I'm Starting to Wonder if Maybe Trump DOESN'T Have an Amazing Health Care Plan
But that's probably just cynicism
In the years I’ve written this blog, I’ve come to be known as something of a starry-eyed optimist. “Glass-Half-Full Maurer”, I’m sometimes called — “The Prince of Positive Thinking” is another. I would say that I’m mainly known for: 1) My irrepressible optimism; 2) My love of mainstream popular culture (superhero movies, network TV singing competitions, etc.); and 3) The fact that I never, ever resort to using foul language.
And that’s why I was surprised to feel pangs of skepticism when I saw this clip:
First: Shame on Norah O’Donnell. This man is the president, Norah — if you can’t trust the president, who can you trust? If 60 Minutes thinks that they’ve caught the president in a lie, then they should run a special report; I’m sure that impeachment proceedings would follow forthwith were the president found to be stretching the truth. But surely Trump has earned the benefit of the doubt, and I hope that Bari Weiss pulls Norah aside and lectures her on how disrespectful it is to talk to the president with such a smart mouth.
But — unforgivable sass from an uppity news wench aside — I’ll confess that I didn’t instantly and totally believe Trump’s promise for “much better healthcare”. I feel guilty saying that — what sort of irredeemable doomsayer have I become?! Next I’ll probably say that I don’t think the four foot tall bong with a scary clown on it in the window of my local “glassware” shop is really for tobacco! Still, I admit that I’m starting to wonder if there’s any chance that there isn’t a brilliant, tradeoff-free healthcare plan on a White House hard drive waiting to have the “t”s crossed and the “i”s dotted. Is there any chance that that could be the case? Like, one in a billion?
I should explain why such an outlandish thought has entered my mind: It’s because Trump has made the same promise that he just made on 60 Minutes over and over again since back when people still got DVDs in the mail. More than a decade ago, Trump told Sean Hannity that he would replace Obamacare with “something great”, and around the same time, he told CNN that he’d soon present “something terrific” — I assume that the upgrade from “great” to “terrific” came from Trump fine-tuning his plan and finding new efficiencies to make his design even more stupendous (he must have been so excited!). A little while later, timeframes were introduced: Trump said that the plan would come “immediately” and then “within the first 100 days” of him taking office. Later, he said that the plan was only two weeks away! I’m sure that I’m not the only one who — upon hearing that the plan would arrive in a fortnight — immediately tore up my insurance card and wrote a verbose letter to Aetna telling them that in exactly two weeks they could S my fat D.
I simply can’t fathom why Trump wouldn’t present a plan. He’s obviously the right man for the job: He’s a policy wonk to end all wonks — I call him “The Garter Snake” due to how often he’s found in the weeds — and designing an optimal health care system is a famously simple task. The fact that Trump didn’t crank out the Excalibur of health care plans in a New York minute forces me to scramble for an explanation. Maybe we’re in a Paul McCartney/Billy Shears situation. Maybe the plan is too awesome and Trump worries that it will encourage reckless behavior. I’m grasping at straws, because the hard-to-believe alternative is that there isn’t a plan and Trump is talking nonsense to people who are so gullible that it boggles the mind.
But surely the president isn’t talking out of his anus. Surely this isn’t the most transparent ruse since those Nigerian prince emails. This can’t possibly be a decade-long grift meant to disguise the fact that while Democrats put forward tradeoff-laden plans to expand health insurance, Republicans have no plan whatsoever. There’s no way that Republicans would alter Obamacare and replace it with nothing, exposing people to higher premiums and less coverage, and then simply hope that some culture war issue will be front-of-mind when people go to vote next year. It can’t possibly be true that the president constantly tells easily-falsifiable lies and that blind partisanship causes some people to convince themselves that this is normal. That is far too stupid of a scenario to contemplate — it hurts my brain to consider it, so I simply won’t. I’ll go with the far-more-logical explanation, which is that this time, a comprehensive, low-cost health care plan really is right around the corner. I don’t know about you, but I’m pumped! I just hope that Embryonic Breakfast Sustenance Removal is covered, because when Trump rolls out his new plan, I’ll have egg on my face for ever doubting him!
J.D. Vance Might Be a Straight-Up Policy Moron
When I worked in a congressional office, we would get faxes (yes, faxes — I am 97 years old). It turns out that there are self-styled geniuses across the country who will fax in “solutions” to intractable problems; we’d get detailed plans for balancing the budget, restructuring health care, or achieving Middle East peace. Most of these plans were — to be polite — nonsensical garbage from self-important loons. I suspect that many of these people had seen the movie
“Uppity news wench” sounds like a character you’d find at a Renaissance Fair in Nutley, New Jersey (“Bring me my Uppity News Wench, for I wish to be informed of the goings on in my fair realm!” “Yes, Sire, I shall summon her at once!”)
You forgot “Big ‘The Midnight Sky’ fan”