Tom Price fine pick to head DHHS

Donald Trump could not have nominated a better person as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services than U.S. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia.

I know that sounds surprising. During the campaign, Trump consistently told voters that he was different than other Republicans, that he would protect Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other essential safety-net programs. Price, on the other hand, has long nursed an ideologue’s hatred of such programs. He wants to privatize Medicare and slash Medicaid dramatically, and has consistently voted against efforts to extend coverage even to children through the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

So why has Trump decided to take programs that he has pledged to protect and place them under the control of a person pledged to drastically reduce and, if possible, eliminate them?

Come on. You know the answer already. It’s because Trump’s campaign talk was a scam. Every administration has its priorities, and since we cannot afford both huge tax cuts for the wealthy and decent health care for the masses, decent health care for the masses has been placed on the chopping block by the Trump administration.

Because that’s what you do, right? When you run an anti-elitist, anti-Wall Street, populist campaign that tells working people they have been victims of a rigged system that ignores their needs in favor of the well-connected, after your election you immediately move to lavish immense rewards on the wealthy, appoint fellow billionaires and Wall Street denizens to your Cabinet and undercut programs that provide citizens at least some insulation against predatory capitalism.

On Medicare, for example, Price and his fellow House Republicans have laid out a plan in which the current system of guaranteed coverage would be replaced with a system in which elderly Americans are given federal subsidies — the GOP calls them “premium supports” — which they then use to buy private insurance plans on the open marketplace. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s very much the same structure as Obamacare.

In addition, Price has proposed legislation to cut traditional federal Medicaid spending by $1 trillion over the next decade. Repeal of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion would cut another $1.1 trillion, producing $2.1 trillion that then becomes available for cutting taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent. And if that means that some 14 million Americans have to be stripped of Medicaid coverage to achieve that goal, as predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, that’s the price to be paid.

In fact, when Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch was asked whether entitlement cuts are needed to make tax cuts plausible, he didn’t mince words: “I think that’s probably the understatement,” he told the Washington Post. Rural hospitals will close as their paying customers lose the capacity to pay, and once those areas lose hospitals they lose whatever meager ability they may have had to attract industry. These are not happy outcomes, but elections do have consequences. The consequences of this one are that men such as Price will get to test long-held Republican fantasies about how the world ought to work, and a lot of vulnerable people are going to suffer as a result. But if that’s what has to happen to open some eyes, I guess we better get on with it.