Hasn't today been a hoot?
Dr. Tom Coburn spoke with Ali Velshi on MSNBC this morning (before the vote was pulled) and I gotta hand it to Velshi: the host wasn't taking any gaslighting from the former Oklahoma Senator. Keep in mind that Coburn single-handedly prevented a bill from passing to fund suicide prevention among members of our military.
COBURN: First of all, the average American has no knowledge of what's in this bill.
VELSHI: That's not true, sir. We spend all of our days helping people understand what's in it.
COBURN: That's just not true.
VELSHI: Can we talk about the poll? Are you going to let me ask --
COBURN: I'm just telling you, you can't trust a poll. Look at the last federal election. you can't trust the poll. (Looks like someone forgot to mention the Russia-effect on polling).
VELSHI: Let's take the poll off the screen because the Senator doesn't want to see any details.
Coburn doesn't believe the non-partisan CBO and equates the inaccuracies of the CBO reports of both the ACA and Medicare Part D, which he claims were both scored in error. The only problem here is that the ACA outperformed many expectations and the Bush 43 Medicare Part D cost far more than anticipated.
Velshi tries to get an admission from Coburn about the increased popularity of "Obamacare" while Trump 'care' is sinking like a stone in the court of public opinion.
VELSHI: When people find out what's in it, what they're about to lose, those numbers get worse and worse and worse. So you may not believe the polls, but can you at least believe the trend that fewer people now support repealing Obamacare today than they did on Election Day, and on Inauguration Day?
COBURN: I have no doubt that fewer people do not support that because of what's been seen and what's been said, that is not necessarily accurate. If you take the CBO's estimate ...on the Affordable Care Act. How accurate was it?...Medicare Part D. It wasn't anywhere in the ballpark. Why would we think that the CBO is accurate this time?
Notice how Coburn forgot that part about how the ACA was paid for and Bush's Part D plan was not? I'm sure he didn't mean to be so careless.
VELSHI: How would you suggest, Senator we do this? Hold on a second. You don't want to believe CBO stuff, which is bipartisan, nonpartisan, you don't want to believe polls. Do we just guess, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what works?
Coburn lied that the American system isn't twice as expensive as any other developed nation's healthcare costs. The fiscally well-informed host put up a few statistics that made Coburn look as foolish as he sounded. Keep in mind, U.S. healthcare outcomes are far inferior to so many countries who spend far less.
The Oklahoma medicine man insists that the biggest problem is fraud and too many regulations that cause our exorbitant healthcare cost surge. Of course he does.
He implies that the 'other,' the non-white American is just costing us too much money and the hard-working White 'real' American is paying the price.
It's still Barack Obama's fault, no matter what happens from now til the end of time. That's the GOP Party line. How much longer will they pretend they're getting away with it?
