Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of the right wing site Newsmax and a personal friend of Trump’s, weighed in Tuesday with seven suggestions for Trump to revive Trumpcare, including the following: “Reject the phony private health insurance market as the panacea. Look to an upgraded Medicaid system to become the country’s blanket insurer for the uninsured.”
Converting Medicaid from a safety net for the poor into a safety net for anyone who finds themselves uninsured is an idea that would be very popular with Trump supporters, and is thus under consideration by nobody with any power. Where Trumpcare is practically optimized to screw over Trump’s base, replacing Obamacare with a Medicaid-for-all option would eliminate the ACA’s narrow disincentive to work harder while continuing to free motivated workers to voluntarily leave their jobs.
It would be genuinely liberating. Not in the sense proffered by GOP Congressman Jason Chaffetz, that people would be free to forgo buying iPhones until they can afford bad insurance; or in the sense that it would give millionaires a big tax cut; but in the sense that the fear of injury or bad health would no longer be a tool the government uses to scare people into keeping jobs they’d otherwise leave.
Trumpcare, by contrast, enshrines indenture as a facet of personal liberty. As a governing philosophy, it is the freedom to work until you die. And if it weren’t for Medicare, it may well be the freedom Trump and Ryan would bestow on all of us.
–Brian Beutler
Trumpcare Is the Opposite of Freedom
I do wish that Democrats would do a better job of emphasizing how the social safety net actually increases the personal agency for most people.
Too often, we talk about collective action and government programs and the superior social outcomes that they foster but we live in a Country that does admire individualism and we need to do a better job of showing how it will empower the individual.
Right — those programs give people more independence. They make it easier to kickstart one’s life in the direction one wants. Being dependent on some horrid job or the charity of relatives locks you into a routine that’s hard to escape.
It’s kind of like those old families where all the kids sucked up to the aging parent, hoping to get favored in the will. They’re trapped — they have to constantly please the petty-minded manager at work, or the mean relative. This is exhausting and depressing and leaves one very little energy to start a new path.
Government programs that help people without shaming them energize most recipients. We DO need to point this out more!