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March 16, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:53
Ep. 269 - Myths And Facts About Trumpcare
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There's a graphic now going around on social media.
Ten ways you can actively reject your white privilege.
The people pushing this are serious.
And then they suggest that we must all abide by the strictures recommended in this post if we wish for a better country.
So let's deconstruct this nonsense.
Okay, number one says, take up minimal space during anti-racism dialogues and protests.
Minimal space?
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Should white people who don't like themselves put themselves in, like, mime boxes?
Should they take Alice in Wonderland potion and shrink down?
Or better yet, should they simply stop showing up?
What's the big worry here?
Manspreading?
Intimidation of the people who happen not to share a skin color, but who share the same ideas regarding politics?
I'd recommend that leftists lighten up, but they'd probably think that was racist.
They then say, second, stop contributing to gentrification and calling it urban development.
Stop investing in downtrodden areas and building nice homes and shops, people.
Keep those downtrodden areas racially segregated.
At least they're historic.
The last thing we would want is people in those historic areas to have jobs in safer neighborhoods and nice restaurants.
They must be relegated to poverty for the sake of the character of the place.
3.
Listen when people call you on your microaggressions.
I suppose this means not jumping from the nearest window, which is actually kind of a sacrifice.
4.
Never invite people of color to the table for the sake of claiming diversity.
I actually agree with this one.
How about we just invite people to the table who are interesting and have knowledge, rather than judging them by their skin color.
Bet you know who doesn't agree?
Hillary Clinton.
She actually suggested having a black person to be named later in her cabinet, for the sake of claiming diversity. 5.
Refrain from using your non-white friends as your urban dictionary.
Not sure who does this.
Who turns to their black friend and asks them to decode rap songs?
Anybody?
Then again, if you actually talk about black cultural hallmarks, and you're not black, then you're white-splaining, or you're engaging in cultural appropriation, so it's a little bit of a catch-22.
Six, stop lifting up non-confrontational people of color as example of what people of color activism should be.
Stop talking about Martin Luther King Jr.
Instead, let's pretend that the Black Panthers and early Malcolm X were better examples of black liberation, even if they actually resulted in, you know, counterproductive backlashes that hurt their causes.
It's not like nonviolent resistance has actually succeeded in America or anything.
Seven, call your friends, family, and co-workers out on racism, even if a person of color isn't in the room.
This actually seems like a good idea.
Like this post that we're discussing right now.
It's racist.
8.
Understand that all anti-racism work doesn't look the same and advocate accordingly.
This means that you should let everybody do what they please up to and including riots in Ferguson, presumably.
9.
Realize that all discussions about race aren't for you and be okay with it.
You see, if you're called racist, or if we're discussing racism, you should shut up.
Because you're white.
It's not for you.
Yeah, it's about you, and yeah, you're the problem, and yeah, you suck, but shut up!
That's not racism, you know, to tell white people to shut up when discussing how much they suck.
That's rejecting white privilege.
It's your privilege to speak, so we have to reject that privilege.
10.
Recognize that you're still racist no matter what.
Well, I mean, to be honest, this sort of defeats the purpose of points one through nine.
We could just skip to this one and then do whatever we want anyway, since we'll never actually be able to escape our white privilege.
So thanks, leftists, for ensuring that racism lives on and forcing people to shut up based on skin color.
You've done us all a real service, at least in exposing your own moral benightedness.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
You know, every time you think that you've actually parodied the left sufficiently, they parody themselves and it all goes out the window.
I want to talk a lot about Trumpcare today because the new Congressional Budget Office report is out and it basically sucks.
There's a bunch in it that is not true or there's a bunch in it that is based on faulty premises.
And the entire left is going totally insane over it.
And clearly there is a division of opinion about the CBO report from the right as well.
You have some people like Paul Ryan who are touting the CBO report because he hit his head on something hard when he was a child.
And you have some people in the Trump administration saying the CBO report doesn't mean anything even though they used to cite the CBO report about Obama.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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Alrighty, so, let's jump right in here.
So, the CBO comes out with its new report on the Obamacare replacement bill.
And it is not a flattering report.
It is not a good report.
And you wouldn't expect it to be a good report because the bill is actually really not a good bill.
As I've stated before, there are a bunch of problems with the bill, so it's not a shock that the CBO didn't like the bill.
