On Sunday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory decided America needed a “reality check” about the whole health-care website debacle, so he brought on two experts to help people try to decipher their asses from their elbows where all this is concerned.
So who did he bring on?
Ezekiel Emanuel (that would be brother to President Obama‘s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, now Mayor of Chicago) and Washington Post‘s liberal wonk blogger Ezra Klein.
It’s not like they’re activists without a dog in fight or anything.
Gregory introduced the duo like this: “Let’s get more of a reality check. I want to turn now to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is a former health policy adviser to President Obama, now professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and also here is editor of The Washington PostWonkblog, Ezra Klein, who has been closely tracking the progress of the health-care rollout.”
Surprise. Surprise. Each had glowing things to say about how well it’s all going. It’s one thing to have these guys on. Nothing wrong with that. But at least be straightforward and say they’re liberal in their stances and active in supporting Democratic Party causes.
Excerpts of what each had to say:
Emanuel: “I think it’s good enough progress. … This one still has a ways to go. But it is certainly working reasonably well. … So I think actually we are going in the right direction. … Oh, the website, no doubt, is going to get solved. That’s a technical problem. … Over the next few years and then to the end of the decade, this is going to have a dramatic improvement. It’s going to lower costs. You’re going to have competition in the exchanges, that is already keeping insurance costs down, and going to keep them down further. You’re having improvements in the health-care system.
Klein: “… For a lot of those folks, they’re going to get hundreds of billions of trillions of dollars, not individually, but in the market as a whole, of subsidy. So they’re going to find they’re going to have a good deal. And that’s the reason they’re going to go in and be part of it.”
Sounding like a politician instead of a reporter, Rep. Ezzy Klein (D-Washington Post) uses a bizarre “we” phrase when he speaks. Who is “we”? He and his Democratic colleagues in the House?
“The individual market is a place where the reason prices are what they are is we discriminate against the sick and the old and women and people who can’t read the fine print of insurance. We are fixing that. And it’s going to be important that we fix it. It doesn’t mean no one will have a tough time in the changeover. And we need to help those folks. But we also need to recognize, if we’re going to make big things better, there’s going to be a positive difficulty as we do that.”