President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

We are talking about 73 million people -- 1 in 5 Americans. At what point will you acknowledge the reality of what you have created, rather than always trying to frame it in terms of some question related to compassion. It's about the least compassionate thing I can imagine, because it has screwed up the market for health care, hurting millions more who haven't been made dependent on the state. In the name of compassion, you are hurting people.

The program itself has been the biggest contributor to why so many people now rely on it. They created a self-fulfilling prophecy with it. At first it was, "Well, we need to take care of the very most vulnerable." But in the efforts to do that, they began this path to destroying the market for health care, driving up costs at an insane pace, and creating a burden for everyone else being asked to support it. It's not just Medicaid. There were way more messed up interferences that have contributed too. But in regard to Medicaid itself, we got this to the point that we drove up costs on ourselves and created such an inefficient mess, that everyone else can't be asked to handle the burden of what we have. So the fantasy of some people subsidizing others (but just the needy!) has been thrown out the window and we are just putting ourselves into bigger and bigger debt to avoid being realistic. You really think that this can go on another decade even?

As costs have gone up -- which was entirely predictable, except that anyone pointing out that there was no free lunch got shouted down -- more people are driven into the program, creating 73 million people "who live under extremely difficult circumstances." The thing has grown bigger and bigger (to the point where the ACA was largely designed to funnel people to it) and it is characterized by inefficiency, waste and bloat. Which is also no surprise, because there is no incentive for it NOT to be the mess every state-run program like that is.

AYou have created this mess in which 1 in 5 people in the country is dependent on something that not only does a shitty job of providing what you want it to. ... it is bankrupting the country. I can point that out without having a magical solution for the fact that we live in a world of scare resources that makes it difficult for everyone to have everything we all want them to have. The question isn't, "Do *I* have a better way." The question for me is, "Why are we screwing up the market for health care this way, driving up costs for everyone, and making people dependent on the mess we created?"