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Trump's Medicaid chief just told America that premiums are only going up $13 — #PromisesMade!
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Oct. 30: You heard the wizard! Thirteen-dollar premium hikes! … Shutdown may be helping Republicans by not yet hurting enough Americans … Some officials prepare to sic police against starving people deprived of food relief … Trump says nuclear testing is coming back (how else can Jesus come back?) …
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Pres. Donald Trump’s Medicaid chief, who oversees Obamacare, on Wednesday taped the first Democratic campaign ad of the 2026 mid-term elections, promising America that premium hikes next year will amount to just $13.
Dr. Mehmet Oz — appointed by Trump as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) after becoming famous lying on TV — was lying on TV.
Oz was asked about “health” “insurance” companies raising premiums on their Obamacare (aka ACA, née Affordable Care Act) plans at the same time federal subsidies to buy those plans are ending. The combination of which means that the total insurance costs for some 22 million or so people will explode like a SpaceX rocket but much higher.
Here’s the exchange with an unidentified reporter who appears to be an actual reporter unlike the traveling emotional-support clowns who dominate the White House and Pentagon press corps…es:
Q: “The average plan will increase for Americans by somewhere around 115%. Do you believe that Congress should extend those subsidies so that most Americans do not receive significant increases in their premiums?”
Oz: “Where’d you get that 115% number from?”
Q: “Kaiser Family Foundation.”
Oz: “They retracted that [sic]. That data was run inappropriately [sic]. They changed the messaging on it [sic]. Go back and look at the website. Here’s the truth [sic]. The window-shopping is already revealing that the average American is gonna pay … $50 total next year [sic]. It’s gonna be $13 more than this year [sic].”
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Journalist Jennifer Schulze responded that this “an incredible LIE,” but she was wrong. It was an incredible LIES.
Shocking to find out that a man literally named “Oz” might be a bamboozler and snake-oil salesperson, I know, but let’s take them from the top.
Kaiser (KFF) didn’t retract it.
The data weren’t “run inappropriately.” Anyone left in America who remembers basic math knows that to calculate an increase percentage you just times shit. Or divide it, whatever (it’s conceptually the same thing!)
KFF didn’t change the messaging.
Go back and look at the website? You mean all this time all I had to do was click (my heels) three times…?!?
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Zero idea where Oz got his $50 figure. But the Trump administration issued a press release doubling down on Oz’s claim that premiums aren’t doubling up, promising, yes, $50. As always with Trump, it pays to read the fine print.
The press release didn’t say that $50 is what the average American will pay. It said Americans will be able to find plans that cost $50. Y’know, the kind of gold-star health insurance that only covers conditions like chronic nose hair, extended fingernail, and intermittent flossing-deficiency syndrome.
But it might serve us better to focus not on the obvious chicanery but on the promise Trump’s top health-insurance just made.
Fifty-dollar health insurance?!? Wake the kids! Call the neighbors! Let the word ring far and wide that this is what Trump is promising those 22 million Obamacare recipients who get federal subsidies¹. In fact, anyone with any insurance should know that this is an option!
Let Trump explain that it was bullshit when the first bills come. And let Barack Obama continue to fuck this guy for years to come.
FOR THE RECORD Obamacare is still woefully inadequate to serve human health needs. Government should just cover health care the way it mostly does in mostly sane nations. There is nothing politically toxic about promising to make the rich pay for people’s medical bills and to do away with insurance hassles.
Is It Time for Democrats to End the Government Shutdown?
Spoiler: I don’t know!
Unlike people wildly overpaid to make predictions on TV news, your non-magic TFN is sadly incapable of seeing the future.
But I do worry that the shutdown’s effects are so remote that most people aren’t seeing them. Which may have the perverse effect of teaching people they don’t need the government.
And congressional Republicans are actually doing better in recent polling.
That’s the politics of it. As for the governance of it, I certainly don’t fault any Democrat for voting no on a Republican spending plan that reflects zero Democratic priorities.
Voting to exempt some sectors — like federal workers — from the shutdown pain could backfire on Democrats. Yes, it’s good that federal workers would get paid — real lives really matter! — but the fucked-up reality is that we’re not going to get real change to make real lives really better until most of this country understands what life under Republican policies really means. And Democrats keep saving us from that — understandably!
Real change happens when America has to live that life. Or recognize it in time to avoid it. I suspect those 22 million people facing $13 114% price hikes are right now joining one or both of those categories. And maybe that’s all we were ever going to get out of a shutdown.
But yet again, Democrats are the wingman who won’t leave their friend alone with an obviously amoral predator, which is the only reason the friend can’t recognize the obviously amoral predator. And the only way the Democrats could prove it would be by leaving their friend alone.
ON THE OTHER HAND THAT’S NOT COVERED BY OZ’S $50 HEALTH PLAN If congressional Republicans for some reason are going up in the polls, it’s not because America loves Trump. In fact, maybe their recent resistance to him helps explain their bump.
But Trump himself is at record lows for this term.
New polling puts his approval number at 39%. He’s been that low before (and lower, morally speaking). But it’s the gap with his disapproval number that’s a new record.
A whopping 58% of America disapproves of how Trump is whopping America. Which means he’s now underwater, as the pollsters say, by 19 points. In other words, he’s uniting the nation. #PromisesKept.
Oh, Right, Food
Halloween night on Friday might be the last time anyone gets food for free this year.
The Trump administration is shutting down the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), food stamps, as of Saturday, Nov. 1.
Even though it oughtta be illegal to starve people and oh wait it is illegal, because the law says the government has to provide food aid to anyone qualified who applies and even though Pres. Donald Trump is sitting on a $5 billion emergency slush fund he refuses to hand out even if you TP his entire house on Halloween which you can’t because a third of it is gone and it won’t even matter if you cover whatever’s left in eggs because that would just be an improvement over being already covered in disgusting Long Island-chic gilding.
