The health care confusions that just keep giving!

THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 2017

What Pelosi actually said/Watching Medicaid grow: Everyone knows it! The Republican health care bill would cut Medicaid badly.

Everyone knows it until they read front-page reports in the New York Times. Yesterday morning, Robert Pear's front-page report started off like this:

PEAR AND STEINHAUER (6/21/17): A growing rift among Senate Republicans over federal spending on Medicaid and the opioid epidemic is imperiling legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act that Senate leaders are trying to put to a vote by the end of next week.

President Trump had urged Republican senators to write a more generous bill than a House version that he first heralded and then called “mean,” but Republican leaders on Tuesday appeared to be drafting legislation that would do even more to slow the growth of Medicaid toward the end of the coming decade.

According to the highlighted passage, Medicaid will continue to grow under the Republican plans. They're just slowing the growth of the program!

This is one of the horses we rode in on. In part, we started building this site in 1997 because of the ludicrous Medicare discussion of 1995-1996. During that ludicrous pseudo-discussion, reporters were completely unable to handle this basic question:

Was Newt Gingrich proposing cuts to the Medicare program? Or was he simply reducing the rate at which the program would grow?

That basic question was too hard for the upper-end press corps to handle. Today, major reporters are experiencing the same problems with the GOP Medicaid plan.

This is part of what we mean when we say that our upper-end press corps seems to have virtually no analytical skills at all. People think we're speaking hyperbolically. But actually no—we aren't.

In another highlight, consider Karen Tumulty's report in this morning's Washington Post.

We happen to like the reporter in question. But dear God! This very day, discussing the passage of Obamacare, Tumulty seems to quote "an infamous declaration" by Nancy Pelosi:

TUMULTY (6/22/17): In the end, Democrats got their bill [in 2010], but the legislative maneuvering it took to get it over the finish line was not pretty.

There had been special deals for individual senators that became known as the “Cornhusker Kickback” and the “Louisiana Purchase.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made an infamous declaration that spawned a legion of attack ads: “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

Pelosi's famous "infamous declaration" has been ridiculed forever. According to the standard interpretation, Pelosi, and Democrats generally, didn't even know what was in the mammoth Obamacare bill!

In this morning's report, Tumulty puts a bunch of words inside quotation marks. You'd almost think that she was quoting what Pelosi actually said.

As far as we know, she isn't. There is no link from Tumulty's report to any actual statement by Pelosi. Meanwhile, it has been explained, a million times, that Pelosi's actual statement was different.

Unless Tumulty has some other statement in mind, Pelosi's "infamous declaration" was made in a speech to the National Association of Counties. Speaking about the disinformation being spread about the bill, this is what she said:

PELOSI (3/9/10): You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

You can watch her say that here.

As usual, Pelosi was less than sharply articulate, even in these prepared remarks. But she was saying that we had to pass the bill so the American people could learn what was in it, aside from all the dissembling—aside from "the fog of controversy" which was being generated by all the partisan dissembling.

In fact, the dissembling never stopped. And this very morning, Tumulty seems to have misquoted Pelosi's actual words, dropped a key phrase, and omitted the basic context.

"Slowing the rate of growth" is one of the horses we rode in on. (The Lincoln Bedroom was another.) Soon after arriving, we spent years watching the press corps misquote and misparaphrase Candidate Gore, with disastrous consequences for the U.S. and entire world.

Ridiculous Us were too dumb and compliant to complain about these things when they were actually happening. We've been too lazy and dumb to establish the history of these events in the years since. We'd rather spend our time dropping R-bombs on Them. That's easier and more fun.

Today, twenty years later, we still live in the journalistic land of "slowing the rate of growth," and in the land of the massaged pseudo-quotation. On cable, our biggest stars mug and clown and entertain us, then stuff millions of dollars into their pants.

We tell them how great we think they are. It's all part of the way we lose. It's the soul of Ridiculous Us.