Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Begala
Read between
October 3 - October 7, 2020
First, Democrats should call Trump...
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Second, ask questions of every Republican politician.
ask them this simple question: “If Trump tries to cancel or discredit the election, will you stand with democracy or with Trump?” Videotape them.
Third, if it comes to it, be prepared to use your First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of assembly.
Fourth, the only cure for a war on democracy is more democracy.
The best way to defeat voter suppression is by having such a high turnout that the barriers to voting have limited effect.”
In 2020, if the country elects a Democratic president, U.S. House, and U.S. Senate, not to mention Democratic governors and majority-Democratic state legislatures, we will have new laws protecting the right to vote. If Republicans control any part of the legislative process, we won’t.
The acid test of a democracy is accepting the results when you lose. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton are the gold standard: they accepted being denied the White House even when they had won the popular vote. In Gore’s case, he lost the votes of five Republican lawyers on the Supreme Court. In Hillary’s, it took voter suppression plus Russia plus Jim Comey’s intervention plus the Electoral College to keep her out of the White House. But here’s the deal: both of them accepted the result. Does anyone think Trump will? Me neither. So we had better be prepared to stand strong for our democracy if and
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As a candidate, Trump was adamant that he would not propose cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He lied.
“Hillary Clinton is going to destroy your Social Security and Medicare. I am going to protect and save your Social Security and your Medicare. You made a deal a long time ago.” Psychologists call that “projection”—accusing someone of that which you know you yourself are guilty of. It’s kind of a tell with Trump.
In his 2020 State of the Union address, he was repeating his lie: “And we will always protect your Medicare and your Social Security.” He gave that speech on February 4. Six days later, he released his budget. It proved he had lied. His 2021 budget cuts Medicaid and Obamacare by $1.6 trillion dollars.
His 2021 budget also includes spending $451 billion less on Medicare.
2020 budget as well. As the Washington Post summarized that budget: “The spending plan calls for a cut of nearly $1.5 trillion in Medicaid over 10 years.”
Trump wanted to eliminate funding for Medicaid expansion, the Obamacare project that has brought health insurance to more than 17 million Americans.
All told, the bottom-line Trump cuts to Medicaid came to $777 billion.
What’s more, Trump’s 2020 budget called for reducing spending on Medicare by $845 billion over ten years, and cutting...
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the Trump people say, we’re just going to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Baloney. Trump doesn’t want to cut waste, fraud, and abuse; he is waste, fraud, and abuse. “Waste, fraud, and abuse”—the unholy trinity for people who are lying about cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” my Aunt Fanny. Trump bilks the taxpayers every day. It’s part of his con, his grift, his endless drive to line his own pockets at taxpayers’ expense.
Almost 11 million Americans rely on Social Security Disability Insurance. Oh, but what about waste, fraud, and abuse? I bet there’s a ton of that in the SSDI program. Ummm, no. According to the Trump administration’s own analysis (dug out by the Washington Post’s tireless fact checker Glenn Kessler), “improper disability payment, which can result from mistakes or incorrect information” (NOTE: which are innocent mistakes, not fraud or abuse), represented a teeny, tiny percentage of disability payments. How tiny? Tinier than Donald Trump’s hands. Overpayments constituted 0.99 percent of
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In 2018, when they read Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that if you add together the George W. Bush tax cuts for the rich and the Trump 2017 tax cuts for the rich, “Republicans will have sent a whopping $2 trillion to [a] small sliver of the richest Americans.” The senators went on, “In their proposed budget, Republicans in Congress are now wanting to pay for those special interest tax breaks by taking that same $2 trillion out of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act.”
Hillary Clinton won a solid majority of voters under the age of forty; Trump won voters over forty. Trump won voters age sixty-five and older—by definition, voters who are on Medicare and Social Security—by 7 percent. Basically, the older you are, the more likely you were to have voted for Trump.
Obviously, everyone over sixty-five (or nearly everyone) is on Medicare and Social Security. Thus any cuts to those programs would have affected Trump voters more than Hillary voters. Hillary won Medicaid recipients. But 39 percent of Medicaid recipients voted for Trump, and in rural counties that number was even higher. The bottom line is, Trump’s cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social
the uninsured rate for senior citizens in America has dropped from 56 percent to 0.
Today, more than 64.5 million Americans get their health insurance through Medicaid.
Medicaid is the number one payment source for nursing home care. Sixty-two percent of all Americans in nursing homes today have their care paid by Medicaid.
Sixty-four million Americans receive Social Security benefits.
In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, a whopping 12 percent of Americans supported decreased funding for Medicaid. On the other side of the ledger, 87 percent wanted to maintain funding levels or increase them. Medicare is even more popular. In a Pew survey, 94 percent of Democrats said they want to maintain or increase Medicare spending. Okay, but they’re, ya know, Democrats. You may be interested in learning, however, that 85 percent of Republicans agreed with them.
Ninety-five percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans want to maintain or increase spending on Social Security. Only 10 percent of Republicans and 3 percent of Democrats say they support cutting it.
