No, No, Norm, It’s Much Worse Than That

DSR's Words Matter

In this episode of Deep State Radio's 'Words Matter,' host David Rothkopf and guest Norm Ornstein discuss the severe consequences of propose

Key takeaways

• Medicaid cuts will disqualify millions due to stringent work and reporting requirements, despite many being caregivers or unable to work.
• Hospitals and nursing homes rely heavily on Medicaid funding; reductions could lead to closures and overwhelmed emergency rooms.

Main topics

• Medicaid cuts and their impact on healthcare access
• Rural hospital closures and emergency room strain

Notable quotes

"The Republicans Are Going to Kill People, But Not Until After They Vote."

"There are a couple of important points to make here. First is the biggest changes that they've made are building in terribly onerous work and reporting requirements."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a stark warning that the current political and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:04) 9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 3. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super-secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Words Matter. I'm David Rothkopf, one of your hosts, and I'm joined, as always, by the great Norm Ornstein, who has the wisdom to be at the beach enjoying August, not too far from where Joe Biden enjoys his summer beach experiences. Are you headed out to get some, I don't know, cotton candy or... Turkish taffy or whatever it is people buy at the beach these days? A lot Speaker 2 (1:05) of people buy that stuff, but I'm not generally into Turkish taffy or cotton candy. However, the twice-cooked French fries out here are pretty good. Pretty, pretty good. Speaker 3 (1:21) I knew you'd find your way to something unhealthy. Yes, and Speaker 2 (1:24) crabs. Do you have crabs? There are lots of crabs, Jerome. Speaker 3 (1:31) Oh, yeah. No, that's everybody. In Maryland, they have crabs. Very good crab Speaker 2 (1:34) cakes, yes. Speaker 3 (1:36) Yeah, I don't know about that. Crabs are a pain in the ass to eat. People are always going, oh, go to this place and eat crabs. And they say, you'll have a mess of crabs. I don't know what that is, but it's a mess. And then there's all these crabs. And then they give you a hammer and they say, isn't this fun? I'm like working and working. There's like this little tiny bit Speaker 2 (1:55) of food. You get your aggressions Speaker 3 (1:57) out. by hanging away. But the crab cake you don't have to work at. Yeah, the most famous crab place, I used to live in Annapolis, is called Cantler's. Speaker 2 (2:07) Cantler's, Speaker 3 (2:07) yes. And it's right down on the water and you could go in your boat and... I just never. I'm from New Jersey. I'm like a hoagie. Anyway, you know, earlier this week, you had an article in the New Republic, as you told us you would last week, and it's called The Republicans Are Going to Kill People, But Not Until After They Vote. I think this may be incorrect. I think they may be killing some now. Even as we speak, it's true. But Speaker 2 (2:35) I Speaker 3 (2:37) thought maybe this would be a good chance for you to talk a little bit about what you say in your article. Speaker 2 (2:42) Yes, thank you. Okay, just as a preysy, I first started to write this because I had noticed, as many others have, but it was getting no attention, that the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which is the opposite, it's big, but it ain't beautiful, includes a trillion dollars in cuts in Medicaid over a 10-year period. But they postponed them until after the midterm elections. And then they phased them in so that the big cuts come further down the road. But there are big cuts coming in January. And I thought, this is going to be horrible for an awful lot of people. But then I began to realize that it's worse. It's even worse than that. Now, there are a couple of... Important points to make here. First is the biggest changes that they've made are building in terribly onerous work and reporting requirements. And they keep saying all the time at the number of able-bodied people on Medicaid who are not working, when we've had studies that show that a very substantial share of them are not working in jobs because they're home taking care of family members. But regardless of that, those work requirements, the paperwork requirements, which most people, no matter how well educated, would have trouble filling out, are going to take 11, 12, 15 million people off the Medicaid rolls. And they're celebrating that. But what never gets mentioned is that money doesn't go to these people. It goes to the providers. And the reality is that hospitals, doctors. Even insurance companies, but especially nursing homes, rely heavily on that revenue. So what happens when we cut it? The first thing that happens is more hospitals are going to go out of business. And hospitals, we know, have been in trouble for a very long time. Or hospitals, by the