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June 22, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:44
Democrats Struggle For A Strategy | Ep. 325
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On Thursday, left-wing fact-checker PolitiFact, a site known more for its biases than its quality fact-checking, stepped into a pile of doo-doo once again.
This time they blasted President Trump with a fake news fact-check that demonstrates just how dishonest they are.
Here is their headline: White House tweet wrongly says Obamacare led to fewer insurance options.
And they say mostly false.
So, what did the White House say that was so wrong?
Trump said, quote, Obamacare has led to fewer health insurance options for millions of Americans.
This is indisputably true.
Just yesterday, Anthem Blue Cross pulled out of the Obamacare exchanges in Wisconsin and Indiana.
Health insurance rates have risen dramatically.
As CNBC reported last week, quote, as many as 1,200 counties are projected to have just one such insurer next year.
More counties could be left bare or with just one insurer in coming weeks as insurers announce their intentions, unquote.
And this doesn't take into account the fact that many Obamacare plans have cut patients off from their doctors.
If you liked your doctor, you couldn't keep your doctor.
Those who have been added to the insurance rolls under Obamacare aren't actually buying health insurance for the most part.
They're being forced onto Medicaid by lack of options.
So, instead of dealing with that claim, PolitiFact made up an unrelated claim that the number of insured had dropped overall.
Nobody said that, though.
If you count Medicaid coverage, which doesn't actually improve health outcomes, the numbers are up.
But that's not what Trump claimed.
Here's PolitiFact admitting the truth all the way at the bottom of their little fact check.
Quote, the sole threat of truth is that with the insurance exchanges set up by the law, the number of carriers has dwindled.
Oh, you mean the only claim here that Trump made was true?
And then you made up a series of alternative claims to knock down?
PolitiFact is ridiculous.
Their drive to check fake news from the left only makes them purveyors of that same fake news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so they finally just released the Senate healthcare version, the Obamacare quote-unquote repeal.
It is not a repeal.
It is even more of a trash heap than the House version that passed.
I was very critical of that version.
Version 1 was really bad.
Version 2 was slightly less bad.
The Senate version is really quite crappy.
It's gonna pass, probably.
And the reason that it will pass, I would think, is because of two things.
One, it defunds Planned Parenthood.
And two, it basically allows Republicans to go out there and claim that they repealed Obamacare when they did no such thing.
But we'll talk about that in a little while after I want to discuss Trump in Iowa.
But before we do any of those things, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
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Okay, so...
I do want to talk about the Senate version of Trumpcare slash Obamacare repeal.
Before we get to that, I think it's important to talk about the Democrats and their aftermath of their reaction to the loss of John Ossoff in Georgia's 6th against Karen Handel.
So, finally, all of the conflict that has been brewing under the surface of the resistance has broken open.
The hatred for Trump covered up the fact that the Democrats really have nothing in common anymore.
There are three branches of the Democratic Party and they are at war with one another.
One is the Bernie Sanders branch.
This is the progressive socialist Michael Moore branch of the party that says capitalism is evil and we need to redistribute all the income and all the problems in the country are created by income inequality.
These people are not intersectional politicians.
They believe that Socialistic redistributionism is the solution and that the Democratic Party has to universally move toward the left.
That's branch number one.
Branch number two are the intersectional politicians.
This would be like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Both of these politicians, their principles are a little bit all over the place.
They're all to the left, obviously, but they tend to differ on certain basic functions of government.
But they all agree that America is a terrible place where human beings are separated by race and sex and sexual orientation.
So you have the intersectionalists who believe that they're going to cobble together This new coalition of people who have been victimized by the American system in order to win elections.
So, again, Group No.
1, the Sanders people, they say, we move to the left, we'll win.
And then you have Group No.
2, and these are the Obama people, and they say, we need our intersectional hierarchy, the Hillary people, we need our intersectional hierarchy.
And then there's Group No.
3, and Group No.
3 are the Seth Moultons of the world.
This is the Democrat congressperson from Massachusetts who was making the rounds yesterday because he said, what we need is a broader tent party where we have some pro-life Democrats, where we have some people who are not so anti-business, where we are not Universally, Nancy Pelosi, Democrats.
