On hour two of Wednesday’s Morning Joe, Mika and Joe basked Republican health care woes. The pair invited Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on set to join in the revelry.
Scarborough got the ball rolling by raising the possibility that Mitch McConnell’s stalled partisan effort to repeal Obamacare may lead to bipartisanship.
“Do you think there is a possibility that peace may break out at some point?” Scarborough asked.
Murphy said yes — but in turn used his answer to make the extraordinary claim that Obamacare was failing because of Donald Trump.
“We’re been very clear that we would love nothing more than to sit down with Republicans and try to keep what’s working with the affordable care act and fix the parts that aren’t,” he said. “There’s an imperative to do that because insurance companies are pulling out of these markets. They’re raising rates because of the instability that the Trump administration has injected into the markets by refusing to commit to continuing to pay insurers and I think Democrats and Republicans can work to fix that.”
Even for a Democratic senator, that is a breathtaking big of revisionism.
Obamacare’s problems — including market pull outs and premium increases – were well-established long before Donald Trump became president. While Trump’s erratic policy positions have probably not been helpful, laying Obamacare woes entirely at the feet of “instability that the Trump administration has injected into the markets,” is more than a little disingenuous — and at the very least undermines that whole bipartisan talk the senator claimed he was so interested in only moments earlier.
After blasting Trump, Murphy said that Democrats would be happy to work with Republicans if they were willing to dump their plans for tax cuts and commit to insuring more people as a starting point. “If they do those things, we can absolutely have a conversation.”
This claim that Trump was at fault, went completely unchallenged by Scarborough and Willie Geist — who wasted a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of bipartisanship that we all know is not going to happen.
It took USA Today reporter Heidi Przybyla — at the tail end of the interview — to finally point out what was immediately obvious to us here at Mediaite.
“There’s no doubt that insurers have been bailing on the market in a frenzied pace since Trump took office,” she said. “But this was happening even before Trump came in like with Humana pulling out and the reason why was because the patients who came onto Obamacare were too sick, too costly, and the pool was not big enough to basically accommodate that.”
Heidi for the win here.
[image via screengrab]
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
