Brit Hume said Tuesday that California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s call for a fix to Obamacare is a sign of just how bad things have gotten for President Barack Obama and his administration.
On Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File,” network senior political analyst Hume explained to host Megyn Kelly that Feinstein’s shift, after a million Californians lost their health coverage, indicates the worst is yet to come. Many more Americans are expected to have their health insurance policies canceled.
“This is as bad a political disaster as I have ever seen,” Hume said. “Dianne Feinstein is wonderful example of just how bad it is. She is not up, as you pointed out, next year. But her state does have what, a million people who lost their policies, something like that. She is hearing about that. Every senator in the place is hearing about it, as is every member of the House. This is a very, very big deal. And they’re looking for something to get them disassociated, if they can, from this problem. And the problem isn’t the website, although that is part of it. The problem is that people are losing their coverage. And that the people who have succeeded in getting on the website and check the prices are horrified at what they see. And this is going to get worse. The number of people losing coverage is going to grow, as we know, and it’s going to grow by the millions. And the next round of people who get their policies canceled are likely to find their options on the health care exchanges are not any more appetizing than the people who already have tried it. So, this is a problem they all are looking at and they can see where this is going. This is bad now and it’s going to get worse.”
Kelly went on to ask if there might be a way out for the Obama administration, but Hume didn’t think that was possible.
“I don’t know that he can,” Hume said. “I don’t know that anything — look, anything — the reason why you heard Jay Carney say what he said today about some of the plans up there, they would basically allow the restoration to the market by the old policies. This whole Obamacare scheme depends upon people migrating away from their old less expensive policies into new or supposedly better or extensive policies that cost more. And the reason they need them to do that is to raise the amount of premium money that will be needed to cover the older, sicker people who are now going to have coverage they didn’t before. And that is the problem they have. If that money doesn’t flow in, the whole structure collapses and the whole thing is basically a total failure.”