When Republicans try to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and Democrats call them on it, Democrats win. It’s pretty simple. They cut. We protect. We win. And yet for the life of me I rarely heard the Democratic candidates for president talk about it—at least not in the early stages of the primary contest.
As soon as Trump promised Fox News he would be cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—literally minutes after Trump’s comments—Biden hit him with a rhetorical two-by-four, tweeting: “Here’s the deal, folks: Social Security is on the ballot this year, and the choice couldn’t be clearer: I’ll protect and expand it. Donald Trump will cut it and take it away.”
That’s how you do it, people. You just say it—early and often.
are also the only country in the industrialized world that does not have universal health care. (By “industrialized world” I mean the thirty-six nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the OECD), which includes our economic peers Japan, Germany, Great Britain, and Canada. It does not include China,
World War II sent millions of workers, mostly men, off to war, creating a labor shortage at home. Wages had been frozen, so to compete for talent, companies began offering benefits, especially health care. After the war, Britain and many other countries converted to universal health care, but the United States maintained its employer-based system. Seventy-five years later, here we are.
Canada took a slightly different path. Starting in one province in 1947, they slowly had provincial governments take over health insurance, culminating in 1984 with a national law. Today in Canada, doctors and nurses are all privately employed. But there is only one insurance company, as it were: the government.
Wofford was one of the few people I have known who I would truly call a visionary. He saw self-evident truths and spoke them clearly. When he articulated his vision of health care, he knew that less was more. If you say a hundred things, you’re really saying nothing. Democrats need to state powerful truths simply.
Donald Trump wants to give insurance companies the right to jack up rates or deny you health care coverage altogether if you have a preexisting condition.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that as many as 129 million non-elderly Americans have some sort of preexisting health condition.
as we age, the preexisting condition risk just increases. CMS estimated that up to 86 percent of Americans aged fifty-five to sixty-four have a preexisting condition, and that nearly a third of people who are in good health today will develop a preexisting condition before they reach sixty-five,
Approval of the ACA has jumped from a low of 33 percent in 2014 to a high of 55 percent in February 2020.
Perhaps the increase in support is also because, for the Obama-haters, Obama is no longer president, so Obamacare is now just care.
Before Obamacare, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 44 million Americans lacked health insurance. After the ACA, that number fell to fewer than 26.7 million—a historic low. The percentage of Americans who lacked health insurance had been stuck around 17 percent for years before the ACA. After it was fully implemented, the number dropped dramatically, to around 10 percent. Nearly 20 million Americans have health insurance today because of Obamacare.
harder for people to get Medicaid—these were programs that appeared to impose work requirements but actually just punished people for being poor and sick. By the end of Trump’s second year in office, the uninsured rate had risen again, from 7.9 percent in 2017 to 8.5 percent in 2018—the first back-to-back increases in the uninsured since 2008–9, when we were in the Great Recession and the Affordable Care Act had not taken effect. And, as with everything under Trump, it is worse for people of color. While the uninsured rate is 5.4 percent for white people, it is 9.7 percent for African
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According to the National Rural Health Association, 121 rural hospitals have closed since 2010. Beyond that, 673 are vulnerable and could very well face collapse, which would mean that more than one-third of all the rural hospitals in America would be gone. The year 2019 was the worst for rural hospitals in a long time, with 19 going under.
The NRHA estimates that “11.7 million patients will lose direct access to care while local economies suffer.” And “seventy-seven percent of rural counties in the United States are Primary Care Health Professional Shortage Areas while nine percent have no physicians at all.”
The states that have seen the greatest number of rural hospitals go under—Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Missouri—have this in common: none of them opted to extend Medicaid under Obamacare.
Here’s why extending Medicaid helps rural hospitals—and bear with me, this is technical: poor people can’t pay their hospital bills. Medicaid pays the hospital bills for poor people.
On this issue as on so many, he is out of touch with real Americans. And yet he has used his superpower—diversion—to distract us from a record on health care that should alone be enough to sink the Trumptanic.
Health care is the number one issue on voters’ minds. Not Trump’s stupid wall or his rants about the media. Eight in ten Americans in a February 2020 poll by Politico and Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health say that “taking steps to lower the cost of health care” is extremely or very important to them. The issue cuts across parties: 89 percent of Democrats put practical concerns about the cost of health care first, and 76 percent of Republicans agree with them. Along the same lines, reducing the cost of prescription drugs is rated as important by 75 percent of voters.
Trump doesn’t want Democrats to focus on the real-life, real-world consequences of his policies. So he uses his superpower: diversion. He distracts our attention with stunts and crimes and bigoted tweets. And while people like me react to those outrages, Trump uses the smoke screen he’s generated to gut health care, even for people who voted for him.
job growth under Trump’s first three: 227,000 per month under Obama versus 191,000 per month under Trump.
Before anyone had heard of COVID-19, job growth had slowed or died in construction, mining, transportation, and other classic blue-collar industries.
