Medicaid – immigrationcourtside.com

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-borders_n_5e6a530ec5b6dda30fc4be6e

Jessica Schulberg reports for HuffPost:

During his first address to the nation on the global coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump characterized COVID-19 as a “foreign virus” while touting his decision to institute travel restrictions with China and announcing plans to close the U.S. to visitors from most of Europe.

Meanwhile, he has been raked by critics — and the markets — for failing to thoroughly explain how the government plans to address the lack of tests and spiking number of cases across the U.S. His administration has for weeks downplayed the threat of the virus, even as experts warned it is on track to spread exponentially.

Trump clearly sees the novel coronavirus as just another foreign invader to keep out — a viewpoint reflected both in his policy proposals and the way he and his administration talk about the virus. This approach is in line with his overarching political strategy of exploiting Americans’ fears to justify racist, nativist policies.

“This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history,” Trump said Wednesday about his administration’s response while blaming the European Union for failing to take steps to prevent contagion. Several European countries have fewer cases of coronavirus per capita than the U.S.

It’s not just Trump. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar repeatedly referred to the disease as the “China coronavirus” during a briefing last month. Anti-immigration zealot Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) — who is in self-quarantineafter being exposed to coronavirus at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland — has gone out of his way to describe the virus as the “Wuhan virus,” a reference to the location of the first outbreak.

When Gosar’s critics argued that the congressman shouldn’t spread racist stereotypes, Rich Lowry, the editor of the right-wing National Review, wrote an entire column insisting the illness be called the “Wuhan virus.” “China deserves to be connected to the virus that it loosed on the world,” he argued.

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For those who don’t know the history, the “Reichstag Fire” in 1933 was a pivotal step in the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany. At the time, Hitler blamed Communists. The actual cause of the fire has since been debated by historians: some say the Nazis started it themselves, while others say that it was an accident, or the act of a single arsonist.

Regardless of cause, all agree on the result. Hitler used it as a pretext to eradicate the constitution, punish the opposition, and place draconian authoritarian measures in place using the fiction of “national security.” This eventually led to the Holocaust and a World War that killed approximately 75 million.

Fact is that the coronavirus isn’t “foreign.” Viruses don’t possess or recognize nationality. Nor was it spread in the U.S. primarily by “foreigners.” Most cases initially reached the U.S. through U.S. citizens who took cruises or traveled abroad after the start of the virus abroad had been publicized.

Mexico, a frequent target of the Trump regime’s racism, has reported fewer than ten confirmed cases of coronavirus, as opposed to over 1,000 in the U.S. The Northern Triangle of Central America also appears to have avoided major outbreaks to date. On the other hand, the illegal and inhumane anti-asylum policies of the regime, as enabled by the Supremes and complicit Article III Courts, appear to present a realistic danger of spreading the virus to all of those countries which are ill-equipped to handle it.

The market as well as all medical experts recognized and reacted negatively to the idiocy of Trump’s Oval Office speech. The U.S. preparation, public education, and actual response to coronavirus has been one of the poorest and most inept in the world to date. To the extent that the U.S. has mitigated the disease, it has been largely the result of decisive actions by State Governors and local officials of both parties, although primarily Democrats, along with universities and sports leagues.

Expect Trump and his White Nationalists to use the danger to our public health that he didn’t cause, yet unnecessarily aggravated, as an excuse for more irrational, cruel, xenophobic, racist attacks on migrants. And, you can expect the “Chief of Complicity,” John Roberts, and his accomplices to continue to help promote Trump’s attack on human decency, truth, and our democratic institutions. John Roberts has never seen a transparently false “emergency” from Trump that he didn’t love or racism or religious bigotry so obvious that he would actually call it what it is.

Incompetent governance by a corrupt, selfish kakistocracy that promotes myths and conspiracy theories over truth, scientific knowledge, and the common good does not cause epidemics. But, it does unnecessarily aggravate them, hinder effective control, and gravely endanger the public health. It simple terms, it kills! Yet another reason why “regime change” in November might be America’s last chance for survival.

The coronavirus has surfaced perhaps the only competent high level official in the entire Trump Administration — Dr. Anthony Fauci. In case you haven’t noticed, there is no resemblance whatsoever between the scientific truth spoken by Dr. Fauci, who paints a honest but grim picture of the Administration’s half-assed efforts to date, and the unadulterated BS and party line spouted by Trump and the second most unqualified individual in the U.S. to handle a pandemic Mike “Super Sycophant” Pence. Talk about a “Confederacy of Dunces!” I’m just surprised that Trump hasn’t fired Fauci yet, given the well-known Trumpian aversion to all things true.

