel good. It doesn't give people a medical card.
BINION: The government won't solve all of our problems.
REID: Why weren't those people insured -- why weren't those people insured under the free market before Obamacare?
BINION: More people will be insured if health insurance --
REID Then, why weren't those people insured under the free market system we had before Obamacare?
BINION: Many of them could have been and chose not to. They weren't insured until the government forced them to be.
REID: You're saying people wouldn't have wanted the Medicaid expansion -- they wouldn't have taken Medicaid and have an insurance card to go to the doctor if they -- it ends the expansion.
BINION: No, it doesn't. no it does not.
Joy gets in the last word, definitively, succinctly and with authority. Try as he might, Joy wasn't going to let any of Binion's falsehoods be left out there to pollute the airwaves.
REID: Okay. that's actually not true
When these lying Republican fiction-peddlers try to sell their goods on any media outlet, it should be mandatory for those ideas to be countered with the FACTS which easily dispute these lame, deceptive, gaslighting arguments.
Keep up the good work, Joy! Wish there were more journalists like you out there.
