OPINION - Brooks and Klein 9/29/2017

"Brooks and Klein on Tom Price's plane scandal, Trump taking aim at the NFL" PBS NewsHour 9/29/2017

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SUMMARY:  New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ezra Klein of Vox join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including the resignation of Tom Price as HHS secretary over expensive chartered flights, the anti-establishment upset in the Alabama Senate runoff, and President Trump's divisive rhetoric over the NFL protests.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  And now to the analysis of Brooks and Klein.  That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Ezra Klein of Vox.com.  Mark Shields is off this week.

Gentlemen, it's good to have you both.

We — our lead story tonight, David, is the resignation of the secretary of health and human services, Tom Price.  We were going to talk about the flights several Trump Cabinet officials seem to have been taking.  But now he's gone, the first Cabinet member to step down.  Big deal.

DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times:  Yes, I don't think he should have to go.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  You don't?

DAVID BROOKS:  If Donald Trump thought he was a good Secretary of Defense — of Health and Human Services, and he knew his policies, which he did — he knew the policies — and he was generally supportive, which, as far as I could see, he was, then this scandal doesn't merit a firing/resignation.

He made Trump look bad.  And Trump's only loyalty is to himself.  So, I get that.  He had to go.

But, personally, I think the government should have a fleet of planes to take around Cabinet secretaries.  It would just be more efficient.  Any company of any size has this sort of thing.  And so this scandal makes Trump look bad, but it certainly doesn't merit firing, I would say.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Didn't have to be fired?

EZRA KLEIN, Vox:  No, I think he probably did have to be fired.  But I have different views on what's a decent Health and Services Secretary than Donald Trump.

I think there are two things here that are interesting.  One is, Donald Trump has not been running an administration of very high ethical standards.

When Tom Price was nominated, there was quite a lot of ethical smoke around him.  There were allegations of insider trading.  These were things the Senate decided not to dig into.  There were things that he misstated.  They didn't hold a secondary hearing to look into them.

Donald Trump himself has had a lot of conflict of interests and quasi-dealing things that he's been trying to get around and certainly not address in any serious way.  Nobody knows the tax returns.

But the other thing that I actually think is a bigger scandal here — it's not at all why Tom Price was forced to step down — but he's been fundamentally sabotaging Obamacare, which is the law of the land.  They're just making it worse in an effort to weaken it.

It's going to make a lot of people's lives a lot worse, and feels to me like it should be a bigger scandal than whatever planes he did or didn't take.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And, David, in fact, we are told the President was unhappy with Tom Price because he didn't get Obamacare repealed.

DAVID BROOKS:  Yes, I understand that, but that really wasn't Tom Price's fault.

If Donald Trump wants to fire somebody for not getting Obamacare repealed, he should fire himself.  🤔

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS:  He was the one primarily who messed up the investigation, who had no clear agenda, who was ignorant when he entered into the negotiations with the Congress, messed everything up even worse.

And so, if that's the standard, then there is a lot of people to be fired.

Donald Trump has a problem with loyalty and a problem with his administration.  How many people has he gone through already?

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Exactly.

DAVID BROOKS:  We're only a country of 320 million people.  He's going to run through all of us.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS:  He's going to start hiring labor from Mexico.

So there has to be — if you're running a successful administration, then you're loyal to people who are basically good who make a mistake.  And that seems to be essential for any organization.  And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom, where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And if he holds to this standard, Ezra, these other four Cabinet secretaries could be in trouble.  But it's hard to believe that four more would go.

EZRA KLEIN:  Is it that hard to believe?

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF:  I don't know.  I don't know.

EZRA KLEIN:  This has been a very unusual administration so far.

I do think that there is a very unclear level of conduct in the Trump Administration.  That's one reason you're seeing this among so many different secretaries.  Again, Trump himself has been bending ethics rules left and right.

But the problem is, Donald Trump is loyal to himself.  He's not loyal to them.  The rules are different for them in ways that they don't understand.  It's creating a lot — a real lack of clarity.

This is something, though, that I think Senate Republicans deserve a fair amount of blame for.  They should have been much harder in terms of the confirmation hearings in insisting on a fairly high level of ethics and a fairly high level of competence in the folks they let through.

You do that and you have those standards to protect yourself, so these things don't happen down the road and make you look bad and imperil your agenda.

There is a lot that they didn't do at the front end that is going to come back to bite them in these coming months.
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JUDY WOODRUFF:  I want to turn to the NFL story.

The President’s really gone to war with the National Football League, David.

I’m just learning from our producer that the White House has announced that the White House chief of staff is going to have to approve, going forward, all charter travel on the part of senior Cabinet official — I guess any Cabinet official or Cabinet at any level.

But what about — David, what about this story that has — confrontation that’s just blown up before our eyes over the last week-and-a-half, between the president openly criticizing professional football players and the league standing up for them?

DAVID BROOKS:  Yes, well, I don’t approve of what Colin Kaepernick did.  I don’t think you kneel before the national anthem.

I think, if you are going to protest, you protest in a way that doesn’t undermine our common nationality.  And so I didn’t think — he did what he did.