And these three factions are now at war with one another.
And that's breaking out into the open because Democrats, for the first time, are realizing that it's not enough just to scream at President Trump alone.
It's going to get them most of the way.
But if they have no unity, if they can't figure out what they're doing, then they've got a problem.
Rahm Emanuel acknowledged that they are in serious trouble.
He says, we are 1,000 seats behind, says the former chief of staff for President Obama.
We are a thousand seats shorter today than we were in 2009 or 2008.
This is not about one election.
It's about building a party, building an apparatus.
Okay, so they're finally realizing they have bad news.
But the problem is, their response to that was, Trump is colluding with Russia.
When Hillary lost, their immediate response was, we have to resist.
What are we resisting?
Well, we can't say what his agenda is, because we don't know what his agenda is.
Trump hasn't actually done anything major at this point.
So we'll resist him.
He's a Putin stooge.
Only one problem.
That entire theory is falling apart.
Jay Johnson, who is the former Homeland Security Secretary under President Obama, helps contribute to the collapse of the Democrats' key talking point that Trump is some sort of Russian stooge.
Not beyond what has been out there open source and not beyond anything that I'm sure this committee has already seen and heard before directly from the intelligence community.
So the only thing I'd have on that is derivative of what the intelligence community has and the law enforcement community.
Okay, so you can see that with that narrative falling apart, they now have to come up with a new narrative.
So on the one hand, you have the people who are more in favor of this broad tent Democratic Party.
That's the one that's actually going to be better for Democrats, right?
This would be kind of the Joe Biden wing of the party.
We need to get beyond intersectional politics.
Representative Dingell, who I guess replaced I think she replaced her husband, right?
This is Debbie Dingell.
She spoke with MSNBC yesterday, and she talked about this.
She said that basically we need to get beyond the intersectional Obama era, and we need to move toward a more solid era of we're all Americans.
And this is what Democrats would do if they were smart, but they're not.
So here's Debbie Dingell from Michigan.
If we don't figure out how we become we again, we're going to keep losing.
So I think it's important that we need to understand each of these groups has issues.
So she says that we can't be African Americans for Obama or for Hillary.
We can't be Hispanic Americans for Obama or Hillary.
We have to just be we again.
And this is true, right?
This is the real reason that Trump won.
The reason Trump won is because he wasn't insulting Americans by categorizing them into small groups and then implying that there was this broad, vast, white mass out there that was out to get them.
That's the real reason that Trump won.
It wasn't about his populist politics.
It wasn't about tariffs.
It wasn't about any of that stuff.
It wasn't about Ross Douthat and the tax credits that Trump would give to particular businesses in the Rust Belt.
It was about the fact that Trump did not patronize a bunch of white voters by telling them they hated black and Hispanic people.
That's what actually happened here.
So you have this wing of the party, the Debbie Dingell wing, that is starting to figure it out.
Unfortunately for Debbie Dingell, that's being undercut by the Bernie Sanders wing.
So the Bernie Sanders wing says that Nancy Pelosi should continue to rule the party.
Nancy Pelosi is a wonderful far-left politician.
Who's just done Yeoman's work, even though it was Nancy Pelosi's name just being dropped a couple of times in the Georgia 6 that led to the Democratic defeat.
Paul Begala says we can't get rid of Nancy Pelosi.
We need Nancy Pelosi.
Let me defend Nancy Pelosi.
If there was a Mount Rushmore for speakers, Nancy Pelosi would be on it.
She passed national health care.
Even Franklin Roosevelt could not do that.
I mean, she is so important.
We need to keep her.
We need to run far to the left.
We need to become the Bernie Sanders party.
So that's wing number two.
And then finally, there is the intersectional wing.
So here's what Democrats need to unify.
And this is where it's kind of interesting what's going on right now, because I think it plays into what Democrats need in order to unify.
What Democrats need in order to unify is not only for Trump to be unpopular, but for there to be some piece of legislation that they can all jump on and smack him with.
