As part of the ongoing debate about the future of ObamaCare, Mick Mulvaney -- director of the Office of Management and Budget in the federal government -- was a guest on CNN's New Day Wednesday morning, when he disagreed with co-host Chris Cuomo on various aspects of what is also called the Affordable Care Act.
During a debate on the policies of companies in the insurance business, Cuomo asserted: “The difference between the consumer and the insurer is that the consumer pays the price; the insurer passes it along through premiums.”
“Why would you allow insurers to raise premiums in some effort just to cripple ObamaCare?” the co-host then asked.
“Let’s make one thing perfectly clear,” Mulvaney replied. “Insurance companies have been raising premiums even with these payments having been made in the last several years.”
The guest then continued:
On ObamaCare. I know exactly what it’s doing. I lost my doctor. My wife lost her doctor, so we’ve been through this in a way that many people have not. That was happening even with the CSR (Cost-Sharing Reduction) payments having been made.
ObamaCare is failing, and I think what’s happening is a lot of folks are trying to distract from that.
“They’re just trying to keep you from making it worse,” Cuomo responded. “How do you justify making it worse as evidence that it’s already bad?”
“It gets worse by itself, as we’ve seen for the last several years,” Mulvaney noted. “It doesn’t need the president’s help to make it a bad piece of legislation.”
“But Mick,” the co-host asserted, ObamaCare “is not a bailout. It’s going to keep premiums from spiking. … I don’t understand why you’re not calling it what it is.”
“The reason you’re getting pushback from your own party is because you’re going to hurt people if you don’t allow these CSR payments,” Cuomo indicated, “which by the way, your own party put in their own bills, which obviously they saw the need for them even though they were trying to repeal and replace.”
“I think it was the Republicans in the House who filed the lawsuit to stop the payments in the first place,” Mulvaney responded, “so I would disagree with that entirely.”
“You have the Senate and the House with a disconnect there,” Cuomo retorted, “even though the House still provided for some of these payments going forward to a certain year stoppage.”
The guest then stated:
Look, if they want to provide for the payments as part of a larger bill, that’s fine. We supported the House bill, as you recall, so it’s not that we dislike these payments as long as they’re part of a system to fix ObamaCare or to repeal ObamaCare.
But right now, you don’t even have that, so the president comes back to the point I’ve just made, which is: Why are you giving the insurance companies a better deal than you are the people?
“Because the people will get a worse deal if you don’t give these payments,” Cuomo responded. “Is it as simple as that?”
“The people have a bad deal the way that it is,” the guest stated. “Look, the simplest way to fix this is to get rid of this, not to continue to throw bad money after good.”
“You said something earlier about how the White House’s position was to focus only on ObamaCare,” he continued. “I think that’s not entirely accurate. What we’re saying is: ‘Don’t give up.’ Yes, you can continue to work on tax reform” and other issues. "We haven’t given up on trying to repeal it, and we don’t think they should either.”
“I feel like you’re dancing around the reality that you need those payments in order to stabilize the markets,” Cuomo asserted, “and if you’re holding them hostage, you -- .”
“Stop, stop for a second,” the guest interjected. “These payments have been there for years. You are assuming that with these CSR payments, the markets will stay stable. That is a false assumption.”
“More stable,” Cuomo responded.
“More stable is replacing this with something that actually works,” Mulvaney noted.
“The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) says that X number of people will not receive coverage,” Mulvaney noted. “What are they comparing that to? They’re comparing that to an ideal ObamaCare that works.”
However, “ObamaCare doesn’t work. All of those promises that were made about ObamaCare” didn’t happen, Mulvaney noted. “The market became destabilized because the system is broken.”
Also, medical insurance is “one of those things you buy, and you don’t care what the cost is,” he added. “That’s the only product or service that we buy like that in the country so it’s a tremendous warping of the market.”
