| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Trump’s Presidency Failed in Record Time
Eric Zuesse
Trumpcare — his promised replacement for Obamacare — is so blatantly atrocious that an excellent NBC News article on it is headlined, and documents that — “Experts: The GOP Health Care Plan Just Won’t Work”. This was even before the Congressional Budget Office has had a chance to price out its costs to taxpayers (which can only sink it even deeper).
In other words: Trump’s healthcare promises, too, have now irretrievably bitten the dust.
Before that, there had been campaign promises which he already had casually abandoned, and the abandonment of which was an insult to the millions of people who voted for him because he had promised those things: things such as, “Lock her up!” for Hillary Clinton’s having never even been investigated for the things she did with her email that were illegal on their very face. (The FBI investigated her only on the more-difficult-to-prove charges.)
When asked about the “Lock her up!” promise, Trump displayed the nerve, on December 9th, to say “That plays great before the election — now we don’t care, right?” and he didn’t even wait for an answer — because until the election, his promise to do exactly that, about which he now said “we don’t care,” was one of his biggest applause-lines.
Clearly, then, his campaign-promises that, as President, he would impose real accountability — something which has been entirely absent at the top in America for decades — were just cheap lies for votes.
And he also had promised to “Drain the swamp!” of its corruption, but likewise casually abandoned that, with Newt Gingrich saying on December 22nd, “I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore” — and this was even before Trump became President! He quit the progressive promises even before he moved into the White House.
Every progressive thing that he had so much as suggested — such as that maybe free healthcare for poor people isn’t such a bad idea, or that maybe global warming is a problem — was simply ignored by him after he won the Presidency.
But the healthcare-issue is the one which will decimate his Presidency. Because, he’s not even trying to deliver what he had promised on that, and yet it’s an issue that everyone cares lots about, and which (unlike the accountability-issue) he can’t simply pretend is minor.
Trump had told Scott Pelley of CBS “60 Minutes” on September 27th, while campaigning against Hillary Clinton, that he favors taxpayer-paid healthcare for Americans who cannot afford to pay for the basic healthcare they need — and this idea, of basic healthcare as a right instead of as a privilege, was something that Ms. Clinton had always said was a “one size fits all” approach that reduces consumer-choices and is inappropriate for the United States. Trump, to the contrary, told Pelley:
It would actually cost far less than what the U.S. (including the government, the insurers, and the patients) now spends on healthcare. Recent OECD data on healthcare costs show that the U.S., which is the only OECD country that handles healthcare as a privilege instead of as a right, spends by far the world’s highest percentage of GDP on healthcare, 16.9 percent; and also show that the average U.S. life expectancy is 78.7 years; by contrast, Canada spends 10.2 percent, and their life expectancy is 81.0 years. The OECD average expenditure is 9.3 percent , and life expectancy is 80.1 years. So: the U.S. spends almost twice as high a percentage of GDP as every other OECD nation, and yet gets markedly inferior results. This makes the U.S. far less economically competitive than it otherwise would be; but, the healthcare industries finance conservative politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all Republicans; so, those politicians don’t like single-payer — it would take much of the excess profits out of exploiting the sick, and those excess profits help to fund their campaigns.
The American people’s financial losses produce exceptional financial gains for the investors in healthcare-related stocks, and also inflate the pay for executives in those firms. This helps to fund lots of what conservatives such as Antonin Scalia lovingly call “free speech” — campaign commercials.
Here are the latest available data, and they show that, still today, the U.S. is somewhat worse than average, for quality of care, and astronomically higher than any nation on both per-capita healthcare costs, and the percentage of GDP that goes to healthcare costs. For examples: across 45 countries tabulated by the OECD, the U.S. healthcare-expenditure per capita was $8,713 and 16.4% of GDP, whereas the average OECD country paid $3,453 and 8.9% of GDP. France paid $4,124 and 10.9% of GDP, and Japan paid $3,713 and 10.2% of GDP. The U.S. also was tied with Brazil, Chile, and South Africa, for having the highest percentage of healthcare-costs that’s paid privately rather than by the government.
In any case, with our existing healthcare-for-profit, instead of healthcare-as-a-right, system, the U.S. ends up paying lots more than our competing nations, yet getting inferior results. (Apparently, postponing care until one is being rushed into an emergency-room is both atrociously poor care, and extremely expensive care. But it’s the most profitable for the sickness-industries — so, President Trump wants it to continue. Republicans care lots more about corporate stockholders than they do about the public’s welfare; and, unlike Democrats, they don’t pretend not to. That’s the difference between the two Parties.)
Consequently: What Trump was promising on healthcare was the only way to reduce America’s healthcare costs. It would also — if the experience of the other OECD countries, all of which treat basic healthcare as a right not a privilege, is to teach us anything — considerably increase the quality of our healthcare, yet cost far less.
But Trump instead (like his predecessors) cares more about the profits to healthcare-providers than about the healthcare of the American people and about the competitiveness of the American economy.
All of the progressive-sounding things that Trump said, were just lies. But he’s pushing hard the conservative-sounding things. He’s trying to fulfill only his conservative (i.e., pro-aristocracy, anti-public) promises. But conservatism is based entirely upon lies (saying it’s being done ‘for the benefit of the ruled, not of the rulers’); so, one can only hope that his now-doomed Presidency will achieve as little as possible — as little harm to the nation as possible, so that nothing should pass in the far-right Republican-controlled Congress and get signed into law in this far-right Republican White House — by either Trump, or (if the President becomes the current Vice President, Mike) Pence. A four-year total deadlock would thus be the best that can realistically be hoped for, now.
Obama’s Presidency was lousy, but Trump’s (and/or Pence’s) could be even worse. A country that’s becoming more and more an aristocracy — or what’s commonly called an “oligarchy” — and less and less an actual democracy, does better to block political change, than to allow it. America today is certainly in that situation; it’s in decline.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Trump’s Presidency Failed in Record Time was originally published on Washington's Blog
Source: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/03/trumps-presidency-failed-record-time.html
We need national health care that insures that anyone who works for a living or has in the past worked and no longer can due to job loss or illness is taken care of.
National health care that does NOT cover ghetto rats who never have worked and live in public housing and who never have any intention of being anything but a liablilty, and that most certainly does not cover those not citizens of this country.
What Trump seems to be proposing is that everyone simply pay monthly premiums that the insurance companies demand, which will cause the deaths of a lot of hard working americans who will have a choice between giving up everything they have worked for, or health care.
Which will in turn mean the death of insurance companies and a collapse of the health care system.
Because nobody but the top 2% will be able to afford even basic medical care at the insane prices for profit medical industry demands.
Once people have given up their homes and vehicles in order to afford cancer treatments and gall bladder removals, they will have nothing left and will not even be able to afford a casket and a hole in the ground.
Which also means the amount of “unlicensed pharmacists” ( I suppose that is the PC term for drug dealers, much like “undocumented workers” for criminal invaders) will skyrocket and basement medical practice by hacks will flourish.
When faced with the choice of helping insurance company preferred stockholders and CEOs beachfront properties well maintained or feeding their kids, I have a feeling that the grocery store comes before medical insurance payments.