Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Reminder: A Gaffe is When a Politician Accidentally Tells the Truth
From Rep. Tom Price’s confirmation hearing, via Reason:
https://youtu.be/JigNx_XXMZE?t=31s
Senator Elizabeth Warren: [C]an you guarantee to this committee that you will safeguard President-Elect Trump’s promise? And while you are HHS Secretary, you will not use your administrative authority to carry out a single dollar of cuts to Medicare or Medicaid eligibility or benefits?
Price: But what the question presumes is that money is the metric. In my belief, from a scientific standpoint, if patients aren’t receiving care even though we’re providing resources, then it doesn’t work for patients.
Warren: I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re very limited on time, but the metric is money. And the quote from the president-elect of the United States was not a long discourse on this. He said he would not cut dollars from this program. So that’s the question I’m asking you: Can you assure this committee that you will not cut one dollar from either Medicare or Medicaid should you be confirmed to this position?
0Warren: So I take that as a no?
Price: It’s that that’s the wrong metric.
Thanks, Senator, for lifting the veil for a moment.
Published in Healthcare
Can you imagine the awfulness of having to take a class at Harvard taught by her?
Worse: She’ll likely be going for the Democrat nomination to run for President in ’20. Howdya like to listen to this drivel for a year or more?!
You ask a question and then cut the person off because the start of their question does not sound like the answer you approve? How did she foster growth and development beyond obedience to her ideas while teaching? Most of these clips that get headlines make our representatives look like jerks, Rubio included. Not sure if it’s media bias in selected clips or behaviors by representatives knowing they’re on camera.
“The metric is money.”
Thus was it ever inside the Beltway. That ought to be her 2020 campaign slogan.
I’d lean toward the effects of being on camera and wanted to signal very clearly to their base. Having watched too many clips of Warren over the last week or so, I can’t imagine swing voters finding her manner to be enticing if she’s looking toward 2020.
Since the metric is money, she may only be concerned about driving up the cash inflow from her donors.
This touches upon the “use it or lose it” money mind set of bureaucrats. If you don’t spend all the money allowed, then a higher level review considers that the agency wasted money since more money was allocated than used. The result is that bureaucratic agencies are incentivized to not become more efficient. In fact to spend all your money is way to say that you’re underfunded so then you can ask for more money.
She is so embarrassing.
I thought spending was controlled by Congress, (Article I, Section 9, Clause 7) and not the secretary, is Medicaid special?
The Democrats like this woman, fraud and all.
Boy did she get him. He won’t guarantee that he will spend every penny of the fake printed money that Congress allocates to his department. “The metric is money”. Wow, does that say it all in the difference between conservatives and progressives. I, Elizabeth Warren, care not about the quality of the services rendered, only about spending as much as possible on rendering those services. Could she be any more shallow? She certainly made it clear what is important to her.
People like to beat up on Scott Brown for losing to Elizabeth Warren, but her showing was not at all good. Some quarter-million Obama voters rejected her and went for Scott Brown… in Massachusetts. In the state where Mitt Romney had been governor.
Take thirteen percent off the top of any Obama numbers nationally, and you lose in a landslide. She’s awful.
As to the confirmation hearings: what really bothered me is when she went after Ben Carson. He’s an objectively brilliant man, and she treated him like he was some sixth-grade kid who hadn’t done his homework. She snidely told him that it was a “simple yes/no question” as to whether or not “even one dollar” of HUD funding would “financially benefit” the Trump family.
Except a halfway decent lawyer would be well-aware that the answer to “Will X financially benefit a family with a multi-national business?” is never simple. It’s one thing to say, “Can you guarantee that the Trump family will not be a direct contractor,” but it’s entirely another to use a vague term like “financially benefit.” Do you financially benefit when a low-cost housing project could have gone in near a Trump site but went elsewhere, or vice-versa? Basic honesty demands that the question not be answered “yes/no,” and in fact, shouldn’t have been asked.
Sorry for that random rant.
Luckily the metric there was money too. Professor Franklin thinks this is A- work.
Crazy as she is at least she’s not an overtly corrupt slimeball. Rap on tomahonkey, rap on.
I am not an expert on this subject, but Congress has recently been writing laws such that they grant more discretion to cabinet secretaries on how to allocate their appropriations than they did in the past. With phrases like “the Secretary shall determine” or “the Secretary shall direct” etc. It’s my understanding that there’s a lot of this sort of language in the Affordable Care Act, which I believe also changes a lot how Medicaid dollars are spent.
So yes, spending is controlled by Congress, but Congress has been handing big piles of money to cabinet secretaries and basically saying “Do whatever you want!” You know, because there was going to be a permanent Democrat electoral majority because of the demographic Blue Wall that nobody was ever going to penetrate. Oops.
But she is. She falsely claimed minority status and got a minority hire a Hahhvad.
Elizabeth Warren has be the most self righteous jerk during all of these hearings, but it’s red meat for leftists. Her lefty friends in Massachusetts love it
I dunno. I think that they’re all Feelin’ the Bern now instead. She lost a little of her luster when she didn’t endorse Bernie over Hillary in the primary.
If he makes it through his first term without resigning/being impeached, I think chances are quite high that Trump is reelected.
“Tomahonkey” hahaha
“The money is the metric” perfectly encapsulates it for that crowd. It doesn’t matter whether something works or not. What only matters is how much we spend on it. What a fool.
I think it’s funny that her “advice” to him was to put a quote on his wall. As if he’s some 19 year old dorm-dweller in need of motivation. “There: that should fix the country!”
In law school, I had to use the bankruptcy case book she authored. Twenty-five pages of policy for every page of actual law. Just awful–and unhelpful. But, hey, who cares about the actual law, amiright?
My impression of all federal spending is that it isn’t the money that is the metric, but, rather the amount of meaningless paperwork generated by the agencies which are paid for by the money that is the metric. They have never been interested in real patient care, only reams of paper demonstrating how the money was spent.
Warren is an irredeemable bureaucrat. She is not a legislator. What matters to her has nothing to do with final end of the dollars spent, only what shows on paper, whether it is a truth or an outright lie.
Hey editors, when you do a wholesale rewrite of someone’s post, could you at least add a disclaimer stating that you’ve done so?
But they’re helping!
What an unpleasant bully Senator Warren is.
I blame the American people for becoming addicted to government largesse.
It’s a trick question. I guarantee Medicare and Medicaid spending will increase during this Administration. The real question is the pace of increase. If there are successful reforms that reduce the pace of increase while maintaining, or improving, care I’d consider it a triumph for the Administration. However, in Washington budget speak any decrease in the rate of the projected increase cuts as a “cut“. It’s the opposite of how it is done in the private sector.
The same issue comes up with Democratic attacks on the Ryan budget proposals in the past few years. They are denounced as “cuts” but it’s an odd use of the term when the federal budget would still increase by 25% over the next few years, compared to the Obama administration projections of a 50% increase.
What happened?
They rewrote the post. They didn’t change the substance of it, which is why I’m merely suggesting they add a disclaimer, instead of raising holy heck in outrage.
Still, really quite rude of ’em, sez I.