I am one of the nine to ten million Americans who watch the Sunday morning political programs where there is always a talking head from the administration trying to put a spin of coherence on the most recent gaff or nonsensical tweet of the president. A recent Atlantic article underlines the renewed importance of these programs in the age of Trump. The title of the article says it all, “The Sunday Shows Set the Agenda in Trump’s Washington.” The article quotes Chris Wallace who has been doing Fox News Sunday since 2003, and was the host of Meet the Press in the 80s during the late years of Ronald Reagan’s second administration.
“I think that the Sunday shows are more relevant and more important than ever in the Trump era, and the reason I say that is because the velocity of news and the amount of news in a week is so much greater than we’ve ever seen before, and I’ve been doing Sunday talk shows since Reagan was president.”
The author of the article, Scott Nover, expanded on the renewed significance of these programs that have been around over seventy years. Meet The Press (NBC) first aired in 1947.
The Sunday shows also often now help define the news of the week—and set the next week’s agenda—when the velocity of breaking events and controversy threatens to spin out of control. Part of this relates to Trump’s communications strategy. It might be best defined as having administration talking heads appear everywhere, all the time.
Thanks to the ease of recording programs, I can go to church on Sunday morning and then later watch the programs that I want to see. Recording them isn’t even necessary. They are all on the Internet almost instantly.
There are a few frequent fliers on the Sunday programs. One is Kellyanne Conway, Counsellor to the President, whose title is vague, but whose visage is familiar. She can control an interview like an Olympic gymnast doing a complex routine. She has a whole repertoire of moves that allow her to sidestep a direct question and end up on her feet making a point that forces you to shake your head in wonder asking yourself, “How did she do that?” She is a master of avoiding an uncomfortable question by “pivoting” to a new subject, and using the rhetorical device of “whataboutism,”
It is a fact that Mick Mulvaney, former Tea Party congressman from South Carolina, former Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, continuing Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Acting White House Chief of Staff since late December 2018, got his job in the White House in part because he had impressed the president with his own Sunday morning skills. He often appears on more than one show on any given Sunday, as he did last Sunday.
Jonathan Karl was sitting in for George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, and he was no match for Mulvaney. The first thirteen minutes of their conversation were about the Mueller report and the Democrats’ inability, for political reasons, to admit that the president is correct to say that we have a crisis on our southern border. Mulvaney reiterated the president’s threat to close the southern border and discontinue aid to Central American countries. The whole problem it seems is Nancy Pelosi’s desire to make this a political issue and not a national security concern.
At thirteen minutes Karl began to explore with Mulvaney why the administration decided to side with the eighteen state attorneys general and two governors in the suite to declare the ACA unconstitutional. This is where the conversation moved from an exercise in twisted interpretations of other people’s intentions and political sparing to outright prevarications. Below is the transcript, interlaced with some commentary from me, of what Mulvaney said in response to Karl’s enquiry about why the Trump administration is asking that the ACA be ruled unconstitutional:
KARL: The other big announcement from the White House was joining – asking the courts, essentially, to terminate all of Obamacare. I want to ask you, where 8 and a half million people that are enrolled in Obamacare in 2019, you also had another 61 million at the very least who have preexisting conditions and have been able to get health insurance in part because of the guarantee that they can get coverage without – you know, under Obamacare, even if they have preexisting conditions.
And also, about 6 million Americans who are 26 and younger are on their parents’ health plans. Can you guarantee that if you succeed in court, that all of those tens of millions of people who have health coverage, guaranteed because of Obamacare, will not lose their coverage?
The question was barely out of Karl’s mouth when Mulvaney answered in a firm voice:
MULVANEY: Yes, and here’s why; let’s talk about preexisting conditions because it gets a lot of the attention and rightly so. Every single plan that this White House has ever put forward since Donald Trump was elected covered pre existing conditions. Every single plan that Republicans in the House voted on in the previous Congress covered pre existing conditions. Every single plan considered by the Senate covers preexisting conditions.
The debate about preexisting conditions is over. Both parties support them and anyone telling you anything different is lying to you for political gain. Pre existing conditions are going to be covered. The debate becomes, how do you best do it?