So in 1994, Bill Clinton was very unpopular, but it took Hillarycare and the threat of Hillarycare to lead to this vast Republican wave that wiped out 60 seats in the House for Democrats and led to the rise of the Republican majority in the House that has basically been steady with the brief period between 06 and 10.
Since 1994.
So, the fact is that it needs two things.
In order for the out-of-party, the out-of-power party to take over, what they need is an unpopular president, number one, and then, that goes in the mix, and then you need an enzyme to catalyze the resistance, and that is some piece of unpopular legislation.
Well, so far, Trump hasn't actually done anything.
So far, the only thing he's done is nominate Neil Gorsuch, and that's not enough of a slap to Democrats for them to really catalyze around it, for them to coagulate around that and then become the quote-unquote resistance.
And so Chuck Schumer is interested in Obamacare appeal.
He thinks that the Democrats are going to be able to whip the base into a fury over the supposed repeal of Obamacare.
We're going to look at every single thing and find out the best way, but this is full-scale warfare.
This is the most important advancement since probably Medicare in terms of helping people, and we're not going to be complacent or go along or business as usual in any way.
So Democrats need something to oppose.
They need Trump not just to be Trump.
They need Trump to actually push a big piece of legislation that is unpopular.
Fortunately for them, it looks like the Senate is about to do that.
So the Senate just dropped their health care bill.
And the Senate health care bill is just a disaster.
The Senate health care bill, it cuts some of the Obamacare taxes.
But the problem is then it doesn't pay for all the subsidies that it's giving.
It's preserving virtually all of the Obamacare subsidies.
It's increasing subsidies in certain areas.
It cuts Medicaid, but it only does that down the road.
And those cuts are never going to materialize.
It enshrines the Obamacare central regulations in place.
Will Republicans pass it?
As I said, I think they probably will because I think that Republicans are stupid and they just want the immediate headline that they repealed Obamacare, even though that means they now own what comes next.
They also want to be able to say to their constituency that they repealed all the funding for Planned Parenthood.
Although, again, is that a big enough deal to... Is that a huge enough advance for the Republicans to own Obamacare for the foreseeable future?
No.
It's sort of reminiscent of what President Trump did with illegal immigration.
He said that he was going to get rid of DAPA, which is the protection for parents of illegal immigrants who came in when they were children.
He said he was going to get rid of DAPA, which wasn't even in place, and then he re-enshrined DACA, which was Obama's executive amnesty.
Republicans are basically re-enshrining Obamacare and then calling it Obamacare repeal, which is the worst of all available worlds.
Even the creator, even the creator of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, you remember, he's the guy who was caught on tape saying, yes, we lied to the American public about what Obamacare was going to do.
Even he is now out there saying that this Senate version doesn't actually repeal Obamacare in any significant way.
Does this bill have more heart, as the president would say, Jonathan?
You know, I'm torn this morning.
On the one hand, this is no longer an Obamacare repeal bill.
That's good.
On the other hand, this is just a giant cut in Medicaid.
That's what this bill now amounts to, and that's bad.
Okay, and so he's upset about the Medicaid cuts, but he says that basically Trumpcare is Obamacare, and this is essentially correct.
There's a poll that just came out from NBC Wall Street Journal.
They found only 34% of Republicans like the House GOP health care bill, and only 16% of Americans overall say that that House GOP health care bill is a good idea.
The Senate GOP health care bill is in many ways even worse.
Peter Suderman over at Reason.com has a good rundown on what exactly is in the bill.
What he says is the Senate plan looks even closer to the health care law that is already on the books.
In other words, it is exactly what critics predicted.
A bill that, at least in the near term, retains weakened versions of nearly all of Obamacare's core features, while fixing few, if any, of the problems Republicans say they want to fix.
It is Obamacare lite, the health law Republicans claim to oppose, but less of it.
It represents a total failure of Republican policy imagination.
And then he goes on, he says, to understand the Senate plan, it helps to recall Obamacare's underlying framework.
The centerpiece of the law was a reform of the individual market intended to give those who do not get coverage through work or a federal program access to subsidized regulated coverage.