But Donald Trump reacted in his typical way, which was to find a wound in the American body politic, in this case, a wound about race, and then to stick a red-hot poker in it and to rip it open.  And to me, that is what is most troubling about what we’re seeing over the last year, maybe two years, is that the fabric of society is being destroyed by someone who’s really good at finding out where we’re weakest, and exploiting those differences in order to launch really a cultural agenda.

And so the fragmentation we saw last Sunday, and we will probably see again, is something that he is exacerbating.  And somehow we have to find a way to reverse that cycle.

TRUMP AGENDA - HHS Secretary Tom Price

"As HHS Secretary, Tom Price has significant powers to change health care" PBS NewsHour 2/10/2017

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SUMMARY:  Tom Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia, was confirmed as the next secretary of health and human services overnight.  The longtime opponent of the Affordable Care Act sees a smaller role for the federal government in health care.  But his new boss, President Trump, has said he wouldn't touch Medicare or Medicaid.  Lisa Desjardins talks with Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News.

LISA DESJARDINS (NewsHour):  He is, after his swearing-in today, the nation's 23rd Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Georgia Congressman Tom Price in the wee hours this morning on a party-line vote of 52-47.  Secretary Price is a longtime opponent of the Affordable Care Act.

To Democrats like Maria Cantwell of Washington State, that is the problem.

SEN. MARIA CANTWELL, D-District of Columbia:  My view is, this vote is the first vote in the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

LISA DESJARDINS:  But to Republicans like Tom Cotton of Arkansas, that's Price's appeal.

SEN. TOM COTTON, R-Ark.:  You could say his chief qualification for the job of replacing Obamacare is, he had the good sense to oppose it in the first place.

LISA DESJARDINS:  Price is also a retired doctor, the first physician to lead HHS in nearly 25 years.  But in confirmation hearings, he faced tough questions over his relationship with health care companies, and his investment in some which were affected by his actions in Congress.

Now Price is responsible for a more than a trillion-dollar health agency budget, for a department that oversees food and drugs, biomedical research, public health threats, and, of course, a large portion of U.S. health care.  That includes Medicaid, which covers more than 74 million people, and Medicare, over 55 million.

His theme?  A smaller role for the federal government.  In Congress, Price backed a proposed cap on Medicare spending per person.  Price also supported giving states fixed amounts, in block grants, to cover low-income people on Medicaid.

But his new boss, Donald Trump, said on the campaign trail he wouldn't touch Medicare or Medicaid.

DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States:  Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts.  Have to do it.

TRUMP NOT FILES - Tom Price vs 'Obamacare'

"Will Tom Price take a 'surgical approach' to revising Obamacare?" PBS NewsHour 11/29/2016

WARNING:  Price and the GOP will be using a meat cleaver for their 'surgical approach.'  You will be paying more or getting less.  Their plan (as always) puts money ahead of actually providing health care.  Their unmoral/unethical plan to just forget about those who NEED health care.

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SUMMARY:  Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga) is an orthopedic surgeon and a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act.  He's also President-elect Donald Trump's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services.  Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Sabrina Corlette of Georgetown University, Robert Moffit of The Heritage Foundation and Sarah Kliff of Vox about Price's background and how he might shape health care policy.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  As President-elect Trump's pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Congressman Tom Price would oversee programs as wide-ranging as Medicare and Medicaid.  But, first, he'd help lead efforts to carry out one of Mr. Trump's signature campaign pledges:  Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

For more, we turn to Sarah Kliff.  She has written extensively on the topic for the Web site Vox.

What do we know about Congressman Price and the plans that he has already had in mind?

SARAH KLIFF, Vox:  So, he's a congressman who has spent a lot of time thinking about repeal and replace of Obamacare.  He's the author of a 242-page replacement plan for Obamacare.  He's the guy you would pick if you're quite serious about moving forward on Obamacare repeal.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Republicans have tried to do repeal and replace before.  Even Speaker Ryan has a plan.  What do these plans have in common?

SARAH KLIFF:  So, they generally cover fewer people than Obamacare.  They would leave a few million people uninsured.  The exact number depends on the plan.  They're generally better for young, healthy people and worse for sick, older people.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  How so?

SARAH KLIFF:  They have a lot less protections for people with preexisting conditions.

They make it possible for insurance companies to charge more to those who are sick.  That would be a really big change from Obamacare, which outlaws those provisions.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  And then what does the pick say of Seema Verma, who is going to run Medicare and Medicaid, say about this new team that he's putting in place?  She's worked on Medicaid expansion as a consultant for different states?

SARAH KLIFF:  She's incredibly experienced in Medicaid policy.

It suggests to me that the Trump administration is thinking about making some big changes to Medicaid, possibly adding premiums into the program, which serves low-income Americans.

OPINION - Shields and Brooks 4/11/2014

"Shields and Brooks on Sebelius’ legacy, the 1964 Civil Rights Act" PBS NewsHour 4/11/2014

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SUMMARY:  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss this week’s news, including the resignation of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and the health care law that defined her tenure, the anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and potential candidates for the 2016 presidential election.