way, Speaker 3 (4:53) hospitals refuse to accept it, which has already happened with the Mount Sinai system in New York. Speaker 2 (5:02) Yeah, but what's also true is that the law says that if somebody comes to an emergency room with a health emergency, they have to be treated even if they don't have means to pay. So pick one example from the past, and we talk all the time about rural hospitals and deep trouble, which they are. But a few years ago, a big hospital in Philadelphia, which took care of most of the poor people in the area, had to close. And what happened to all the other hospitals? They were overrun. Their emergency rooms couldn't handle it because all of the people who used to go to that hospital had to go to these hospitals. And that meant that if you or I, and we're in an age where, you know, stuff happens. Speak Speaker 3 (5:53) to us. Speak for yourself. Speaker 2 (5:54) Well, you know, driving that car of yours, you might, you know. have an ankle injury when you were shifting gears. Yeah. Just injured myself Speaker 3 (6:03) getting in and out of the car. Speaker 2 (6:05) There's that too. The last few years I had a Miata, I had some of that difficult. And you had to go to an emergency room. Do that in one of these places where one of the hospitals closed, and you're going to be waiting for hours longer. But let's turn to nursing homes. Almost two-thirds of all the people in nursing homes in America, disabled people, elderly people, are on Medicaid. People can't afford this, most of them. We're talking a lot of money. So what happens in most cases is that individuals... pay down their assets until they're pretty much impoverished. Then on Medicaid, they can qualify to have their nursing home care paid for. Take that away or cut it substantially. Nursing homes are going to close. People are going to be out on the street. People are going to have to go to their relatives. At the same time, and here's where we get into some of the interactive effects, they've cut out insurance support for home health care. Speaker 2 (7:13) If you are home taking care of a relative and you've been relying on the home health care subsidy, or if you are working for a home health care agency. You're going to be in bigger trouble. And of course, what's going to happen is that nursing homes that stay in business are going to cut way back on their services, cut back on their help. And then we get the triple whammy. That was the double whammy. The triple whammy here is 100,000 or more Haitians have been working in the health world. They're orderlies in hospitals. They're technicians or helpers in nursing homes. They work for home health care agencies, and they're going to be deported by these nativist monsters. So we're going to have even bigger shortages there. And we're going to have crises in families that, of course, go well beyond the elderly or the disabled who are in the nursing homes. Their families are not going to be able to deal with it. You have two earners and a family, which is what you need in an economy where Speaker 2 (8:20) where wages are rising slower than inflation, and you have to work just to make ends meet, and you've got somebody at home who needs somebody to take care of them, and you can't do that. So you got that. Now let me add the quadruple whammy just for a minute, which is the war on health, safety, and food safety conducted primarily by its major general. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's now spending his time instead of sniffing cocaine off a toilet seat or killing animals and doing things with their penises, God knows what, is now instead destroying our vaccines and our health care system. And then we have Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture. who's completely undermined food safety. So we have epidemics of many varieties leading to explosive diarrhea and in some cases death from listeria or other horrible diseases that have now extended to fruits, vegetables, and ice pops. And then we have the other- And eggs, eggs. And eggs, eggs. We have the other impact of the immigration crackdown, as it were, the American Gestapo at work. Very large shares, probably 200,000 undocumented people have been working in meat and poultry processing plants, taking jobs that no one else will take or want. When they go, these plants are going to be understaffed, and the industry has manipulated the process so that they are doing an awful lot of the safety inspection themselves, not relying on the poor objective, shall we say, inspectors. So we'll have more of this stuff going on. The next pandemic is going to be a catastrophe. The flu season, where RFK Jr. has said, don't take the flu shot. The flu shot kills more people than the flu, he said. Just as he said. The polio vaccine killed more people than polio. I mean, God knows what animal parts this guy has eaten other than the brain worm, other than the cocaine off the toilet seat that's created this fantasy world of his. But put all that together and we're going to have