On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, as correspondent Tom Foreman informed viewers of how Avalere Health evaluates the Graham-Cassidy ObamaCare replacement plan, the CNN reporter misleadingly hinted that part of the motivation for the plan might be to reward states that voted for Donald Trump. Host Don Lemon even bolstered the suggestion: "Yeah, you can certainly see the politics at play here."
But neither bothered to inform viewers that critical competitive states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arizona that Trump will most likely need to win in 2020 were not on the list of states that were considered relative winners under the plan.
It was not until later in the show that right-leaning guest Stephen Moore pointed out that the states that benefit more tend to be states that are more poor while wealthier states would benefit less.
As Foreman informed viewers of the GOP plan, he recalled that Avalere calculated that California would receive substantially less funding than under ObamaCare. He then continued:
And 34 other states would go through some version of this. Health care advocates say they think that would be cuts to the working poor, cuts to people with chronic conditions, and cuts to people with very expensive medical treatment that they can't pay for.
Foreman then further explained:
But what about these green states here? What's going on there? Avalere says some of the states that did not buy into ObamaCare a lot might initially see their funding go up -- places like Texas, for example, where they believe that there could be about a 14 percent increase in the money.
The CNN host then hinted at a desire to benefit Republican states by the plan's authors as he added:
But here's the thing that has a lot of the politicians here talking in this town. Look at the green states out here. Not all of them, but almost all of them are states that voted for Donald Trump and are Republican strongholds. Don?
Lemon then chimed in "Yeah, you can certainly see the politics at play here."
Later in the show, after Lemon raised the issue of red states benefiting and blue states losing, Moore responded:
If you look at that map, Don, what it's really showing is that the wealthier states -- the states with higher per capita income -- states like New York and Connecticut and California -- are going to lose money relatively and the poorer states that have more poor people are going to get more money.
