So much for toning down the violent rhetoric. Sen. John Kennedy made an appearance on Fox’s The Story with Martha MacCallum this Friday, and was asked about the upcoming vote on Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s proposal to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies for a year in return for ending the shutdown, and Kennedy made this thinly veiled threat against Schumer in response while just straight up lying about what extending those subsidies would mean for people’s insurance premiums.
MACCALLUM: What is your response to Chuck Schumer’s proposal here to keep those ACA benefits going for another year? Bipartisan committee to work on those and reopen the government with a clean CR.
KENNEDY: God, please give me patience, because if you give me strength, I’m going to need bail money. What Senator Schumer is suggesting is that we do the dumbest thing possible that won’t work. Stupid should hurt more.
Senator Schumer says we should just extend the status quo for a year. What does that mean? That means that we would have to take $35 billion of taxpayer money and give it directly to the health insurance companies without any commitment of lowering premiums.
How is that going to reduce health care costs? How’s that going to reduce premiums? The health care companies are going to take $35 billion from the taxpayers and put it into their pockets. I mean, duh!
I don’t know what Senator Schumer is thinking. Earth to Chuck. I mean, Earth to Chuck. Am I going to vote for this? The short answer is no. The long answer is hell no! I think we’re just going to have to get used to the fact that we’ve been in a shutdown, we’re going to be in a shutdown for a while.
I voted 14 times to lift the shutdown. The Democrats and Senator Rand Paul have voted 14 times to keep the government shutdown. We’re just going to be here for a while.
Hey John, maybe we could afford the subsidies if Trump hadn’t decided to give Argentina billions of dollars. So much for America first.
MacCallum didn’t correct Kennedy’s lie about the insurance rates, but played cleanup for him instead while allowing him to pretend that Republicans care one iota about the price of health care or health insurance.
MACCALLUM: It doesn’t seem like what Senator Schumer just proposed is really any different than where Democrats have been all along. They wanted a trillion and a half, you can say $36 billion, I guess there’s a lot of different numbers on this package.
But to keep the… the Obamacare benefits were expanded during COVID. And of course, once you give something very hard to claw it back. So that’s the that’s where we are right now. And so the the impact is, of having that extension pulled away is making people’s new health care benefits rise.
But as you say, it’s not fixing the problem in terms of lowering costs. Is there any, you know, I just spoke with the former Governor Sununu and he said, you know, what they need to do is accept Senator Thune’s next proposal and agree on it and get Democrats across the board on it. What do you think that is going to look like?
KENNEDY: He’s just going to bring up the same resolution that he’s brought up 14 times. Look, if we’ve learned anything during this shutdown, we’ve learned that the Obamacare Affordable Care Act exchanges, they’re not working. They’re not lowering health care costs.
Extending the status quo will just be putting fresh paint on rotten wood. Why would we want to do that?
They have no plan to fix anything. They’ve been doing everything possible to destroy the ACA and undermine it since its inception. Shame on him for threatening Schumer an for gaslighting the American public about what they’re doing.