But let's go through some of the things that are in the bill.
So, Robert Krajcik over at Daily Wire has a pretty good breakdown on what's in this thing.
The stuff that Republicans like is that the deficit is supposed to go down.
So right now that's important because there are certain bills in place that say that if the CBO estimates that costs will go up, then it's very hard to pass a bill.
If the CBO says the costs will go down, then it's easier to pass a bill.
One of the reasons this is stupid is because the CBO is wrong about Pretty much everything.
The CBO report on Obamacare is just incorrect.
When they estimate that a lot of coverage is going to happen through Medicaid, they're assuming a bunch of states are going to expand their Medicaid in accordance with Obamacare.
They're not doing that.
So they're assuming states that haven't joined Medicaid will join Medicaid or expand their Medicaid.
Rather, and that's not happening.
So the CBO reports are very, very flawed, but the CBO here estimates the budget deficit will be $559 billion in fiscal year 2017, but they say that the American Healthcare Act, this is Trumpcare, would reduce federal deficits $337 billion over nine years.
Now, The real number is like over a trillion dollars over the next nine years, but then we give a bunch of tax cuts.
They say that this takes away from the government, so it actually is only going to reduce the deficit by about 400 billion, 337 billion.
Now, there's a problem with this too, which is that it's assuming that everything is going to stay the same.
The level of subsidy is going to stay the same.
Congress is not going to come along and try and fill in coverage gaps by providing bigger subsidies or bigger tax credits.
So I don't actually believe that the deficit is going to really drop under this bill because there has never yet been a government subsidized program where the deficit decreases.
It just doesn't happen that way.
The bill, the CBO also says That the number of uninsured is going to rise.
So by 2018 they say 14 million more people would be uninsured than under current law according to the CBO's estimate and they say that most of this 14 million person increase would be people who are currently purchasing health insurance because they are forced to do so by the government and then they would just stop doing it because they don't want to pay the penalty.
So the left is jumping on this to suggest that people are being thrown off their health insurance.
No, most people just don't want to buy the stupid stuff because it's too expensive and it's crap.
And once they're not forced to buy it, they will stop buying it.
And we'll talk about this in a little while because the left keeps saying now that this means people are going to die.
People are going to die because of Trumpcare.
No.
They say that by 2026, 52 million people would be uninsured, according to their estimate, and they estimate that there would only be 28 million people if the status quo of the Obamacare administration was maintained.
There is a problem with this, however.
Okay, so I will explain this problem with this chart.
Here is 18.
This is what the CBO estimated would be the enrollment in Obamacare over time.
And so what you can see here, if you're watching, is you can see several different lines.
You can see that there's the CBO's estimate as of 2010, the CBO's estimate as of 2012, the CBO's estimate as of 2014, and then you have here the CBO's estimate of 2016, and finally you have the actual.
Then you have the actual.
So as you can see, the actual is much, much, much lower than what the CBO estimated.
They estimated that by this time, they estimated that by 2018, 18 million people would suddenly jump into the Obamacare pool.
From 12 million that they estimate now, and really it's only 10 million now.
Originally, in 2010 when Obamacare passed, they estimated that 22 million people would already have enrolled in Obamacare.
Okay, right now it's 10 million people.
So clearly the CBO doesn't know what it's talking about because you can't forecast these things.
They were including, the way the CBO estimates these things is they take Sort of the projections of the administration at issue, and they carry out their assumptions.
But if the assumptions are bad, the assumptions are bad.
You can see how bad these assumptions are.
If you want to know how bad the CBO is at this, look at that blue line.
Look at that blue line and the black line, because those are the CBO estimates.
And then, look at that green line.
Do you see the giant disparity between the green line and the blue and black line up top?
That's how badly the CBO got this wrong on Obamacare, and now they're saying that there's going to be this great discrepancy between Trumpcare and Obamacare.
One of the ways that you drive up the gap between what they estimate Trumpcare will be and what Obamacare will be is by following the red line.
But look, the red line still isn't the green line.
See, there's this giant gap, 7-8 million people.
Between what is more likely to happen with the Obamacare exchanges and what the CBO estimates.
So what the CBO is doing is they're using that red line and then they're contrasting it with what Trumpcare would do, when really they should be using the green line and contrasting it with what Trumpcare would do.
