Dems must recognize only truth will keep Trump away
Corporations got a sweet deal, and hospitals don’t have to follow the rules doctors do
WASHINGTON — And now he’s really gone, acquitted under the rules yet condemned by the facts, nursing his grievances and planning his comeback from isolation at Mar-a-Lago. For the country, the question is how to ensure that Donald Trump remains there while the nation tries to recover from the damage he wrought.
Perhaps it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a character so memorably theatrical in his two-faced behavior that his dialogue might have been penned by Charles Dickens, who best summarized the evidence: “Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty . ... This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”
The acquittal verdict, bizarre after all the damning facts, was a near-certainty even before arguments were heard, when 44 Republican senators voted against proceeding with the trial, most of them claiming it was unconstitutional to try a former president. I disagree with that judgment, but I can understand — barely — the argument that convicting a former president might, as McConnell put it, mean “empowering Congress to ban any private citizen from federal office.”
By Saturday, it was time to call the question: The Democrats were wise not to extend the proceedings by calling witnesses. That would have opened a door through which would have entered more division and discord, but almost certainly no more Republican votes for conviction. It was time for the Senate to return to the urgent business of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
The trial is over, but the country needs a fuller record of what happened during the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, including the most painful details. Why was intelligence so thin? What coordination was there between Trump’s inner circle and the rally organizers? Did members of Congress or the Capitol Police abet the attackers, knowingly or unintentionally? Was the military so determined to avoid the overreaction of June 1, when peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square were forcefully dispersed, that it under-reacted? What did Trump supporters hope would happen next, if the count of Electoral College votes was stopped and the election result was in limbo?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has endorsed the call for an independent, bipartisan commission that can investigate precisely what happened and build a platform of facts on which the country can unite and move on. That’s the best protection against a recrudescence of Trump.
In the Republicans’ generally lame defense of Trump, I heard two points that come up nearly every time I talk with his supporters. Both involve claims that Democrats have been hypocritical. Though I disagree, Democrats should have honest answers ready. Not all of Trump’s 74 million voters believe the Democrats and the media are biased, but many do.
The first grievance is that Democrats treated Trump as an illegitimate president from the moment he took office. As Trump’s defense counsel Michael van der Veen put it in his closing argument, “Democrats were obsessed with impeaching Mr. Trump from the very beginning of his term,” and Trump’s lawyers had video clips from 2017, 2018 and 2019 to make their point. In Trump’s telling, he faced a “witch hunt.”
That’s mostly nonsense. Trump brought ruin on himself with his reckless and divisive actions. But it’s true that some Democrats favored “resistance” after Election Day 2016; they opposed treating Trump as a legitimate elected president and insisted that crediting any Trump achievements was “normalizing” him. Trump supporters pointed to this relatively mild resistance and accused Democrats of refusing to accept the 2016 election results — and turned that into an argument for the sedition that culminated on Jan. 6.
The second grievance I hear repeatedly from Trump supporters is that Democrats are hypocrites because they condemn mob violence when it’s from the right, but not the left. Again, to quote van der Veen’s overheated summary, Democrats “repeatedly made comments that provided moral comfort to mobs attacking police officers.”
I don’t find many comments by leading Democrats that actually back up this charge. But there are stray sound bites. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan shouldn’t have said on June 11 that armed protesters occupying downtown Seattle had created a “block party atmosphere” that could foretell a “summer of love.” Whatever the excesses of federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Oregon, Pelosi shouldn’t have called them “stormtroopers” on July 17.
Democrats need to be emphatic and impartial in condemning political violence, whatever causes it seeks to advance. The peaceful racial justice protests that followed the killing of George Floyd were a national inspiration; the street violence that sometimes accompanied the protests was wrong. If Democrats fail to make this distinction clearly, they open the door to Trump’s false claim that the “other side” condones violence by its supporters.
A process of reconciliation won’t work without reciprocal honesty. Trump tried to torch our country, as McConnell said and many other Republicans seem to understand. Responsible people need to help put out the fire. Truth is the best way to douse the flames and cool the embers.
House Bill 75, which recently passed the N.M. House of Representatives, will eliminate hospitals from the list of providers eligible to obtain coverage under the Medical Malpractice Act. Normally, this issue would find New Mexico’s independent physicians joined with the hospitals in opposing the bill. No longer.
The MMA was passed in 1976 when malpractice insurers departed from the state, leaving New Mexico physicians without coverage. The MMA created the Patient’s Compensation Fund to pay the major part of all malpractice liabilities incurred by physicians and seven other types of providers, including hospitals. In order to avoid swamping the fund with the malpractice claims of any single provider, the Legislature imposed a three-occurrence limit on the number of times any provider could use the fund to pay for their yearly malpractice liabilities. Hospitals rarely used the act because the malpractice occurrences in any year for most hospitals numbered in the “hundreds.”
In 2009, the Office of the Superintendent of Insurance changed all of that by secretly cutting Christus St. Vincent a sweet deal giving it coverage under the act for an unlimited number of occurrences of malpractice each year. By 2016 and 2017, 99 other hospitals and outpatient care facilities wanted in. The superintendent secretly gave it to them. The deal also allowed the hospitals to essentially set their own premiums for the use of the fund based on their own cherry-picked data. The hospitals receiving the superintendent’s deal were not small, struggling community hospitals but rather the progeny of large multimillion dollar corporations, most located out of state.
The result is the fund, which was running a positive balance in 2009, had developed a $36 million deficit by 2017. After the New Mexico Medical Society discovered the superintendent’s deal with the hospitals in 2017, I and three other past presidents of the medical society filed suit to require the superintendent to follow the requirements of the MMA, one of the most important of which was to require hospitals to comply with the act’s three-occurrence limit. Our suit since then has been basically “stuck in the judicial mud.”
Meanwhile, the fund’s deficit has climbed from $36 million in 2017 to $56 million in 2020. New Mexico’s physicians have accordingly seen a 49% increase in their malpractice premiums over the past five years. New Mexico physicians’ malpractice premiums are now significantly higher than virtually all of the surrounding states. Nevertheless, the fund, which New Mexico’s independent physicians and their patients depend on for the payment of malpractice liabilities, will sooner or later become insolvent.
Consequently, I wholeheartedly endorse HB 75 to take hospitals out of the MMA. If the hospitals will not follow the MMA, the Legislature should take them out of the MMA. The MMA itself states that any provider not following its terms is not entitled to its benefits in the event of any claims against it. HB 75 only ensures this result. I encourage the New Mexico Senate to hear and vote on this bill in a timely manner.
Thus instead of spending my time this session defending the hospitals’ alleged entitlement to coverage under the act, I will attempt to convince our Legislature to nudge our Supreme Court to directly and immediately decide if the superintendent must follow the three-occurrence limit in the MMA with respect to all health care providers, or if he is free to ignore it with respect to hospitals.