Today in Trump

**Spicoli** · 09-13-2024 04:16 AM

**Spicoli** · 09-13-2024 04:28 AM

"What's your plan for health insurance"...Trump answer was basically 'all we had was Obama care, but we made it good'

. Liberally 8 years in and running for the oval office and you get "well I have a concept of a plan". FFS. The higher tariffs he wants question turned into a pisser. Trump got away with a lot of unchallenged belligerence and steamrolled the moderators with "gimme a minute" follow ups that ran into the carnival mirror fantasy land that is his mind right now. But in the and he really did get Rope-a-dopped.

**Master** · 09-13-2024 08:24 AM

There will be no rematch!

Trump rules out another presidential debate against Harris

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9l9500vg7o

**Kirkland Laing** · 09-16-2024 10:59 PM

Originally Posted by Spicoli

"What's your plan for health insurance"...Trump answer was basically 'all we had was Obama care, but we made it good'

. Liberally 8 years in and running for the oval office and you get "well I have a concept of a plan". FFS. The higher tariffs he wants question turned into a pisser. Trump got away with a lot of unchallenged belligerence and steamrolled the moderators with "gimme a minute" follow ups that ran into the carnival mirror fantasy land that is his mind right now. But in the and he really did get Rope-a-dopped.

They could maybe have brought up the fact he claimed he had a plan in 2016 but it turned out to be a request to the senate to come up with a healthcare plan within sixty days. They actually did. The GOP senate healthcare plan was ...... a capital gains tax cut. Their plan was to scrap Obamacare and leave the problem of providing healthcare of uninsured people to the states. Which was exactly the position that existed before Obamacare came along and managed to insure ten percent of the population. The subsidies that enabled the ten percent to be insured came from a tax on capital gains which would be abolished if Obamacare was scrapped.

Or they could have asked him about the tariffs he imposed in 2017. These were on various imported products like washing machines. Turns out tariffs are a tax on Americans, that's the whole point of a tariff, it makes imported goods more expensive than similar domestically produced goods and means people buy the domestically produced goods. Except what actually happened was American producers put their prices up in line with the foreign goods price increases and just made more profit. Or they could have asked him why he gave tariff waivers to super wealthy corporations like Apple and whether imposing tariffs on all imported goods might leave open the possibility of a president giving waivers to favoured firms over other firms maybe in exchange for monies paid in various ways. Of course the first thing I think about when I think of Donald Trump is financial probity so I'm sure that wouldn't happen. It's not like a similar system and a corrupt president caused Argentina to go from being one of the world's foremost economies to being Argentina. And of course there's the massive inflation that across the board tariffs would inflict on the American economy. Or retaliatory tariffs from other countries and what they would do to American exports.

There are lots of questions that the liberal media could ask Trump about his policies considering there's a track record with endless other corrupt looking stuff just on these two issues that I haven't covered in this post to keep it reasonably brief. They want a four thousand page policy document from Harris due to the fact that she's flipped on a few things she said running in a nomination primary like every other pol running for party nomination does. Trump can flip flop his abortion position three times in the last week with no blowback but Harris needs to explain in detail stuff from a years ago nomination race when every single journalist knows all pols play to their base. It would be nice to see a bit of consistency. Never mind. I think he's going to win anyway.

Some interesting bits and pieces.

A bunch of Reagan administration people back Harris:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ronald-...s-walz-ticket/

Tariffs explained to the New York Times:

https://jabberwocking.com/tariffs-ar...rk-times-says/

Springfield asked the immigrants to come:

https://twitter.com/SwissWatchGuy/st...86852117926201

And there's only a couple of thousand of them there according to the census bureau and BLS. And they arrived some time ago.

Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club hosted a convicted Jan. 6 rioter and alleged Nazi sympathizer twice this summer, where he was celebrated and gave speeches. At one event, Trump sent a video praising the attendees as “amazing patriots.” At the other, he won an award.

https://twitter.com/TomDreisbach/sta...07890208768212

Click the link. Look at the photograph. Just look at it.

