More nonsense on health savings accounts and these high deductible junk insurance plans from Utah Republican Rep. Mike Kennedy. Pushing for HSAs as a replacement for the Affordable Care Act is apparently the talking point they've settled on since we're seeing all of these Republican backbenchers come out of the woodwork to advocate for them since the shutdown ended on Fox not "news."

Kennedy made an appearance on Fox's Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy, and while discussing the shutdown and the ACA subsidies that Democrats were pushing to have extended, Kennedy started things off by shaming SNAP beneficiaries for buying soda and candy before going into his spiel about why he's such a huge fan of high deductible insurance plans and HSAs.

KENNEDY: Access to healthcare is vital for everybody, but I'll just remind you, Trey, and everybody else, that the primary driver of healthcare should be the individual. And this gets me to government policies like SNAP, where the number one purchase on food stamps or SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, number one purchase is soda. The number two is candy.

And my question to the people that are listening today and to my patients when I talk to them regularly, is that a good idea for us as a government system to subsidize people to buy some of the least nutritional value, worst drivers of healthcare, soda and candy, so they can buy it on the government dime and make themselves sick.

And then guess what, Trey, you already know all this stuff too, is that when these people consume more soda and candy, diabetes, high blood pressure, they have heart disease and strokes, and that leads to, what do we have from these people? Medicaid. They all are on Medicaid and some of them are on Medicare, and the government is gonna subsidize their healthcare on that side.

We know that anybody that goes to the emergency department is going to get care. And I've donated my time to a voluntary care clinic in Provo, Utah, in my district, that actually we give away free care on a regular basis, but health care should start with the individual.

And that's why I'm a big fan of high deductible plans and health savings accounts. These actually fundamentally are things that are going to transform health care. And we need to promote those policies, which are actually going to drive people to take more account, not only for their own health care, but also for the cost of their health care.

Someone explain to me how that's going to work if people don't have any money to put into one of these plans in the first place. Gowdy then proceeded to pretend that the only things people are complaining about are $20 copays, ignoring the fact that millions of Americans will be looking at completely unaffordable skyrocketing monthly premiums, and not just things like copays going up. Kennedy then wrapped things up by making the ridiculous assertion that these high deductible plans are somehow going to keep costs down.

GOWDY: Well, like a good smart doctor, you anticipated my last question, which is if you could design a plan, what would it be? And I heard high deductibles. I mean, we don't expect our homeowners insurance to pay for every repair at our home, but for health insurance, for some reason, I mean, even paying a $20 copay gets people's eyebrows raised. High deductibles and let the individual interact with the insurance company. That's what I hear you saying in terms of a plan for healthcare.

KENNEDY: Right on. And we're working on that as Republicans because when people have skin in the game, when they have health savings accounts, that their money is in there and they can use it in their own fashion. And I've seen it literally in my office. When people have high deductibles and they're accountable for these charges when I'm ordering tests, they ask me how much those tests are going to cost.

And I tell them how much those roughly estimated, how much those tests are gonna cost. And these people and I, my patients and I have a conversation about the cost of their healthcare. This third party payer process where nobody cares, the doctor doesn't care, the patient doesn't care, but the insurance constantly is, in my case, prior authorizations and refusing to grant the patient's access to labs or tests that I feel like they need. And I've had that for 25 years as a family doctor.

We have to get the customer, which is the patient, in charge of not only their own healthcare, but also in charge of the costs associated with that. And high deductible plans with health savings plans will do that.

Yeah, bullshit. If anything, it means they won't get tests they need because they can't afford them. These people are all just shameless liars.

We need Medicare for all or something similar. Most of the rest of the civilized world has managed to do it and we're still allowing our politicians to be bought off by the insurance companies here.