On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel argued that while Obamacare has gotten people insured and saved the government money, “Do we need reform? 100%. I’m the first person to say the system sucks, it’s broken.”
Host Bill Maher asked, “Where is Obamacare? What do we need to do?”
Emanuel answered, “So, look, we got 25 million people insured. We’ve saved the federal government, through Medicare, more than almost $4 trillion. So, those were the positives. All that time, Republicans were trying to repeal it without a plan about what to do for people who didn’t have insurance or for the costs in the country. And then Trump comes in, and he gives a big tax break, some of that $4 trillion, to the thousand billionaires in the country, and he throws a bunch of people off Medicaid and out of the exchanges. Do we need reform? 100%. I’m the first person to say the system sucks, it’s broken.”
Emanuel added that there shouldn’t be deductibles for people who have illnesses because the idea of a deductible is to keep people from overusing things that are “discretionary”, and people with illnesses aren’t being discretionary, and “at 5,000, $7,000, it’s not discretionary.”
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