The law created a new federal subsidy based on income for lower and middle income households to purchase health insurance.
It also set up federal rules requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions.
And it mandated that all individuals obtain health coverage to pay for it.
So basically, it created what we know as Obamacare created these Obamacare markets.
And the idea was we're going to force all of the insurers to cover people with preexisting health conditions.
How do we pay for that?
By forcing people who are healthy to buy health insurance.
That was the basic structure of Obamacare.
So what does the Republican Senate bill do?
It keeps in place all of the regulations.
It removes the mandate.
It removes some of the taxes.
So it keeps all of the mandates on insurance companies, which means that the so-called Obamacare death spiral will be accelerated.
All these insurance companies are going to be forced to take on people they can't afford, and nothing makes up the gap, except for more government subsidies.
Those government subsidies, of course, come from borrowing.
And Republicans are cutting the taxes, so they won't come from taxes.
The reason Republicans are cutting Medicaid in the future is they're playing an accounting game.
What they're hoping to do is come across as revenue neutral In fact, they're hoping that this quote-unquote saves revenue to the federal government, even though it really will not in the long run, so they can pass tax reform.
That's the goal here.
If you understand that the Obamacare repeal plan from the Senate is designed to do two things, neither of which is repealing Obamacare, you'll understand all you need to know about this Obamacare repeal program.
It is designed to, number one, tell Republicans that it repealed Obamacare without actually repealing it, and number two, it is designed to make room for a tax cut under reconciliation.
Under reconciliation, in order for Republicans to pass a bill through the Senate with 51 votes instead of 60 necessary to shut down a filibuster, Republicans have to get a score from the Congressional Budget Office that says that any bill that they pass is quote-unquote revenue neutral.
Okay, tax cuts are not revenue neutral because, in the short term at least, they reduce the amount of money that comes into the federal government.
So what Republicans are trying to do is pass a health care bill that cuts the amount of outlay by the federal government so they can then take that amount and translate it into a tax reform bill.
So all the Republicans really want from Obamacare repeal is the headline that says they repealed it, even though they didn't, and two, the ability to pass a tax cut.
That's it.
That's all this is.
And so the Senate bill accomplishes both those goals, but it doesn't actually repeal Obamacare.
Republicans have criticized these marketplaces, as Suderman says, for being expensive and unstable.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Obamacare is collapsing around us.
Yet even more than the House plan, the Senate plan retains the essential structure of Obamacare's individual market reforms.
It would likely result in fewer people being covered, and it would not stop the destabilization of the market.
So it doesn't actually help anybody.
It creates a permanent subsidy Right now, under Obamacare, there are subsidies that go up to 400% of the poverty line for a family of four.
So if you're trying to buy health care in the Obamacare plan, you get some sort of subsidy up to 400% of the poverty line.
That's about $100,000 for a family of four.
Starting in 2020, the Senate bill ratchets that back to 350% of the poverty line, about $86,000 for the same family.
Well, that hurts the middle class people who have been reliant on those subsidies.
And two, we shouldn't be subsidizing this stuff anyway, okay?
The idea that we should be subsidizing a family of four that makes $100,000 a year to buy Obamacare, it doesn't actually help anything in the sense that it continues to drive up costs because healthy people are still not getting insured once you remove the mandate.
So if you have an unhealthy family of four, even with the subsidy, they lose money.
If they're healthy, then they shouldn't really need the subsidy, should they?
So it's this bizarre situation.
It's an entitlement program, basically, that Republicans are signing off on.
And then, they're proposing to authorize certain payments called CSR payments.
These are cost-sharing reduction subsidies to insurers.
So we are now going to subsidize the insurance companies, even the same way that Obama was going to.
Remember, Obama tried to subsidize the insurers and Republicans sued to stop him.
And now Republicans are going to backtrack on that.
Republicans are now going to provide the same subsidies they sued Obama for providing, under the Senate version.
So, the reports, by the way, indicate that those subsidies for families of four, they're pegged to lower cost plans, which means smaller subsidies for crappier health insurance.
