Did you know that getting people health insurance wasn't the goal for Trumpcare and Republicans?
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Mark Halperin asked OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, his "estimate of how many fewer people will have health insurance” under House Republicans’ proposed Replacement.
Mulvaney audaciously said, "We’re looking at it in a different way, Mark, because insurance is not really the end goal here, is it?”
Say, what? What is he talking about?
Mulvaney continued, “It's one of the conservatives' and one of the Republicans' complaints about the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning."
The idea was to make health care affordable and available to all Americans.
Mulvaney said, "It was a great way to get insurance and a lousy way to actually be able to go to the doctor."
I'm sorry, just because you are covered under Obamacare doesn't mean you couldn't go to the doctor. The problem has been fluctuating rates and high deductibles, problems that can be fixed without throwing 20 million people off insurance.
I will tell you in my case, I had a preexisting condition before 2010, and I paid higher for my health care than I have been since Obamacare first began. Years before Obamacare, I also went to doctors who dropped out of the insurance markets altogether because their staff was tied up on the phones trying to get patients coverage from item to item.
Mulvaney continued, “So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people, 'can they afford to go to the doctor?' And we are convinced it will be possible for more people to get better care at the doctor under this plan than it was under Obamacare.”
Doctors do not change the way they do their jobs and diagnose health problems because you purchased your insurance on the exchanges or privately, idiot. If a doctor did that, they'd lose their license to practice medicine.
Matt Shuham from TPM writes: That is a slightly different metric than the one set out by President Donald Trump to the Washington Post in January: “Insurance for everybody … Much less expensive and much better.”
