I thought Jon Stewart handled his recent interview with conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer better than most so-called real journalists would. He almost always outdoes them, of course. But there was one point he let slide that I wished he would have jumped on. Krauthammer’s disdain for what Obamacare will do to policy in the course of granting affordable insurance to tens of millions led him down a dead-end alley–and a familiar one at that.
First, he claimed that Republicans really do want health care for all Americans. That may be true for Krauthammer personally, but it certainly isn’t of members of his party with voting power in Washington. But it’s not likely that the talking head wants health care for all, either, since he followed up with his contention by using the Ryan budgets of an example of how more Americans could be insured. That’s just an outright lie. First an excerpt from Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic and then the Stewart-Krauthammer meeting.
“Start with the federal budgets crafted by Paul Ryan. You remember those, right? Those proposals passed through the House with unanimous Republican support and were, in 2012, a basis of the Republican presidential platform. Those budgets called for dramatic funding cuts to Medicaid. If Republicans had swept into power and enacted such changes, according to projections prepared by Urban Institute scholars and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 14 and 20 million Medicaid recipients would lose their insurance. And that doesn’t even include the people who are starting to get Medicaid coverage through Obamacare’s expansions of the program. That’s another 10 to 17 million people.”
