Just when we thought that Joe Biden was the king of gaffes, it turns out that Harry Reid is doing a good impersonation of the gaffemeister himself.
Biden is the Vice President of the United States, so apparently he is not only allowed to be a buffoon, be is expected to be. But Harry Reid – he is the Senate majority leader – and supposedly serious, intelligent, all seeing, all knowing.
Nope.
Things seem to be going from bad to worse for poor old Harry. He can’t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. Apparently, Senator Reid, the man who forced the piece of garbage known as Obamacare legislation through the Senate, thinks the purpose of the legislation is not to allow people to get the healthcare they need, like the healthcare they previously had, but to pull in a few more people under the umbrella of health insurance, no matter whether they can see a doctor or not.
The most recent time that Reid opened his mouth to change feet, he discounted Senator Tom Coburn’s remarks about cancer specialty centers in the United States. Senator Coburn is a doctor, and he has cancer, which gives him first-hand knowledge about the cancer center that is treating him.
Harry Reid says Coburn doesn’t understand the Affordable Care Act.
What Harry Reid doesn’t understand is that people carry health insurance so if they are sick, the insurance company will cover the cost of being treated by their doctor and the hospital.
Coburn knows exactly what is happening to him. His cancer center, and 13 others do not accept Obamacare insurance. He said “Nineteen of the cancer centers in this country, only five are covered under Obamacare.”
The things that got Harry Reid fired up was “It’s a market, and what they’ve done is they’ve priced it where these cancer centers, a lot of them, aren’t going to participate because they don’t get paid to cover the costs.”
Reid fired back at Coburn “Dr. Coburn is very good at getting into the weeds and trying to find something that he thinks makes sense, but I think we need to look at the overall context of this bill.”
Does Harry Reid understand what he just said? Continuing his bizarre waffle, Reid said “It really brings a lot of people in from the cold so that they have the ability to get health insurance, which they’ve never had the opportunity to do before.”
Note to Harry Reid: Nobody cares about insurance coverage if the hospitals don’t accept it because it doesn’t cover the bills.
Reid is on his own railroad track and it is pointing in a different direction to the one that real people are on.
Appearing on “Fox & Friends,” Coburn said that Obamacare numbers promulgated by The White House are “being skewed” since most people who have now signed up already had health insurance plans that were canceled under the health reform law.
In other words, most of the people who were previously uninsured are still not insured, and the majority of people signing up on the Obamacare exchanges already had insurance but were dropped by their insurance companies.
Senator Coburn thinks that less than a million people fit into the category of newly insured. There is no way for anyone to know right now, because there is no way to track anything related to the health exchange websites, other than how many people visited and how many registered.
Making exactly that point, Coburn said, “We’ll see how many people really signed up when we see how many people pay. And, one of the measures of that will be what the premium increases are coming in late April, early May, for next year’s premiums.”
At this point, Reid either realized he was wrong and clammed up, or he ran out of words.