I’ve watched the smirking nitwit Rich Lowry of the National Review (too) many times on the “talking heads” where he is a favorite because he is one of the few Trump apologists who can put two consecutive sentences together in the English Language. Most of what he says is BS, but at least it’s comprehensible and reasonably articulate BS. And, despite the endless smirk, he isn’t as overtly rude and aggressively crude as most Trumpists. Jessica’s article confirmed my already low opinion of Rich. As Rome burns, by all means, let’s pontificate on what we should call the fire.

Still don’t believe we have “malicious incompetents” in charge? Check out the latest from the L.A. Times on how the regime is stiffing states, screwing the poor, and spreading disease and potential death by blocking states from using Medicaid to respond to the coronavirus. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-03-13/trump-administration-blocks-states-use-medicaid-respond-coronavirus-crisis

It’s never good to be governed by the malicious, stupid, and cruel in a time of crisis. Kakistocracy has consequences!

PWS

02-13-20

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-ryan-obamacare-medicaid_us_58d01716e4b0be71dcf6d5a7

Ryan Grim writes:

“Speaker Ryan and others often argue to governors that a Medicaid per capita cap is about more flexibility (even though states already enjoy expansive flexibility in their Medicaid programs) rather than what it is really about: a way to achieve big federal spending cuts and cost-shifts to states,” Edwin Park, a health policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said in an email. “The House bill makes that starkly clear: $880 billion in federal Medicaid spending cuts over 10 years by ending the expansion and imposing a per capita cap without any new flexibility.”

Ryan’s plan would cut taxes by some $275 billion over the next decade, mostly for the rich, and is setting the stage, he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, for a much bigger tax cut to come. That’s what’s going on here.

When Ryan refers to seeing “the forest through the trees,” he is arguing to conservatives that they should swallow elements of the Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill that they don’t like in order to seize the once-in-a-half-century opportunity to destroy a major federal entitlement program. Everything else is just trees.

Ryan is right that it is an enormous forest. Some 11 million seniors and people with disabilities are covered by both Medicare and Medicaid, according to a new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s one in every five Medicare beneficiaries. Forty percent of those are under age 65 with permanent disabilities. Two out of three Medicare beneficiaries who are in nursing homes have their care covered not by Medicare, but by Medicaid. Many who get home-health care are similarly covered by Medicaid.

Social insurance organized by the government is a relatively new phenomenon. Before the New Deal, society dealt the the elderly and infirm by shunting them away in “poorhouses,” or by moving parents in with their children. “I can remember the terror that existed with regard to those county poor farms,” said former Rep. John Dingell Jr. (D-Mich.), who left office in 2015 after serving six decades.

Dingell’s father, also a prominent House Democrat, was an architect of the Social Security Act. It had a tangible benefit to the Dingell home.

“Social Security — this is one of the things of which my dad was very proud — closed 1,100 old folks’ homes in New York. Eleven-hundred. And that was just one example, but it tells you what it did all over the country,” Dingell said in an interview for an article on poorhouses.

Before Social Security, he said, “everybody and his second cousin piled in with their families. I had relatives that came to stay with my dad and mom I didn’t even know were relatives. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they are. And my grandad on Dad’s side, who threw Dad out of the house, came to live with Dad. Dad was the only one of his kids who’d take care of him. He was, quite frankly, the only one who could afford to do so, because Pop was making a fairly decent living during the war, but he was supporting a whole tribe of Dingells and Selmerses and a whole bunch of others who had other Polish names, but were related.”

Paul Ryan, in fact, got Social Security benefits himself; he was 16 when his father died. “It was a tough time for our family, and Social Security was there to help us when we needed the help,” Ryan has said.

Ryan saved much of to pay for school at Miami University of Ohio, where ― who knows? ― a few dollars of it may have gone to pay for the kind of keg he would crowd around to fantasize with buddies about destroying Medicaid, which was created as part of the Great Society program in the 1960s.”

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The competition for “King of the Swamp” is going to be fierce this year. But, certainly, the Speaker is building his credentials with his unrestrained enthusiasm for shorting the needy to enrich the rich.

PWS

03/21/17

Tag: Medicaid

BEWARE AMERICA: TRUMP IS USING HIS STUPID & BUNGLED CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE AS THE “REICHSTAG FIRE” THAT WILL BURN UP OUR CONSTITUTION!

HuffPost: Speaker Ryan Pumped-Up About The Prospect Of Killing Medicaid, Helping Fat Cats Get Fatter, Forcing Low Income Seniors Into Poor Houses Where They Belong!

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