After doing everything possible to sabotage the Affordable Care Act since its inception, and the damage just caused by their "One Beautiful Big Bill, MAGA Mike has the audacity to pretend his party is the one that's "fixing healthcare."
As The Washington Post discussed this week, Republicans’ attempts to kill Obamacare keep backfiring, but that hasn't stopped them from trying again and again.
And as we've mentioned here before, they know their policies are both unpopular and indefensible, so they have to lie about them as we watched House Speaker Mike Johnson do during this interview on Fox News Sunday.
Here's the exchange between Johnson and host Shannon Bream after Johnson initially pretended they want to bargain in good faith with Democrats on the subsidies, that there's plenty of time because they don't expire until the end of the year, and that they've supposedly got "hundreds of ideas" on how to fix healthcare.
BREAM: What about his issue though that open enrollment starts in November. People are already getting notices about what they may pay. I mean that's something that's got to be resolved before...
JOHNSON: Yes, and they're eating up the clock in the month of October. They shut the government down October 1st. We had always been counting on using these four weeks in October to finish up those discussions. The great irony is it is they themselves that are doing it. And Shannon, we cannot lose the simple fact that their counter proposal to fund the government was $1.5 trillion in new spending, as you noted.
They wanted to give money back for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and all sorts of things, and they wanted to claw back the elimination of fraud, waste and abuse that we took out of Medicaid to make it work better, and the $50 billion that Republicans put into the law to prop up rural hospitals. What they're saying today makes no sense.
BREAM: Well, he does talk about the fact, and we know that there have been rural hospitals that have closed. That's happened here in the Virginia area and beyond. So what about that? In his contention that a lot of people will be kicked off Medicaid, and yes, people talk about waste, fraud and abuse, but there's real concern by some analyses that there will be other people that may qualify in some way that are going to risk... you know... losing kind of health care coverage that the Leader is talking about there.
JOHNSON: There's so much to be said there. The rural hospitals that are in trouble right now are not because of Republican policies. This is the legacy of what has happened under Obamacare. And you just heard the leader of the Democrats in the House acknowledge that Obamacare is unaffordable.
When they passed the net law in 2010, they promised us it was going to make health care more affordable. They put it in the name of the law. It did exactly the opposite. Premiums have risen exponentially since 2010, and they're not affordable. It was never designed to be affordable.
Republicans are the party that are fixing health care. We just demonstrated that in the one big, beautiful bill, the working families tax cut. We put in reforms to Medicaid, as I mentioned, that cut out fraud, waste, and abuse and got ineligible recipients off of the program, and it's brought down the cost and made the resources spread more broadly to the people who actually need it. U.S. citizens who are the able disabled, the elderly and young pregnant women, those kinds of folks who were the people who are intended for that program to help. We're shoring up the program. We're fixing healthcare. Obamacare is what broke it.
Obamacare was Romney-care and a compromise with Republicans that they still refused to go along with and sabotaged at every opportunity. Republicans have no plan to make things better for anyone other than their rich donors. Alan Grayson was right back in 2009 when he said this:
It's a very simple plan. Here it is. The Republican health care plan for America: Don't get sick. That's right, don't get sick. If you have insurance, don't get sick. If you don't have insurance, don't get sick. If you're sick, don't get sick.
If you get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: die quickly. That's right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.
Nothing has changed since then.
Editor's note: The right approach to bringing down healthcare costs is to open Medicare to people age 50-65 with a buy-in, and provide a public option for everyone else.
