Now, you don't hear it very much in the corporate media, but the budget bill that the Republicans passed through the House and Senate and Donald Trump signed that set the table for this tax legislation - this tax scam that is being worked out between Republicans in the House, Republicans in the Senate and the billionaires who own them all - includes a trillion dollar cut to Medicaid and a half a trillion dollar cut to Medicare.

So how do you get people to stop using Medicaid and Medicare if you're going to cut the funding for it? You can't just start saying to doctors, 'sorry we're only going to pay you 20% of what we used to pay you, or 80%, or whatever it may be.' I mean, you could, but you might as well not have a system. So what do you do?

Well, the Republicans have got an answer to that, too. You just you have to admit these guys, they're slick. They put a lot of thought into this stuff.

They want to make sure that the donor class is not paying for your health care if you happen to be working for $7.50 an hour someplace and are making so little even though you're working full-time that you qualify for Medicaid.

They want to make sure that you can no longer get that Medicaid because Medicaid is paid for out of the federal coffers and federal coffers are replenished in part by taxes from billionaires and big corporations.

And billionaires and big corporations, they want to keep all that money in Bermuda. They don't want that money messing around here.

So, how do we get people to stop using Medicaid? Because we're going to cut a trillion dollars - a thousand billion dollars - out of Medicaid, so how do we get people to stop using it?

Again, this is all predicated on the foundational notion that Republicans have that health care is not a right, it is a privilege. It's a privilege that you must earn, and you earn it by becoming wealthy, because that's the only metric that is important.

Being a good person - not important.

Being a decent parent - not important.

Being a good son or daughter - not important.

Being wealthy - oh yeah, that gets the GOP going.

So you've got the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - it's called CMS - the part of HHS that administers Medicare and Medicaid. And the woman in charge of this, her name is Seema Verma. And last week she made a rather shocking - in fact it's been called "twisted" and "absolutely awful" by health care experts - a shocking statement.

-Thom

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