The “journalists” at MSNBC continued to fawn over ObamaCare on Friday’s Morning Joe, even in the midst of startling criticism for the bill from David Gregory, liberal host of Meet the Press. The discussion over the president’s massive health care overhaul came after reports that the IRS official in charge of the agency’s unfair treatment of conservative groups during its targeting is now leading the IRS’s efforts to implement ObamaCare.
Gregory pointed out that the Medicare surtax that is funding “Obamacare across the board” is “a lot of money.” “You may not know how it helps you,” he noted, “but you know what it's taking away from you.” Of course, dutiful defenders of Obama like MSNBC Politics Nation host the Rev. Al Sharpton and Huffington Post’s Sam Stein were on hand to defend ObamaCare [see video below the page break].
For his part, Stein seemed to be just fine with the burdensome tax, because it redistributes money into the pockets of “other people.”
David's point – hold on, there is a surtax issue that everyone is going to feel. But that surtax, that money goes to subsidize people's health care. While people will feel a tax issue a lot of other people are going to feel the money in their pocket to buy health care.
Stein’s redistribution of wealth argument wasn’t even the most offensive, though. Sharpton dismissed Gregory’s claim that “costs just keep going up,” touting the “certainty” that Obamacare brings to small segments of the population. Mika Brzezinski even offered a helping hand to Sharpton’s passionate defense of the bill.
GREGORY: Costs just keep going up.
SHARPTON: But there is certainty for people that had preexisting conditions and couldn't get insurance that are now insured.
BRZEZINSKI: Exactly. Young people.
SHARPTON: There is certainty for young people that are now covered that would not have been covered.
BRZEZINSKI: There's preventative care now.
SHARPTON: Preventative care. There's certainty in a lot of areas that people were left out.
What Gregory was trying to point out, and Sharpton dismissed, was the “uncertainty” that millions of Americans and small business owners now face with rapidly-increasing taxes and health care costs under Obamacare.
Then Sharpton declared, with his typical lack of evidence, that small business owners “have come forward and supported Obamacare.” Well, this argument is simply false. As NewsBusters pointed out on Monday, even the ObamaCare-favoring Washington Post admitted that “Small-Business Owners Dread” the new taxes under Obamacare (even though they stuffed the story in the back, on page A15).
We expect Al Sharpton to spout his liberal views day in and day out on MSNBC, but we should expect better than outright lies, especially from a man of the cloth.
View the transcript after the jump:
Morning Joe
05/17/13
7:33 a.m. Eastern
DAVID GREGORY: But here's what else people know about Obamacare. They may not know exactly how it helps them. They do know this: if they're employed, if they’re a salaried employee, and they get their pay stubs...when they get their paycheck on Fridays, what do they see is a new line item. And it's called the Medicare surtax. And it's a lot of money. It's new taxes that we are paying to fund Obamacare across the board. You may not know how it helps you but you know what it's taking away from you.
(...)
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Let me say Vern, quickly. I want to follow up on that point, because we have a lot of people in Washington talking about Obamacare, a lot of people in Manhattan talking about Obamacare. I don't know what they're saying on the subways about this, Donny, we were talking about what they were saying on the subways. I can tell you what they're saying, though, small business owners across Pensacola, northwest Florida, middle America, Iowa: they're saying this is going to cost my small business a lot of money.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Not small businesses...
SCARBOROUGH: And the regulations are going to be high. And we're going to have to also cut some of my best employees to below 30 hours or else I can't afford to stay in business. This – and this is all going to hit, Vern, in 2014.
CONGRESSMAN VERN BUCHANAN: Yeah. I think a lot of people when they hire an employee, this is the thing that gets missed. Twenty years ago you hired an employee, paid him $50,000, there was a 22 percent cost – additional costs in hiring that employee in terms of benefits. Today it's 42 to 44 percent someone was telling me the other day. At the heart of that is the whole thing on health care. I get questions all the time where someone has 72 employees, they say “I'm going to have to cut back to under 50.” So there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst out there, and just the cost of health care in general is completely and totally out of control for anybody in small business. It's not unusual for someone to say they're paying $2,000 a month for their family of four for health care today.
GREGORY: Costs just keep going up.
AL SHARPTON: But there is certainty for people that had preexisting conditions and couldn't get insurance that are now insured.
BRZEZINSKI: Exactly. Young people.
SHARPTON: There is certainty for young people that are now covered that would not have been covered.
BRZEZINSKI: There's preventative care now.
SHARPTON: Preventative care. There's certainty in a lot of areas that people were left out. And a lot of small businesses have come forward and supported Obamacare. I think that – I understand the Republicans’objection. They lost it. And I think that –
SCARBOROUGH: I'm not just talking about Republicans. I'm talking about – you know, I don't know if you know...I know that Democrats own small businesses too.
SHARPTON: They do.
SCARBOROUGH: Democrats are concerned about this as well.
SHARPTON: And many of those small businesses supported Obamacare for some of the reasons I named and other reasons. And I think that it is very important that we understand that a lot of Americans want to see all Americans in a position to be insured that were not insured before we had this legislation.
BRZEZINSKI: Anybody at this table not think, or on the panel not think, that Americans should have access to health care? All of them?
DONNY DEUTSCH: David's point – the argument becomes very simple for the Republicans, it costs more money.
SAM STEIN: David's point – hold on, there is a surtax issue that everyone is going to feel. But that surtax, that money goes to subsidize people's health care. While people will feel a tax issue a lot of other people are going to feel the money in their pocket to buy health care.
GREGORY: The question is though, do you trust the government to administer the program?
SCARBOROUGH: Yes, do you trust the government to administer the program? And that's come out this past week. And also, those people may have more money in their pockets but if their small businesses shut down or they have to get rid of them because they have to cut below 50 employees, then suddenly it ends up hurting them more than helping them. It's a terrible balancing act and I think it's going to be following the White House throughout 2014. And they're going to have to make some adjustments on the fly.
