Bill Maher Torches ‘Bizarre’ Trump-GOP ‘Obsession’ With Taking Away Health Care — Then Van Jones Bashes Dems
Comedian and pundit Bill Maher went off on President Donald Trump and Republicans over their “bizarre obsession” with taking away healthcare — but CNN’s Van Jones hit Democrats over their handling of shutdown politics.
On Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the interview guest was Louis C.K., Emmy® Award-winning writer, actor, director, comedian, and author of the upcoming novel “Ingram.”
The panel guests were Van Jones, CNN political commentator and founder of Dream Machine Innovation Lab and Rapport; and Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
During the panel segment, Maher asked Jones who’s going to win the standoff over healthcare, and Jones prefaced his response by saying it would anger his Democratic friends:
BILL MAHER: I’ve never understood, by the way, the bizarre Republican obsession with taking healthcare away from people.
I mean, first of all, I mean Mitt Romney did it in Massachusetts and it was a Republican idea. Like, people are getting free healthcare in the emergency room. Let’s stop that. No freeloaders. We’re Republicans. I just don’t get it.
How many times did they try to kill Obamacare? Then they did get rid of the mandate. It still survived.
But this is the only leverage Democrats have. Democrats want to restore this and some of the Medicaid cuts. This is about healthcare.
Democrats think this is the one issue we have and this is one leverage we have, which is to shut down the government, because after all, they don’t have any other power.
And the question I’m asking is, who’s going to win this? Can they, because people will lose that. Kaiser predicts premium payments in 26 will more than double if the ACA enhanced premium tax credits expire.
Can the pain that people feel be connected to the Trump administration? This has been the hard thing for Democrats always. Can you connect the pain to the people providing it?
VAN JONES: Look, I’m going to maybe p*ss off some of my Democratic friends, but I think you can always trust our party to do the wrong thing at the wrong time for the right reason.
OK, so here’s a problem. Right now, if the Democrats don’t do anything and they pass this clean resolution, which they don’t want to do, if they did it, guess what would happen this month? Premiums would start going through the roof this month.
By the time you get to the end of November, you would have Americans marching in the streets saying, I can’t pay 150 percent more for my insurance premiums. What the heck is going on?
Instead, we decided to not let that happen and shut the entire government down. So now people are going to be mad about the post office and a hundred other things that Republicans can then blame on us.
So I’m like, I get it. The base is upset. The base wants us to do something. Please do something, do anything.
But there’s something probably shouldn’t be throwing a bunch of people out of work in the federal government and crushing and crushing America’s government’s ability to function right before the pain was about to start. So that’s my concern.
Watch above via HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
