Donald Trump Defends Medicare From Evil Socialist Dems In Op-Ed He Writed All By Himself

Oh look, the 'president' of wrecking healthcare 'wrote' an op ed. And I am Marie of Rumania.

Donald Trump, the guy who wants to know "who drew" the UN's new climate report , wants America to believe he penned an entire opinion column on Medicare in USA Today. Sure, Donald, and then you got back to Bible study. In the pile of talking points tossed together by some unlucky White House staffer, the writer/s claiming to be Trump insist it's vital Republicans hold the House and Senate in the midterms. If they don't, terrible socialist Democrats will create a single-payer health plan that will eliminate Medicare by giving everyone healthcare, and wouldn't that be terrible?

The column is pretty much just one big lie after another, and we suppose we should give the writers aping Trump's speaking style this much credit: Like the actual guy, the op-ed has such a short attention span it can't even stay focused on its supposed topic, veering off into a rant about Democrats wanting open borders and being determined to turn the USA into Venezuela. Which is sort of sad, really -- you'd think that after two years they'd be able to find enough lies about healthcare alone for an entire piece.

Still, "Trump" manages some real whoppers, starting by dragging out a lie recycled from Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, claiming that Obamacare resulted in $800 billion in cuts to Medicare, which of course it didn't -- reimbursement rates to providers were reformulated over 10 years, but benefits were actually expanded. Mind you, the Republican plan to slash Medicare to "pay for" last year's tax cuts never gets mentioned by the ghostwriters. Odd, that.

As for the "dangers" of Medicare for All, the op-ed is yet another example of the same old Republican bait and switch we always see in election years: Pretend during the campaign that you'll make healthcare wonderful, then try to eliminate care for tens of millions of people. And now that it's an election year, "Trump" even lies about his current attempts to undo Obamacare's protections for preexisting conditions:

As a candidate, I promised that we would protect coverage for patients with pre-existing conditions and create new health care insurance options that would lower premiums. I have kept that promise, and we are now seeing health insurance premiums coming down .

For fuckssake, "Trump's" own link in that first line goes to a WaPo fact checkexplaining he'd abandoned his promise to protect people! Guess the White House assumes -- probably correctly -- that Trump supporters are as bad at reality as Trump is. Needless to say, those wonderful new insurance options he plugs -- "association health plans" andshort-term junk insurance -- also don't include protections for preexisting conditions, and even brought back annual and lifetime coverage caps. And of course, health insurance premiums outside those junk plans  keep increasing due to uncertainty about what new fuckery Trump will throw at the market.

Then there's the bullshit about Medicare for All, which at this point is actually a constellation of proposals ranging from allowing people under 65 to buy in to Medicare to the full-on single payer plan being promoted by many Senate Dems. Trump frets about the price tag, of course, but lies about the Koch-funded study which found Medicare for All would actually cost trillions of dollars less than the current patchwork of healthcare systems we have. Needless to say, he insists that covering all Americans would result in "rationing" of healthcare, as if not being able to afford any care at all, bringing back exclusions for preexisting conditions, or rolling back Medicaid expansion aren't all rationing healthcare.

Eventually, after just plain lying about how expanding healthcare for all Americans would actually kill Gramma, "Trump" goes off into his familiar lie about Democrats and immigration, because that "open borders" line always gets applause at rallies, and yes of course all Dems love Venezuela and socialism, and worst of all maybe some people the nice old Fox viewers despise might not have to worry about their children dying of treatable asthma, so you better vote Republican, the end.

[ USA Today / WaPo / AP / WaPo ]

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