The Senate is already debating the repeal of Obamacare, and Bernie Sanders is already pointing out the blazing hypocrisy if they succeed. One of the advantages of a president who can’t stop tweeting is that you have everything he has tweeted in black and white. So Sanders brought a rather large copy of one of Donald Trump’s tweets during the presidential campaign to the floor of the Senate:
Trump’s tweet says: “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me.”
Obamacare contains extensive fixes to Medicare (including fixing the infamous donut hole problem, and funding fixes so it wouldn’t run out of money), and even more extensive improvements to Medicaid. So if Trump signs a bill to repeal Obamacare without replacing it with something that has the same provisions, he will be breaking a huge promise to the American people. Millions of people will lose their health insurance, and everyone else will get worse coverage. That certainly looks like cuts and sounds like cuts, and sounds like a quack.
10 Comments
I have a feeling that trump fans are ok with Trump “bending” his statements or lying other than when it comes to immigration. And repealing obamacare. And when it comes to ocare i get the feeling the only thing they want is to get that name off of their healthcare policy. Replace the name ocare with trumpcare and keep the specifics the same and I would be shocked if they noticed.
Again (and this I sent to Schumer) Health care coverage is so simple. Baby gets a SS# at birth along with a health care card. Now when and if the parents have to file a tax return (some who don’t need to file, file to get the earned income credit) the premiums are based on their income. The rich pay more than the middle class. This is already being done with Medicare where you have to kick an extra $100 a month if you get a windfall on your taxes. Those that don’t have to file, get put on Medicaid. Those that want more protection to cover assests they don’t want to lose, get advantage plans. All of this would be handled by private insurances as it is now: hence RINO can lower the taxes for the rich, the rich will pay extra in health insurance.
Send the above to all your representatives in Washington.
I love Sanders (probably made that over-clear in the primaries) but he has to know he’s trying to grab a phantom here. When it comes to Trump I think we need to adopt a policy of believing the terrible things he says (arms race! religious test! trade war! gut the first amendment!) and be very skeptical of anything that actually sounds too good to be true (the above on SS and Medicare, maintaining the good parts of the ACA, millions of jobs, etc.).
Good for Bernie! That man is on his toes and actually seems to are about the rank and file American.
I agree with Jonas. Call it Trumpcare to stoke Trump’s ego, and everyone, including him, will be fine with it.
A few years ago, Trump was tweeting that Assange should get the death penalty for leaking hacked intel. Today he’s practically his hero, second only to Putin. On the campaign trail and in numerous tweets, Mexico was paying for The Wall, no ifs ands or buts about it. Now he wants Congress to appropriate the funds which, he would now like us all to believe, will be reimbursed later by the country who sends us their rapists, killers and drug mules. And, of course, this apparent misunderstanding is all because of “The dishonest media [which] does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!”. During the campaign: “Lock her up!”. After the campaign: “We won, so now we don’t care, right?”. Riiiiiight, got it…spoken like a true politician he loves to claim he ain’t. Still waiting for those revelations he promised to report on by mid-week about things he knows about the Russian hacking issue that no one else does. Guess he’s been too busy tweeting about the crappy job Arnold’s doing on The Apprentice.
The point being, I wouldn’t bet the ranch on ANYTHING he says, much less tweets; the petulant man-child flip-flops more than a fish out of water. But I applaud Bernie and others for holding his feet to the fire. His dissembling must be shouted out, early and often for as long as it takes.
My concern, as it’s been expressed by some in the press, is that his Twitter account should be considered a potential WMD, whether it’s mocking or slandering public officials who dare question his actions or motives, antagonizing or confounding our adversaries and allies by disparaging remarks about the (and soon his!) intel community, or influencing the stock market by criticizing individual companies’ business practices. His verbal spankings of Ford and Toyota, for example, affected their stock price. How do we know he, his kids, or one of his sycophants, didn’t make money off of that? We’ll never know because he’ll never release his tax returns or other business practices. He’s must be giving the SEC angina over what’s transpired already! He’s said in the past he would be the first presidential candidate to make money off it. Is Twitter only his soap box or a stock market gold mine? I suspect day traders are scouring his every tweet looking for a sure bet.
A President’s words can have global security and economic implications and this PINO-elect has already demonstrated a crass indifference to the gravity of the office he will soon occupy. Be afraid, be very afraid. No wonder I drink!
There I go again, damn computer. I take full blame and responsibility for comment #6.
That’s MY long-winded story and I’m stickin’ with it!
Trigger already has an app that signals day traders when Trump says something that could affect the market… http://www.businessinsider.com/triggers-helps-you-trade-stocks-on-trumps-tweets-2017-1
Re: this wall: is Trump building it up to heaven so the planes that fly in the drugs can’t get over it? And what about the ranchers? And the critters that go from here to Mexico and back? And what about the Bernie supporters who are left out in the cold because PINO cares not for the disadvantaged. We weren’t disadvantaged to support him, we were working for the disadvantaged.
Baby Bush took our taxes to play war games, this one wants ot build a wall the planes can fly over.
Redjon – no great surprise about that app and supports my point, thanks for noting. Along with our “new and improved” stock market, that now mostly buys and sells within microseconds (high frequency trading), skimming fractions of a penny per trade, one could do very handsomely with that arrangement. Here’s a fun thought experiment. Imagine someone hacks into Herr Gropen’s twitter account and goes off on some fabricated Trumpian rant that sends this or that sector of the market into a tizzy, or even a modest upset. Short players in the know could have a field day taking advantage, and it would be remiss for Wall St. not to get in on some of that action too (it’s their fiduciary duty to investors, after all). I’m no trader, but the converse is not hard to imagine either. Anyway, it’s already happened at Trump’s own tiny hands already. Welcome to the twitter economy.