Grandma is going to have her social security payment slashed to alomst nothing but she's going to be making so much money picking strawberries she'll come out ahead. The GOP plan for mass deporation and to solve social security without asking rich people to chip in:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...81629647737060

This guy is actually pretty good on how things work for a pundit:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/house-r...an-for-america

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-...class-tax-hike

https://www.slowboring.com/p/obamaca...s-back-and-its

**Kirkland Laing** · 09-17-2024 08:30 PM

Donald Trump infamously said at the presidential debate he had the “concept of a plan” to replace Obamacare. As is often the case when Trump commits verbal self-harm, it fell to J.D. Vance to turn his car wreck of a statement into an intelligible position.
What Vance came up with is not only surprising but, if understood properly, far more damaging than Trump’s original statement. The Trump plan, according to Vance, is to permit insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions.
Vance explained the Trump plan during an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker: “He, of course, does have a plan for how to fix American health care, but a lot of it goes down, Kristen, to deregulating insurance markets, so that people can actually choose a plan that makes sense for them.”
Vance is advocating a partial or complete return to the system that existed before Obamacare. In that world, prior to 2014, it was very difficult to find affordable coverage unless you were on Medicare, Medicaid, or got insurance through your employer. There was a market for individual insurance, and it was possible to buy plans if you didn’t get coverage through a government plan or through work. But that market was dominated by “adverse selection” — the only way insurers could make money was to weed out any customers likely to need medical care.
Cheap plans could be sold to people who were young and healthy. Oftentimes, those plans denied coverage for any preexisting condition, or had hidden limits on the amount the insurer would have to pay, so if you got very sick, you would discover you faced ruinous costs not covered by your insurance.
Obamacare turned that dysfunctional individual market into a market that offered affordable plans even for people who aren’t young and healthy. It did this by restricting the degree to which insurers can charge higher rates based on age (they can only make older customers pay a maximum of three times the rate they charge young customers). More importantly, it prevented insurers from screening out customers with a preexisting condition or denying coverage for necessary procedures.
Those regulations do have costs. They prevent insurers from cherry-picking young and healthy customers with cheap bare-bones plans — which means young and healthy people might pay more than they did before Obamacare. But it also means the individual insurance market actually makes coverage and medical care available to people who need it.
In the early stages of Obamacare’s rollout, Republicans hoped and believed the ACA exchanges would collapse. Republicans predicted a “death spiral,” in which customers refused to buy insurance in the exchanges and rates went up, driving out more customers and causing rates to climb further, until the exchanges no longer functioned. That did not happen. More than 20 million people now get insurance through the individual market.
But at the time, Republicans fervently believed the death spiral would happen, and they devised a plan in response. The plan was to roll back Obamacare’s regulations. Insurers would be permitted once again to cherry-pick the market for young and healthy customers. Luring young and healthy customers into the markets with cheap plans, Republicans argued, would end the death spiral.
Republicans don’t talk about this idea much any more, because the basis for it (the Obamacare death spiral) has failed to occur and because letting insurance companies discriminate against people with preexisting conditions is horribly unpopular.
Vance tries to pitch this idea in the friendliest possible way, but the idea is unmistakable. Vance explains that Trump wants to:

implement a deregulatory agenda so that people can pick a health care plan that fits them. Think about it: a young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. And a 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.

We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits all approach that puts a lot of the same people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.
Vance is correct that young people have different needs than old people, and healthy people have different needs than sick people, and putting them all in the same risk pool means charging young people more than they would otherwise pay. (Again, insurers can currently charge old customers up to three times the rate they charge the young — Vance thinks they should be able to charge the old even more.) What he doesn’t tell the audience is that allowing insurers to give cheaper plans to the young and healthy means letting them charge more — much, much more — to people who aren’t young and healthy. Perhaps some people have a member of their family who has an expensive medical condition. Those people would be unable to obtain decent coverage, as was the case before Obamacare.
Understanding health-care policy is a siloed journalistic skill, and Welker did not seem to recognize the radicalism of Vance’s plan. Instead, she summed up his answer, “What I hear you’re saying is Obamacare stays in place.” That is close to the opposite of what Vance said — he announced that Trump wants to reverse the regulatory protections in Obamacare that have made the individual markets affordable for people who have preexisting conditions or imperfect health records. Trump’s concept of a plan would take access to medical care away from millions of Americans.

**Kirkland Laing** · 09-17-2024 08:35 PM

Understanding health-care policy is a siloed journalistic skill.

He's taking the piss here. It's embarrassing that a national Sunday show journalist ( I think this was on Meet The Press ffs) doesn't know Janet and John level facts about how Obamacare operates. But I'm certain she does and just doesn't want to get into it with Vance because then she's going to be attacked as being part of the liberal media. You can't have a job like that and not know basic stuff.