Where was I?
Right. Eating.
Stock up on those Kit-Kat™s, kids and even, yes, grab all the goddam Almond Joy™s and Tootsie are you fuckin’ kidding me Roll™s that you can carry. Desperate times, desperate measures.
Half the states, Democratic-governor states, are trying to force the release of food-stamp money by suing the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Some are also preparing to use state resources to make up the difference so people don’t starve. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is calling up the National Guard to actually help people: with food distribution.
Other states are doing no better than directing people to food banks, which are about to see the biggest run on banks we’ll have until Wall Street obviously crashes the money banks.
So we now pause for this important, non-commercial announcement:
Feeding America is helping people find food and helping other people find ways to help people find food. Donating. Volunteering. Eating. All nourishing.
Even in some states that are ostensibly anti-starvation, there are officials so committed to authoritarian notions of order that they’re prepping law enforcement to crack down on … starving people. Yes, it’s the Les Miz road show no one asked for.
The Los Angeles Fox affiliate — remember, not Fox “News”! — reports that Barstow, CA, police announced “increasing patrols around local grocery stores, convenience stores, and shopping centers.”
Barstow police say they’re intended to deter theft and, y’know, maintain sweet, precious order. Well, news flash for Barstow and every other stow surging cops to protect the local supply of processed cheese-ish-tasting food-flavored product items: America’s got about three-quarters of a million cops. Forty-two-million people use food stamps.
But also, people aren’t going to start stealing food en masse en Saturday. First they’ll start missing payments on other things. Like rent. And utilities. With winter starting next month.
U.S. to Resume Nuclear Testing in Concession to Trump’s End-Times Base
Pres. Donald Trump on Wednesday announced or semi-announced that after decades of not detonating nuclear bombs, the U.S. would resume testing them by blowing them up.
Here’s the thing. Okay, the many things.
The U.S. already tests its nuclear bombs. It has sophisticated ways of testing individually all the components of its nuclear arsenal in order to ensure that they will, in fact, explode and kill a million people as advertised.
Now, Trump may feel that’s insufficient. You can’t know for sure whether any given missile will actually work when you fire it. Hence, testing.
But testing nukes in the field doesn’t accomplish that either. Because the missile you test by blowing it up definitely won’t work ever again.
Also, Trump said he’s resuming testing on an “equal basis” with other countries. Other countries don’t do this testing. And according to math, an equal basis with 0 = also 0.
In fact, he last time the U.S. detonated a nuclear bomb was so long ago, 1992, that that President George W. Bush had an H! China did it last in 1996. And Russia’s recent nuclear-bomb test didn’t involve blowing it up. Just the flying part.
Trump explained discussed his decision later, saying that other countries “seem to all be nuclear testing.” Seeming, of course, is now what drives U.S. policy.
Previous presidents have at times used seemingness to justify policy but typically felt at least a token obligation to masquerade it as is-ing.
The primary effects of nuclear testing include ratcheting up international tensions, ratcheting down the health of people who live in Nevada, and letting Trump feel briefly like a man.
Boat-iac Killer Strikes Again, Leaves Note Admitting Failure
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced another boat killing on Wednesday, ending four more lives without so much as a “Stop in the name of the lawless.” Hegseth bragged that he was again following the voice in his head of recidivist offender Pres. Donald Trump, The Boat-iac Killer.
Hegseth left a confession on Twitter, almost as if daring someone to arrest him for continuing to murder people. But Hegseth also seemed to acknowledge that even killing people can’t fill the yawning void inside him.
“The Western Hemisphere is no longer a safe haven for narco-terrorists bringing drugs to our shores to poison Americans,” Hegseth said. But he also said he’ll “continue to hunt them down,” which wouldn’t be necessary if he and Trump had really ended it.
In other words, despite bombing 15 boats remotely — like a miniature version of the Death Star taking out Alderaan, killing 61 people so far — the boats still keep coming. It’s almost as if launching a veritable war — a “war on drugs,” if you will — is working no better than War on Drugs I.
As of Wednesday’s strike, Hegseth and Trump are now America’s most prolific serial killers. The previous record holder, Samuel Little, killed 60 people. And although Little didn’t have an accomplice in ⅔ of the White House, it also took him 35 years to rack up the body count Hegseth and Trump have achieved in just two months. And they’re not done yet!
Three Quickies
Israel on Tuesday ceased its cease-fire in order to kill 104 terrorists, including 40 kid terrorists and 20 women terrorists — just cuz it’s so important not to get rusty — and will now cease its cease-fire cessation by ceasing its fire. Israel’s most recent attack of this, um, cease-fire, was in totally proportionate response to an attack by Hamas or maybe not Hamas that killed one Israeli soldier. Pres. Donald Trump explained Wednesday that under the terms of his cease-fire, Israel “should hit back” which is also known as “war.” Vice President JD Vance, a staunch pro-life Catholic, said the cease-fire “is holding” because he doesn’t count “little skirmishes here and there,” even if they leave 40 little people here and there.
The U.S. is sending a team to Jamaica to assist with Hurricane Melissa recovery the way it didn’t for days after Texas flooding. The death toll is still being tallied in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Haiti saw at least 25 people killed by flooding as if it were some third-world state that can’t afford flood protection like Texas.
Nvidia is the most valuable company in human history, in the sense that it’s worth a lot of money, not that it actually creates good. The maker of artificial-intelligence chips is now the first company valued at more than $5 trillion. This is what’s known as a bubble. And it means the producer of artificial-intelligence computer chips is now the economic equivalent of Germany. Because that’s what the world needed, a Germany but without human emotion.
@bearlyjaw.bsky.social
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