Joy Reid (65:47)
The Obamacare premium is going to go up 17 or 18%. And that's not my fault. I didn't want Obamacare. So there's a lot that he said there that I think we need to break down. He says, it's not my fault. First of all, you're the president, United States. It's like being the quarterback on a team that loses the super bowl and saying, it's not my fault. Yeah, it's your fault, buddy. You're in charge. And number two, you're the one who demanded that your party pass what you called in an act of pure Orwellian propaganda, the big beautiful bill whose purpose was to destroy Obamacare. Because as you said at the end, and that was actually Trump being honest because he's not smart enough to hide his true feelings. He said, I never wanted Obamacare. We know that you never wanted Obamacare. Your party never wanted Obamacare. When they're being honest, they will tell you that they, they all voted against it, by the way. None of them, not one of them, voted to give 20 million Americans access to healthcare. Let's remember that the Republican Party universally opposed expanding Medicaid to allow people who were not completely impoverished to get it. That's what most of Obamacare is. And they opposed the piece of Obamacare that allowed people to purchase healthcare through an exchange. There were federal exchanges and state exchange. That's what Obamacare was. It was a way to expand health care to 20 to 30 million people who had no health care at all. They also opposed a very key part of Obamacare and probably the key part of Obamacare, which was to say that insurance companies like United Healthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield, who used to deny people the ability to even purchase a plan if they had a preexisting condition. So if you had, you, you'd had, you know, cancer in the past, you couldn't get a policy. If you had had a heart attack or stroke in the past, you couldn't get a policy. Because what insurance companies are in the business of whether you're buying auto insurance, they want people who've never had an auto accident because they don't want to ever have to pay the premium. So they look at you and they rate you when you get auto insurance based on the fact that You've never had an auto accident. If you've had an auto accident, they want to charge you a whole lot of money because they say you're a bad risk. Health insurance works the same way. What health insurance want is for healthy people to sign up who are young and are not going to get sick, so they never have to actually pay out for cancer treatment. So if you had cancer in the past, they think it might come back. They don't want to insure you. They used to be able to say, yes, sorry, you can't have a policy at all. Obamacare made that illegal. Another thing, Republicans and Republicans vehemently disagreed. They said the free market should decide. Insurance companies should be able to say no if they don't want to give you insurance because they think you're a bad risk. Or they said you should go into what they called a risk pool, meaning all the sick people pull themselves together and then they try to sneak and buy insurance as a pool of a bunch of sick and old people. And insurance companies don't want to insure sick and old people. But now they have to because of Obamacare. Republicans also oppose the part of Obamacare that allowed parents to keep their children on their insurance if they had private insurance until they're 26 years old. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that's the only way her kids have insurance because her children are in their 20s and up until 26, they get to free ride on their parents. Republicans, if y', all, I don't know if y' all are old enough to remember the actual debate over Obamacare. These are the things Republicans said. Absolutely no. They vehemently opposed all of these things. Obamacare also made it mandatory for every American to be able to get free screenings, meaning you can go in and you can get a mammogram and you don't have to pay out of pocket. You go in, you get your mammogram, you walk out like they do all over Europe. You go in to get a cancer screening and you walk out without a bill and all you pay is a co pay. That is part of Obamacare. If Obamacare goes away, everything I just mentioned also goes away. Understand that Trump wants that to go away. Now, what is their alternative to Obamacare? Because they have tried nearly 70 times to fully repeal Obamacare. Republicans have tried over and over again to simply fully repeal it. What was their idea to replace it? Nothing. Trump had concepts of a plan. Remember that when Vice President Kamala Harris said he had concept? They have no plan. They have no plan. They Just want Obamacare to go away because the insurance companies and insurance industry give them a lot of money and they want to go back to being able to profit in an exponential way by not insuring sick and old people the second. And somebody pointed out young adults are sick too. That is correct. Thank you very much, Leslie Wyatt. Young, young people get sick as well. Children get cancer. Lots of people get sick. And insurance companies want nothing to do with sick people. They just want healthy people to buy the insurance and then never use it, just like auto insurance companies. Okay, let me just explain this to you. So now Obamacare passes. And recall that when Obamacare passed, the Tea Party movement, which had been founded initially to oppose cram down, which is where Democrats and the incoming Obama administration promised to allow people who were underwater in their mortgages to only pay back the value of their home and cram down the money that the bank gets. Republicans opposed that. And the Tea Party movement went to war over that. They said, you are not going to do cram. And they actually got the administration to back down. I don't think they should have backed down. Vehemently opposed it. But they also were formed with the Koch brothers funding this fake grassroots