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Donkees

(31,079 posts)
Thu Jan 19, 2017, 06:07 AM Jan 2017

 Bernie Sanders Just Showed the Country How Wrong Tom Price Is for HHS

[font size="4"font color="gray"]Price tried to spin his way around the moral question of whether health care is a right, but Sanders wouldn’t let him.[/font]

Excerpt:

Price is an indefensible pick for an essential position. A longtime lackey of health-care industry profiteers, whose own investments are now the subject of scrutiny, the congressman has made it his mission to shred not just the Affordable Care Act but the whole of the safety net that provides what minimal protections are available to low-income Americans, working families, people with disabilities, and retirees. “If confirmed,” argue leaders of the National Nurses United health-care union, “it is clear that Rep. Price will pursue policies that substantially erode our nation’s health and security—eliminating health coverage, reducing access, shifting more costs to working people and their families, and throwing our most sick and vulnerable fellow Americans at the mercy of the health-care industry,”

But Price is also a political careerist, with carefully crafted answers that are designed to cloak real intents and muddle the discourse. He can usually spin his way out of trouble.

Bernie Sanders was not about to be spun.


Price did his best to avoid an honest discourse about the moral issues that should be at the very center of the health-care debate in America, spinning up a line about how “we believe it is appropriate to give every person the financial feasibility to purchase the coverage they want for themselves and their family…not what the government forces them to buy.”

That talking point—the one about “what the government forces them to buy”—was a deliberate dodge. Price is a smart man. A physician by training, and a key player in congressional debates on the ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare, he knows the issues. He could have spoken about sincere disagreements regarding the structures of the Affordable Care Act. He could have proposed a better approach: one that might reject mandates, while establishing guarantees. But the congressman refused to take the questions, or the issues, seriously. Instead, he avoided them, talked around them, and spun them.


The congressman’s political gamesmanship revealed everything that needs to be known about this nominee.

Tom Price will not entertain the basic premise that health care is a right, as opposed to a privilege. He refuses to wrestle with the moral questions and conflicts that arise when wealthy Americans know they can address even their most minor ailments with state-of-the-art medicines and therapies, while the great mass of Americans wonder whether they will get the care that is needed to survive.

After the hearing, Sanders tweeted two messages, both of which were true.

“We have to ensure health care as a right, not give the wealthy $346B in tax breaks while 32 million people are thrown off health insurance,” argued the senator.

And, he added, “#PriceIsWrong.”


https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-just-showed-the-country-how-wrong-tom-price-is-for-hhs/

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 Bernie Sanders Just Showed the Country How Wrong Tom Price Is for HHS (Original Post) Donkees Jan 2017 OP
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