The bolding is mine for emphasis that it contains a half truth. He said that the debate over preexisting conditions “was over” and that anyone telling you anything different is lying to you for political gain. He continued by saying the debate now was about how best to cover preexisting conditions. You may say, what’s the problem with that? Well the problem is that Mr Mulvaney is leaving out a lot of information.
Theoretically, almost everyone could buy insurance before the ACA, even if they had a preexisting condition; just like, theoretically, anyone who wants to buy a Lamborghini can buy one if they have a spare $200,000. The problem before the ACA, and with all Republican plans up till now when it comes to purchasing insurance on the individual market if you have a preexisting condition, has been at what cost. And, would anyone be given a subsidy? Even before the ACA it was theoretically possible for most individuals with a preexisting condition to buy insurance, but at rates which were prohibitive. The most common way they were covered if they were not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid was through an employer sponsored plan where their risk and prior experience was blended with other employees. The ACA offered coverage to all low income patients through the subsidized exchanges and through the Medicaid expansion. People who are not poor, but have preexisting conditions, are able to buy coverage at community rates. The Republicans have never produced a workable plan that comes as close to combining coverage for preexisting conditions with universal coverage. They can’t do it because they do not want to pay for it. The ACA not only allows individuals with preexisting conditions to buy insurance, it guarantees that people who develop cancer and other expensive conditions will be able to continue to buy insurance, and it frees them from concerns about lifetime limits. That guarantee that the ACA offers us all is the security that no matter what happens we will always be able purchase insurance at rates which are equal to what is paid by those who have no preexisting condition. That is a huge benefit. Mulvaney never mentions those points and just buries them under the statement that there is just a difference between Democrats and Republicans about how to offer the coverage.
But he was not finished. He had more spin and innuendo yet to spout that comes across as “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” He definitely scored Mark Twain’s hat trick. I was delighted to see that Mulvaney pulled the same chords with Paul Krugman that he did with me. Krugman wrote:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and Republican claims about health care…
But G.O.P. health care claims are special, in several ways. First, they’re outright, clearly intentional lies — not dubious assertions or misstatements that could be attributed to ignorance or misunderstanding. Second, they’re repetitive: Rather than making a wide variety of false claims, Republicans keep telling the same few lies, over and over. Third, they keep doing this even though the public long ago stopped believing anything they say on the subject.
Keep that in mind as we return to what Mulvaney said next. The lies and half truths are bolded.
Obamacare is not working. Even Democrats admit that which is why this week – it didn’t get a lot of coverage – they introduced their own fix bill because they know Obamacare doesn’t work. Those numbers you gave are accurate. But keep in mind, you put all of those people together, people who are on the individual exchanges, people who are on their parents programs at 26, more people than that, most of them in the middle class, paid a fine last year so they didn’t have to take Obamacare.
People are actually paying money to the government not to have to take Obamacare. That is a symptom of something that is desperately broken. We would love to work with the Democrats on repairing that problem, on fixing things. We honestly don’t think they will do any of that. We don’t think they’ll work with us unless this court case proceeds and Obamacare is found to be unconstitutional, which is what we believe.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise to anybody that Republicans think Obamacare is unconstitutional. The position we took this week in the court, we believe is correct. We look forward to working with Democrats. If not, we’ll try and fix it by ourselves.
Let’s look at those statements.
The ACA does work. More people are covered, and although healthcare costs have increased since 2010 many people are getting critical coverage for problems like substance abuse that would go away if the ACA went away. All of healthcare has been modified by the ACA. Just unplugging it will cause enormous problems. A recent New York Times article by Reed Abelson, Abby Goodnough, and Robert Pear has attempted to identify all the ways the ACA works and who and how many people would be hurt if Mr Mulvaney got his way. Here are their highlights.
What Happens if Obamacare Is Struck Down?
- 21 MILLION People who could lose their health insurance.
- 12 MILLION Adults could lose Medicaid coverage.
- $874 MILLION Medicaid spending for opioid addiction prescriptions has more than doubled.
- 133 MILLION Americans with protected pre-existing conditions.
- 171 MILLION Americans who no longer face caps on expensive treatments.
- 60 MILLION Medicare beneficiaries would face changes to medical care and possibly higher premiums.
- 2 MILLION Young adults with coverage through their parents’ plans.