Tea Party movement to oppose Obamacare. And I want you to understand that the opposition to universal health care goes all the way back to Social Security and Medicaid. When Social Security was passed, Social Security, Medicare, I should say, when the Social Security act was passed, the national association of Physicians vehemently opposed it. So much so, and they were so vehement that they never could get universal health care into the Social Security act except for old people. That's why you have Medicare. So they were willing to do it for the elderly, but not for the poor. Because these, these doctors were like the American Medical Association. They were like, hell no. And they opposed it to the bitter end all the way up until the 1960s, which is when you got Medicare finally passed. The Social Security act was expanded to include Medicare in 1960, in the mid-1960s, and they still couldn't get the poor involved in it. The only way they got the poor to get health care was they created something called Medicaid. That rather than being the federal government directly paying you money, paying for your health care, paying into it so you could get cheaper health care as an elderly person for the poor. They were like, make it a block grant. Because then the federal government gives each state a block of money and then they pay for the, for the met, for the health care for the poor. That is a very inefficient way of doing health care. What would make much more sense is if everyone got Medicare, because Medicare is the federal government directly paying and being the main provider of resources so that that big giant pool of 350 million people, if we all had Medicare, everything would be cheaper because it would be a giant pool. A pool of people can make can get things cheaper than one person. If a bunch of you get together and you want to go on vacation and you all split it and the vacation costs $10,000 and each of you pays 1,000, you each pay $1,000 instead of one person paying 10,000. You see how that works? That's how insurance works, too. So when the opposition to Obamacare has been consistent. When Democrats passed Obamacare, they initially proposed, what if we just took Medicare, which is the Social Security act, health care for elderly people, and just expanded the age down, and we said, instead of making it a separate Medicaid for the poor, which is the block grant one, why don't we just take the federal Medicare one and make it for all? Medicare for all. That would have been simple. You wouldn't have had to change a lot and we'd all get health care. Of course, the insurance industry said, hell no, we don't want to do that. The medical community, the doctor said, hell no, we don't want to do that. That's theft of our labor. We don't want to give you that. And Joe Lieberman, who was a Democrat but switched to independent because he lost a primary to a more progressive Democrat, so he switched parties and became independent, came back, and as he said no, his wife was in the healthcare industry. We could have had Medicare for all back then instead of Medicaid, because Medicaid is too hard to play with. If you are the governor of a red state, you can be real stingy with what you give the poor people in your state. If you're a generous state like California, you give your people more. People who have Medicaid in New York get more than people who have Medicaid in Louisiana. You see what I'm saying? Because each state gets to decide the vibe. And then for Obamacare, which is just Medicaid plus for the poor, right? The part of Obamacare that poor people is just expanded Medicaid, and many states literally refuse to do it, even though the reimbursement was 100% for the first 10 years from the federal government. So this is the fight that we're having. When Trump says he's not responsible, what you have to understand is that Republicans never wanted there to be anything like universal health care at all. They did not want to have the expanded Medicaid that let poor people who are not quite as poor get Medicaid. They didn't want Medicare for all, nor do they want Medicaid, which is Obamacare plus, which is the Medicaid plus, which is Obamacare. And so now they see after 70 attempts to repeal it, that didn't work. Remember John McCain did the thumbs down the one time they got within one vote. He said no and yes. He is jealous. Tammy, who's in, in, in in the thread. Yes, he's jealous of Obama cuz Obama has Obamacare, which the Republicans called it Obamacare to make people hate it. But people love it and it's Obamacare and even red state MAGA's level Obamacare because they finally have health care. They finally have for the first time going to the dentist and stuff, right? They now see the light of where they can get rid of Obamacare. How are they going to do it? I'm about to introduce our guest in a minute. But how they're going to do it is they're going to stop paying the premium supports, which is what makes the medical care affordable for normal person, an Uber driver, a Lyft driver, an entrepreneur. The supports make it affordable for them. If you take those supports away now, people pay the real price and it'll be so unaffordable that people will turn against Obamacare. They'll hate it so much that they will demand that it be repealed. That is the goal. So Democrats who flaked out on us and allowed them to go forward and open the government without getting a deal on this, they got played. Because when this comes up in December, I promise you, Republicans will not vote to put the premium supports back on because they finally see their opportunity to end Obamacare, period. And you know what? They want to go back to the old system where Republicans, their donors can get really, really rich. Joining Me now is Dr. Rob Davidson. He's the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, a West Michigan ER physician for more than 25 years, and the host of the Paging America podcast. Dr. Davidson, please correct me if I got anything wrong there.
