Mike Johnson Sure Wants Some Weird Things
He's got thoughts on hospitals and the Super Bowl.
Mike Johnson seems confused this week. Like, more confused that usual. He’s acting a lot like a guy who really thought Republicans were gonna win the rhetoric wars on the government shutdown and have everyone talking about the bad, scary immigrants and now doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that everyone’s talking about healthcare.
Except, as we saw this week, when it comes to being able to look directly at the camera and emphatically tell Americans that “Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare.”
Though I do give him credit for being able to do that with a straight face. That was very difficult and he did his best.
But that wasn’t all he had to say about healthcare this week. Oh, no it was not. During another press conference on Wednesday, Johnson was asked by a reporter: “Speaker Johnson, a lot of the free healthcare for illegal aliens that you’ve been talking about is care provided in emergency rooms, which are required by federal law to care for anybody, even if they can’t pay, even if they’re not a citizen. Do you think that that law should be changed?”
He tried his hardest to flip the “Democrats like undocumented immigrants better than they like you!” switch, but did not seem to actually land on anything with much of a sting.
He said:
No. You’re talking about EMTALA, which has been part of the law for most of my life. Emergency care is provided without question to anyone who comes in. If you’re hemorrhaging and you show up in an emergency room, you get treated. That’s something we all support. That’s a very good law. We’re in favor of it. You’re cherry-picking a tiny subset of the issues.
It is a very good law! It’s also not “cherry-picking a tiny subset of the issues,” as this is literally the only thing that is at issue that has anything at all to do with undocumented immigrants potentially getting any “free healthcare,” and only because EMTs don’t generally ask for the immigration status or entire life story of people who are hemorrhaging or unconscious.
Is this something Mike Johnson would like to see happen? Like, does he want hospitals to wait until a person proves their citizenship before treating them?
Look at page 57 section 2141 of Chuck Schumer’s counterproposal CR that he filed. There’s six categories of things that they would like to restore funding to and it adds up to 192.8 billion almost $200 billion of hardworking taxpayer funds that would go to support illegal aliens and other non-citizens. Now, with regard to EMTALA, are we saying change the law? No. But one of the things they’re doing and one of the things that Chuck Schumer is advocating for and has filed in the law and is using as a leverage point to keep the government shut down is he literally wants to reimburse hospitals more money for treating illegal aliens than American citizens. Fact. Go look it up. Go look on the website. Don’t take my word for it. We’re not doing that.
Wow! That sure sounds insane. I guess we’d better go check out page 57 section 2141, huh?
SEC. 2141. REPEAL OF HEALTH SUBTITLE CHANGES.
Subtitle B of title VII of the Act titled “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14” (Public Law 119-21) is repealed and any law or regulation referred to in such subtitle shall be applied as if such subtitle and the amendments made by such sub-title had not been enacted.
Either I am very stupid, or this very much does not mean that hospitals will get reimbursed more for treating undocumented immigrants than for citizens … or have anything to do with anything Mike Johnson is talking about.
And yet he continued!
If you’re a young pregnant, uh, American citizen woman who shows up in an ER and you get treated and they pay the hospital less for treating you than some illegal rabble rouser who came in from some, you know, South American country to do us harm. That is wrong. The Republican party stands for common sense in the big beautiful bill. We fix that.
Absolutely none of that makes any sense at all. Firstly, with the exception of Texas and Florida, hospitals are not required to inquire about anyone’s immigration status, and even in those states, they are barred by HIPAA laws from disclosing anyone’s immigration status. How could they possibly charge the government more for undocumented immigrants if they do not know patients are undocumented immigrants?
Second, the only reason that might be true is because the “young, pregnant, American citizen woman” has private health insurance, in which case the government would not reimburse the hospital at all.
Third, how could this possibly affect anyone other than the hospital? I mean, I realize that all you have to do to get Republicans frothing at the mouth is insinuate that someone thinks they are better than they are, or thinks some group they feel they should be above in the social hierarchy is better than they are, but how would anyone even know this is occurring? Has anyone in the history of the world thought, “If the government is reimbursing this hospital more for this other person than they are for me, I will just be gutted! Gutted, I tell you!” after an emergency appendectomy?
I do not believe they have.
Should Republicans succeed in slashing funding for Emergency Medicaid, which is what reimburses hospitals for EMTALA situations, it’s not as though hemorrhaging undocumented immigrants will be turned away at the door in order to ensure that the hospital is focused on treating American citizens only — because, again, this would be logistically impossible in many emergency situations — it just means that the hospitals will get less funding overall and either end up closing wards, closing entirely or losing staff, as is happening to many rural hospitals throughout the country. Or maybe they’ll just charge us all more to make up the difference.
This means that not only would they be hurting the undocumented immigrants they’re all so eager to see bleeding out in the street, but that “young pregnant, American citizen woman” as well. Because she might not be able to make it all the way to the hospital that is further away than one that closed due to lack of funding, or that had to close their labor and delivery unit. (Which is now the case for the majority of rural hospitals. The majority!)
Don’t forget, friends, this is the “pro-life” party.
That’s not all Mike Johnson has been talking about this week. Another reporter asked him how he felt about Bad Bunny playing at the Super Bowl halftime show this year.
Via Variety:
“I didn’t even know who Bad Bunny was. But it sounds like a terrible decision, in my view, from what I’m hearing,” Johnson said. Asked why, the speaker noted, “It sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience.”
Johnson added, “And there are so many eyes on the Super Bowl — a lot of young, impressionable children. And, in my view, you would have Lee Greenwood, or role models, doing that. Not somebody like this.”
Ah yes, and who appeals to a broader audience than Lee Greenwood, a guy who, in 1984, sang maybe one not-very-good song that people know? Surely not the most streamed Spotify artist of 2021 and 2022 and the current second-most streamed artist behind Taylor Swift.
It is also unclear what it is about Bad Bunny, who is pretty darn wholesome as far as musical artists go, that would be a problem for “young, impressionable children,” beyond the fact that he performs in Spanish and is not taking his tour to the United States because he doesn’t want to subject his fans to potential ICE raids.
Personally, I’d think the guy who turned down what we can assume is a lot of money because he was concerned for the welfare and safety of his fans is a far better role model than someone who wants to defund hospitals just because doing so might, somewhere down the line, hurt some undocumented immigrant or an unconscious person who looks like they might be an undocumented immigrant, somewhere. But that’s just me.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
“And there are so many eyes on the Super Bowl — a lot of young, impressionable children...."
Christ, Mike.... don't tell Epstein's best friend....
Increasingly, Mike Johnson reminds me of an aging b-list actor that appears in commercials for sham Medicare supplement plans or life insurance they know is crap, and you can see in their face they know it's crap, but they're there collecting a paycheck.