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Column: Examining Trump's lies about what he did with Obamacare and COVID

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Column: Examining Trump's lies about what he did with Obamacare and COVID

My favorite Lily Tomlin line is this one: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

I love it more today than ever, because it applies so perfectly to how we must respond to the campaign claims of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Especially Trump’s assertions about his role — heroic, in his vision — in “saving” the Affordable Care Act and fighting the COVID pandemic.

I’ve written before about the firehouse of fabrication and grift emanating from the Trump campaign like a political miasma. On these topics, he has moved beyond his habit of merely concocting a false reality about, say, immigration and crime to deliberately concocting a false reality about himself.

Donald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.

— JD Vance, flagrantly lying about Trump’s management of the Affordable Care Act

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To start by summarizing: Trump did everything in his power to destroy the Affordable Care Act, starting on the very first day of his term in 2017. On COVID, he did everything in his power to make America defenseless against the spreading pandemic.

Let’s take them in order.

Here’s what Trump said about the Affordable Care Act during his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris: “I had a choice to make when I was president, do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? … And I saved it. I did the right thing.”

This was the prelude to his head-scratching assertion that he has “concepts of a plan” to reform healthcare in the U.S. I examined what that might mean in a recent column, in which I explained that it would turn the U.S. healthcare system to the deadly dark ages when people with preexisting medical conditions would be either denied coverage or charged monstrous markups.

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During his own debate Tuesday with Tim Walz, Vance made himself an accomplice to Trump’s crime against truth .

Here’s Vance’s version of the Trumpian fantasy:

“Donald Trump has said that if we allow states to experiment a little bit on how to cover both the chronically ill, but the non-chronically ill … He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States. And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare. … Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

Here’s what Trump actually did to the Affordable Care Act during his presidency. He had made repealing the ACA a core promise of his 2016 presidential campaign, stating on his website, “On day one of the Trump Administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare.” (Thanks are due to the indispensable Jonathan Cohn of Huffpost for excavating the quote.)

Trump drove down Obamacare enrollment every year he was in office; when Biden removed Trump’s obstacles, enrollment soared.

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(KFF / Kevin Drum)

On Inauguration Day, Trump issued an executive order instructing the entire executive branch to find ways to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision or requirement” of the ACA.

During his presidency, he never abandoned the Republican dream of repealing Obamacare, even after July 28, 2017, when the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) strode to the Senate well and delivered a thumbs-down coup de grace to a GOP repeal bill.

Trump never ceased slandering the ACA as a “disaster.” He returned to the theme during last month’s debate: “Obamacare was lousy healthcare,” he said. “Always was. It’s not very good today.” As president, he threatened to make it “implode,” and used every tool he could get his fingers on to do so.

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Just after taking office, he abruptly canceled the customary last-minute advertising blitz to encourage enrollments in Obamacare plans before open enrollment ended on Jan. 31. The last minute surge in enrollments, which had occurred every previous year, vanished. The drop-off was particularly devastating because it was concentrated among the healthiest potential enrollees — those who often wait until the last minute to sign up and whose premiums generally subsidize older, less healthy patients.

In September 2017 he slashed the advertising budget for the upcoming open enrollment period for individual insurance policies by a stunning 90%, to $10 million from the previous year’s $100 million. He also cut funds for nonprofit groups that employ “navigators,” those who help people in the individual market understand their options and sign up, by roughly 40%, to $36.8 million from $62.5 million.

The impact these policies had on enrollment was dire. In the three years before Trump took office, ACA marketplace plans experienced annual enrollment increases, to 12.7 million enrollees in 2016 from 8 million in 2014. During every year of the Trump administration, enrollment declined, falling to 11.4 million in 2020.

Every year since Joseph Biden took office, enrollment has increased, reaching a record 21.3 million this year — an 86% increase over Trump’s last year.

As for Vance’s fatuous claim that Trump “worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care,” you have the right to ask what Vance has been smoking.

