Seduced and betrayed
Millions of Trump voters stand to lose health insurance
Donald Trump won the Electoral College on the strength of overwhelming support from working-class whites, who feel left behind by a changing economy and society. And they’re about to get their reward — the same reward that, throughout Mr. Trump’s career, has come to everyone who trusted his good intentions. Think Trump University.
Yes, the white working class is about to be betrayed.
The evidence is obvious in the array of pro-corporate, anti-labor figures Mr. Trump has chosen for key positions. In particular, the most important story of the week was the selection of Tom Price, an ardent opponent of Obamacare and advocate of Medicare privatization, as secretary of health and human services. This choice probably means that the Affordable Care Act is doomed — and Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters will be among the biggest losers.
Republican talk of “repeal and replace” has always been a fraud. The GOP has spent six years claiming it will come up with a replacement for Obamacare any day now; the reason it hasn’t delivered is that it can’t.
Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to: You can’t cover Americans with pre-existing conditions without requiring healthy people to sign up, and you can’t do that without subsidies to make insurance affordable.
Any replacement will either look a lot like Obamacare, or take insurance away from millions who desperately need it. The choice of Mr. Price suggests that Mr. Trump is ready to see millions lose insurance. Many will be Trump supporters.
Census data from 2013 to 2015 show the impact of Obamacare. Over that period, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by 13 million; whites without a college degree, who voted for Mr. Trump by about two to one, accounted for some 8 million of that decline. So more than 5 million Trump supporters, many with chronic health problems who recently got health insurance for the first time, just voted to make their lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.
Why? They may not have realized that their coverage was at stake. Or they may have believed Mr. Trump’s assurances that he would replace Obamacare with something great.
Either way, they’re about to get a rude awakening, which will get even worse once Republicans push their plans to end Medicare as we know it, even though the president-elect promised specifically he would do no such thing.
And BTW, Mr. Trump can’t bring back the manufacturing jobs lost over the past few decades. They disappeared mainly due to technological change, not trade or offshoring, and they aren’t coming back. That means nothing will offset the harm workers suffer when Republicans shred the safety net.
Will there be a political backlash, a surge of buyer’s remorse? Maybe. Certainly Democrats will hammer Mr. Trump’s betrayal of the working class. But we need to consider the tactics he will use to obscure the scope of his betrayal.
One that we’ve already seen with this week’s ostentatious announcement of a deal to keep some Carrier jobs in America, will be to distract the nation with bright, shiny, trivial objects.
No, Mr. Trump didn’t “stand up” to Carrier — he seems to have offered it a bribe. And we’re talking about a thousand jobs in a huge economy; at the rate of one Carrier-size deal a week, it would take Mr. Trump 30 years to save as many jobs as President Barack Obama did with the auto bailout; it would take him a century to make up for the overall loss of manufacturing jobs just since 2000.
But judging from the news coverage of the deal so far, it looks like the media will continue to be gullible.
If and when the reality that workers are losing ground sinks in, I worry that the Trumpists will do what authoritarian governments often do to change the subject away from poor performance: go find an enemy.
And it’s started: Even as he took a big step toward taking health insurance away from millions, Mr. Trump started ranting about taking citizenship away from flag-burners. This was not a coincidence.
Keep your eye on what’s important. Millions of Americans have just been sucker-punched. They just don’t know it yet.