Miner Queries | Cherie Miner
As President Trump’s nominees go through Congressional hearings, I wonder how many Trump voters are paying attention. Most of Trump’s nominees appear motivated to destroy the programs they’re charged with overseeing.
Take Betsy DeVos, nominee for Secretary of Education. As Dana Goldstein from Slate Magazine reported, DeVos pushed her pet project of vouchers for private school, despite their lackluster results. It appears DeVos prioritizes school choice over quality education and advocates parents be solely responsible for the education of pre-school, rural and disabled kids.
Goldstein writes: “But in several instances – such as when she said the treatment of disabled children was ‘an issue best left to the states,’ despite the fact that federal law contains strict regulations on accommodating disability – she revealed herself to be either underprepared for the job or stiffly wedded to an ideological, market-oriented vision of education policy, one that has had disappointing results in her home state of Michigan, where she wields enormous influence.”
In Iowa, rural students have few alternatives to public schools; however, open enrollment, home schooling and online schools offer some choice. Coincidentally, DeVos, like other Trump nominees, has a conflict of interest here as a stockholder in K12, Inc., one of these online school providers.
Healthcare
Meanwhile on the healthcare front, Congressional Republicans are giddy with plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) also known as Obamacare. I’ve been seeing reports that some voters are finally realizing Obamacare and ACA are the same thing, much to their dismay.
Continuing such confusion will be a key element to do away with healthcare for working Americans, as evident by the testimony of Health and Human Services nominee Tom Price. While Republicans argue about how to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something better,” Price has his own agenda.
“What Price wants is something very different. He wants people to have access to coverage, not guaranteed coverage. This distinction matters because the Republican vision for health care substantially weakens the protections put in place by the ACA and opens up avenues for denying coverage. But Price and his colleagues are slippery in describing their intentions and consistently try to pass off access as a replacement for coverage,” writes Simon Maloy on Salon Magazine.
Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo fills in more details. “But the GOP lawmaker [Price] who will likely lead the Department of Health and Human Services has long championed a major overhaul to the much bigger employer-based insurance system in order to push consumers to buy their own plans.”
As Sneed notes, employer-based health plans cover seven times more people than individual plans. And she continues, “The goal of the conservative approach, according to Urban Institute health policy scholar Linda Blumberg, is ‘to move away from more sharing of risks and towards more segmenting and separation of risks. What this does is it helps you when you are young, when you are perfectly healthy. But we don’t stay that way,’ Blumberg said. ‘The costs go up tremendously and access decreases tremendously when you have health care needs.’”
So the plan appears to be we’re all on our own, with only those who can afford it given access to education and health care, among other things. As my husband says it’s like “throwing an anchor to a drowning man.”
Get ready to tread water.
Cherie Miner is a local parent, community volunteer, freelance writer and artist. In a former life, she was a corporate writer and public relations professional. Contact her at news@redoakexpress.com or on Facebook.