- $50 BILLION Medical care for the uninsured could cost billions more dollars.
- 1,000 CALORIES Menu labels are among dozens of the law’s provisions that are less well known.
The statistics are hard to get but the trend in those paying the mandate has been flat to declining. Rather than buy insurance, about 4.5% of the population choses to pay the mandate which will go away after 2019. 2018, the tax year we are filing now, the penalty is $695 per adult and $347.50 per child under 18 (up to a maximum of $2,085 per family). The upper limit of the penalty is 2.5% of household income. What is certainly true is that a majority of Americans now believe that overall the law is positive, although the mandate is still unpopular. The popularity of the ACA, and the reality that Democrats will likely be running on improvements to the ACA in 2020, may explain why Mr. Mulvaney is trashing the ACA. The Democrats now hold the House largely because of their stance on healthcare in the 2018 election. Mr. Mulvaney ends in a very disingenuous way:
We look forward to working with Democrats. If not, we’ll try and fix it by ourselves.
This is particularly annoying coming as it does from Mulvaney who has done his best to trash the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, undermine all entitlements, lower taxes on the rich and corporations at the expense of the social service safety net, and was a willing advocate for shutting down the government over a multi trillion dollar deficit created by the 2017 tax bill.
Mulvaney’s performance on ABC last weekend was coupled with an appearance on the same day with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Nation. Tapper kept asking him what would replace the ACA in order to protect those now covered by the ACA and those with pre existing conditions.
Mulvaney said,
“We are going to give people the choice that they want, the affordability that they need, and the quality that they want. We have said that from the beginning…
Tapper then interrupts him:
“Alright, but where is the plan?”
Mulvaney responded by saying that the president would send Congress a couple of pages of guidance and then let them write the bill. He contended that that is what the president did successfully with the tax bill. When Mulvaney tried to pivot to pre existing conditions with the same lines that he tried with Karl, Tapper did not let him get away with his lie. Tapper pointed out that in Obamacare people with pre existing conditions are not charged more, in all the Republican plans they are. Mulvaney kept bobbing and weaving, pivoting, and “whatabouting” for the rest of their healthcare conversation. He is good at what he does. If you want to hear it the exchange, fast forward to about 6 minutes into the interview.
I feel that Mulvaney is fair game for criticism because he is the one who reports say is responsible for the president’s recent attacks on the ACA through the courts, as I mentioned in my last post and has been mentioned by several news outlets.
Jordan Weissmann commented in Slate:
Mulvaney’s power move probably does not mean much for the future of Obamacare. But it does confirm that the man has acquired a great deal of influence in the White House—which, given his venal policy instincts and tin ear for politics, can’t possibly bode well for anybody, least of all Republican lawmakers.
There is hope that Mulvaney’s trickiness will backfire. Ross Douthat, the rational conservative columnist at the New York Times has also suggested that Mulvaney may end up as a problem for himself and others in an article entitled “The Mick Mulvaney Presidency.” Douthat explains:
So why revive the Obamacare debate?…The answer is that there are effectively two Trump presidencies. One offers something like what the president promised on the campaign trail — a break with Paul Ryan’s green-eyeshade approach to entitlement reform, a more moderate tack on health care, an indifference to Obama-era conservative orthodoxies on fiscal and monetary policy.
The other offers a continuation of the Tea Party’s insistence on spending cuts and Obamacare repeal, and appropriately its present leader is a former Tea Party congressman — Mick Mulvaney, the Zelig of the administration, whose zeal is apparently the main reason that the Obamacare lawsuit now has administration support.
The first presidency is mostly real; the second presidency has been mostly imaginary ever since the failure of Obamacare repeal left Ryanism neutered…
But right now Trump is letting the mostly-imaginary version of his presidency, the Mulvaney version, define his priorities and public rhetoric. Which makes him look like a guy who didn’t keep his promises, who promised to be a different kind of Republican and then kept trying to defund the Special Olympians and throw people off their health care coverage.
Douthat may have it right, but I will remain traumatized and apprehensive until this nightmare comes to an end, and we can once again use all of our focus to pursue the Triple Aim without fears of another electoral college victory facilitated by smooth talking people like Mick Mulvaney who are selling their lies about the ACA to red state voters.