As Suderman says, the scheme undercuts the GOP's complaints Obamacare hurts the middle class.
In addition to higher deductibles, it creates a subsidy cliff for middle class families purchasing health insurance on the individual market.
And of course, it still spends an enormous amount of money.
So if you look at the Senate bill and how it handles Medicaid, it's like the House bill.
This is the one good part.
It slowly rolls back Medicaid expansion over a period of years and converts it into a per capita system rather than a need-based system.
But it delays the start of that phase out until 2021, which means it's never going to happen because a Republican president and Republican Congress would have to be elected from here all the way until 2020 in order to ensure that this kicks in.
Otherwise, the Democrats will come in and they'll just roll it back.
It says, starting in 2025, who places a stricter cap on the growth of Medicaid spending than the House bill?
Yeah, except by 2025, who thinks that Republicans are going to be able to withhold the pressure all the way to 2025?
Anybody?
Anybody?
This is the way that legislation works, folks.
If it says, in 10 years we're going to do X, it's never happening.
Because somebody from the other party will come in and destroy it before the 10 years are up.
This is all, it's just, it's a bad bill.
It's a bad bill.
Sutterman says, this might be the notable failure to think beyond the terms set by Obamacare.
It means the Senate bill not only won't be Obamacare repeal, it might not even be Obamacare lite.
Instead, it might be Obamacare lite later, and later could easily turn out to be never.
Because as the individual insurance markets fail, thanks to the lack of a mandate and thanks to the lack of taxes to pay for any of this stuff, then there's going to be more and more call for government involvement, not less and less call or more and more call for free markets.
Bottom line is the Republicans in the Senate and the House do not want to repeal Obamacare because they have all bought into the basic notion that the government ought to be involved in the health care system, which is a disaster for Republicans.
Democrats won this debate and now Republicans are surrendering to it.
So the question becomes, why in the hell do you elect Republicans in the first place?
I'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay, so with all of this said, the fact that the Senate bill sucks, right now we are now learning there are at least a couple of Republican senators who are probably not going to vote for it, which means that it may not pass at all.
The question becomes, do Republicans even want to pass this thing?
Do Republicans even want to pass this thing?
And it's not clear that they do.
It's not clear that Republicans actually want to do much of anything.
Because Republicans, number one, never want to do much of anything because they're afraid that if they do something, there will be a backlash.
And number two, because if you run the entire federal government, you pass something massive, again, this could catalyze the left into opposition.
For example, take the Ossoff race in Georgia 6.
There were a lot of people We're suggesting that Ossoff should have run more heavily on Trumpcare.
Okay, number one, that wasn't gonna work because that's a pretty affluent district.
Not a lot of people are on Obamacare to begin with in that district.
And number two, nothing had actually passed.
It was hard to run against a piece of legislation that doesn't actually exist yet.
If Republicans pass a very unpopular piece of legislation, which this looks like it is, then they will bear the burden of that.
Now, imagine for a second that Republicans had come in and just fulfilled a basic promise.
We're going to repeal Obamacare.
End of story.
One sentence.
Obamacare is repealed.
Let's say they'd just come in and done that.
And then, they negotiated around the edges for what we're gonna do to fix the problems that Obamacare was designed to solve.
Then, Republicans would be in pretty good shape.
But now, because they're trying this omnibus fix to Obamacare that doesn't actually fix it, leaves it in place, increases subsidies in certain areas, decreases subsidies in certain other areas, gets rid of the underlying mechanism for funding the whole damn thing, so we're just gonna borrow up the wazoo for it, and then pretend we're gonna cut later.
If Republicans do that, then Democrats will have something to coalesce around.
Which is silly, because the fact is that if you're going to pass policies, they ought to be good policies.
If you're going to take political risk, it ought to be for a good potential payoff.
There is an alternative strategy that Republicans could pursue if they really don't want to do anything.
There's an alternative strategy that they could pursue that unfortunately, I think unfortunately, would actually work with the Republican crowd and would also prevent them from sustaining massive losses in 2018 because they wouldn't actually pass anything deeply unpopular.
But for that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
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