“What They’ve Decided to Do Is Just Lie About It.”
The writing was on the wall by March 2017: a new health care dynamic emerged in the wake of the GOP’s effort to eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions coverage. No issue is more important to voters this election cycle, and no issue has dogged GOP Senate candidates more than health care. As Rachel Maddow explained last night, it’s caused Republican campaigns to go “absolutely nuts” and “what they’ve decided to do is just lie about it.” WATCH:
Highlights:
Maddow: As you know, as we’ve been covering on the show, the polls right now say the issue Americans care about more than any other when it comes to this election – the issue they’re paying more attention to more than any other when it comes to deciding who they’re going to vote for – the single most important issue this season, this election: it’s health care.
I want to look at this in Arizona, but this is happening all over the country. Since we have been focusing on this issue for the past couple of days, it was crazy a couple days ago. It’s gone absolutely nuts on the Republican side since then.
Republicans in Congress have voted at least 70 times to kill that. The top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell says, “yeah, in the Senate, they’ll do it again,” if Republicans are able to hold onto the Senate. Twenty Republican-led states right now are suing to kill Obamacare, including specifically that part that makes insurance cover pre-existing conditions. That lawsuit is supported overtly by the trump administration. and to put the icing on all of it. The Trump Administration just this week, three days ago, unilaterally changed the rules set by Obamacare, so that now insurance companies will be allowed to turn you down if you have a pre-existing condition or they’ll be allowed to charge you more because of it.
What [Republicans] have decided to do is just lie about it.
It’s also happening in these individual Republican campaigns around the country, too, like with this super hard fought race involving Martha McSally in Arizona. In her case, it is making local news anchors basically spit out their coffee because it’s just through the looking glass bizarre.
Martha McSally of Arizona told her colleagues, “let’s get this f-ing thing done… Now she’s running for Senate in Arizona like this: “We cannot go back to where we were before Obamacare, where people were one diagnosis away from going bankrupt because they could not get access to health care.”
It’s just like are you freaking kidding me? … This is the thing that more Americans care about than any other and she’s just like, “vote for me, I stand for exactly the opposite of everything I’ve ever done.”
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