And that is a much, much smaller gap.
The CBO also says that health insurance companies are not going to survive.
So despite all of the talk from Trump and team about how this is going to free up the market, it doesn't actually free up the market.
They say that the market for non-group coverage insurance purchased individually would be unstable if the people who wanted to buy coverage at any offered price would have average health care expenditures so high that offering the insurance would be unprofitable.
In other words, without a mandate, and this was the reason there was an Obamacare mandate, without a mandate you don't have healthy people buying in because healthy people don't buy health insurance.
insurance typically, or at least expensive health insurance.
If you don't have healthy people buying in, that drives up the cost of health care for all of the other people who actually are sick, because it costs more to insure sick people than to bundle them together with healthy people.
And that means costs go up and people are thrown off their insurance.
That means the premiums are going to rise.
And that's what the CBO estimates.
They say that the premiums in the individual market will rise before 2020.
And then they say that it will decrease after 2020, because a bunch of people will basically be covered by Medicaid expansion up to 2020.
And also because they think that they think that competition at that point will kick in.
And finally, you'll see the premiums decrease The problem is 2020 is four years off from now, three years off from now, and there's no guarantee that that happens.
And then finally, the CBO says, by the way, we don't know what we're talking about.
Here's what the actual report says.
It says, the ways in which federal agencies, states, insurers, employers, individuals, doctors, hospitals, and other affected parties would respond to the changes made by the legislation are all difficult to predict.
So the estimates in the report are uncertain.
But everybody's taking it as gospel.
So, number one, you shouldn't take it as gospel.
That's just Let's be frank about this.
The CBO, as we show in this chart, the CBO really is not correct here and they don't know always what they are talking about.
It is perfectly fair to question the CBO's forecast based on their history of bad forecasts.
That's not stopping Democrats from going out there and pointing out that a bunch of people are quote-unquote going to lose their health insurance.
Now, I want to start with this premise for one second and pause.
When they say that people are going to lose their health insurance, people are going to die because they lose their health insurance.
If your only metric of healthcare success is how many people are covered by any health insurance program, whether it's Sucks, whether it's Medicaid, then what that means is that in the end, the only way you're actually going to get to the number you want is through nationalized healthcare.
If your only measure of success is how many people are quote-unquote covered, and it doesn't matter what the type of coverage is, and it doesn't matter what the quality of coverage is, it doesn't matter whether you can actually get a doctor through the coverage, if that's all that matters to you, then nationalized healthcare is the only solution.
Because nationalized healthcare means that everyone's covered.
Sure, the healthcare coverage is crappy.
Sure, you can't actually benefit from the healthcare coverage, but everybody is covered.
And you see the left jumping into this.
They say that Obamacare is better than Trumpcare because Obamacare, quote-unquote, covers more people.
But there's no evidence that that coverage is actually making healthcare outcomes better, and there's a reason for that.
First of all, when you don't have health insurance in America, it's not like you die on the street.
Virtually everybody who has a health care problem in the United States walks into an emergency room.
That's what illegal immigrants do in the state of California, overburdening the system.
So the idea that the alternatives are you either have some sort of government-provided health insurance or you die in the waiting room, it's just not true.
It's just not true.
Beyond that, the vast majority of doctors actually don't accept Medicaid because Medicaid doesn't reimburse at proper rates.
There are studies that actually examine whether Medicaid increases life expectancy and what they find is basically no.
So there's something called the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment that actually looked at this in Oregon.
And it found that it did not decrease ER visits.
So one of the purposes of having Medicaid is the idea, okay, you're covered now, so you don't have to show up in the ER.
It actually doubled the number of ER visits, because people thought that Medicaid just meant they were supposed to use the ER more, apparently.
And when Medicaid users received more diagnostic care, which is true, it also had no statistically significant effect on several measures of physical health, including blood pressure, cholesterol, or cardiovascular risk.
So the idea that being on Medicaid is a lifesaver, and if you're not on Medicaid, you die, it's just not true.
Jim Garrity at National Review.
He notes that as of 2015, only two-thirds of doctors took Medicaid.
Only 45% of doctors took new patients on Medicaid.
So a lot of people have been grandfathered in.
The Manhattan Institute says, quote, The best statistical estimate for the number of lives saved each year by the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, is zero.
Certainly there are individuals who have benefited from various of its provisions, but attempts to claim broader effects on public health and thousands of lives saved rely upon extrapolation from past studies that focus on the value of private health insurance.
But the ACA has expanded coverage through Medicaid, not private health insurance, In fact, public health trends since the implementation of Obamacare have worsened because people have lost their private health insurance, they've been forced onto Medicaid, with 80,000 more deaths in 2015 than had mortality continued declining during the 2014-2015 rate achieved during 2000-2013.
In other words, The life expectancy in the United States in 2015 under Obamacare actually decreased for the first time in two decades.
So since 1990, life expectancy has been increasing in the United States.
It actually dropped last year under Obamacare.
So suggesting that getting rid of Obamacare will actually kill people, no evidence to suggest that's the case at all.
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Okay, so, when you hear Democrats claiming that everybody is going to die because of Trumpcare, just recognize that that's a wild exaggeration, and it's not actually true.
And also, the reason that they are saying this is because they are conflating health insurance with healthcare.
And by doing so, they're basically pushing for nationalized healthcare.
Because if you say that the only way that America has a good healthcare system is if quote-unquote every single person is covered, you're going to end up in a position where you have to cover everybody through the government.
That's just the way that this works.
The truth is what you actually want is better health care outcomes on average through choice.
And there are a lot of ways to do that that don't involve the government.
One of the reasons that the United States still has high life expectancy is because we develop new products and services.
One of the reasons we do is because we have a private market.
Understand that what socialism and what redistributionism do is they destroy innovation.
They destroy the capacity of insurance companies to compete with one another for your services, and they destroy the capacity for pharmaceutical companies to do research and development, for hospitals to do research and development, for new drugs to be used, for new surgeons to discover new surgeries.
What socialism does is it freezes things in place and passes it around.
And what capitalism does is it doesn't freeze things in place and pass it around, so there's more inequality under capitalism than socialism.
But it allows innovation, it allows prices to drop, and that allows more people to have access.
And that is the important thing.
Now, the problem is that the Trump administration has a real divide.
There's a real divide when it comes to how they understand what Trumpcare ought to be.
And you can see that in how they are dealing with the CBO report, which is really quite fascinating.
So, Donald Trump is basically on the verge of suggesting that we ought to just let Trumpcare go and let Obamacare implode, which, as I said yesterday, is not a solution because entitlement programs don't implode, they just get bigger.
Here is Donald Trump talking about Obamacare.
And it's imploding.
And 17 will be the worst year.
And I said it once, I'll say it again, because Obama's gone.
You know, things are going to be very bad this year for the people with Obamacare.
They're going to have tremendous increases.
And the Republicans, frankly, are putting themselves in a very bad position.
I tell this to Tom Price all the time, by repealing Obamacare.
Because people aren't going to see the truly devastating They're not going to see the devastation in 17 and 18 and 19.
It'll be gone by then.
Whether we do it or not, it'll be imploded off the map.
So the press is making it look so wonderful, so that if we end it, everyone's going to say, oh, remember how great Obamacare used to be.
Remember how wonderful it used to be.
It was so great.
It's a little bit like President Obama.
When he left, people liked him.
When he was here, people— There's actual truth to what Trump is saying here.
The press is propping up Obamacare, talking about how wonderful it's going to be.
But the idea that Obamacare is going to implode—yes, the prices are going to skyrocket at a certain point here, because people are dropping off the rolls, because people are—they'd rather pay the fines than pay for these high premiums.
They're dropping onto Medicaid, and so they're not really paying into the system.
All of that's true, but that doesn't mean Obamacare is going to implode.
It just means that the media is going to say more people are covered because they're dropping from private insurance on to Medicaid.
So that's number one.
But I think the important gap that you're seeing here is in between Trump and the so-called conservatives, you know, like Paul Ryan, who really is not super conservative when it comes to this particular bill.
The gap that you are seeing is that Donald Trump is using the left's metric for what is a successful health insurance and health care program.
And we'll talk more about that, but you have to go over to dailywire.com for that.
So go over to dailywire.com right now, become a subscriber.
We're going to deconstruct some culture a little bit later.
We're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about Michael Brown and this new tape that is broken of him.
Does it change everything?
Dailywire.com to check that out.
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