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The only bipartisanship on the ACA during the Trump years, Cohn observes, were the actions of GOP senators such as McCain and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to cooperate with Democrats to stave off their fellow Republicans’ anti-ACA vandalism.

Now onto Trump’s fantasy vision of his role in fighting the COVID pandemic. Speaking in a low-energy, exhausted monotone at a speech Tuesday in Milwaukee and reading at times from a binder, he praised himself for instituting Operation Warp Speed, which funded COVID vaccine development in record time and got them rolled out in January 2021.

“We did a great job with the pandemic. Never got the credit we deserved,” he said. He then veered into blaming China for the pandemic, a familiar topic. He said bluntly that the pandemic was “caused by the Wuhan lab. I said that from the beginning, came from Wuhan. And the Wuhan lab, it wasn’t from bats in a cave that was 2,000 miles away. … It’s really the China virus.”

As for the rest of his COVID performance, he said this: “We did a great job with the ventilators, the masks and the gowns and everything. … When we got here the cupboards, our cupboards, I used to say our cupboards were bare. … No president put anything in for a pandemic.” Then he segued into praising himself for a big tax cut, and COVID was forgotten.

A few points about this spiel:

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Trump is correct that Operation Warp Speed was a significant achievement. But he didn’t continue to support it by advocating for its product, the COVID vaccine. Instead, he has thrown in his lot with fanatical anti-vaccine agitators such as Robert F. Kennedy. He has repeated an anti-vax mantra, promising, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” This is a formula for exposing children to vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and even polio.

Trump’s reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, underscores how closely the so-called lab-leak theory of COVID’s origins is tied to right-wing partisan politics. The theory originated with Trump acolytes at the State Department, who saw the accusation as a convenient weapon in Trump’s economic war with China.

To this day, not a speck of evidence has been produced to validate this claim; scientists versed in the relevant disciplines of virology and epidemiology say the evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that the virus reached humans via the wildlife trade, and that its journey may well have started with bats thousands of miles from Wuhan, China.

Trump is lying when he says his predecessors in the White House left him without resources. The truth is that Trump himself hobbled pandemic response from the start.

In 2016, in the wake of the Ebola epidemic in Africa, President Obama had established the the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council “to prepare for and, if possible, prevent the next outbreak from becoming an epidemic or pandemic,” in the words of its senior director, Beth Campbell. Trump dissolved it in 2018.

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During the pandemic, Trump cut off funding for the World Health Organization. He eliminated a $200-million pandemic early-warning program training scientists in China and elsewhere to detect and respond to such threats. He sidelined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which had been established under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Due to these steps, the U.S. was fated to sleepwalk into the pandemic. The COVID death toll in the U.S. stands at more than 1.2 million, and its reported death rate from COVID of 341.1 per 100,000 population is the highest in the developed world.

Ventilators, masks and gowns? Trump placed the procurement of this essential personal protective equipment in the hands of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who handled the task incompetently. Kushner turned away urgent appeals from state and local officials for those supplies.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile, it’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” Kushner said at a briefing.

Following his remarks, the website of the government’s national strategic stockpile of medicines and supplies was changed from asserting that its purpose was to “support” the emergency efforts of state, local and tribal authorities by ensuring that “the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most.” The new language redefined the stockpile’s role as “to supplement state and local supplies … as a short-term stopgap.”

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Supplies of ventilators, masks and gowns remained scarce through the first months of the pandemic. A procurement official at a Massachusetts hospital system told me of having had to cut a deal with a shadowy broker offering 250,000 Chinese-made masks at an inflated price, completing the transaction for $1 million at a darkened warehouse five hours from home.

Trump made anti-science incompetence and disregard for the welfare of Americans part of our history. The same thing, or worse, looms on the horizon in a second Trump term.

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Hollywood intimacy coordinators unanimously vote to unionize under SAG-AFTRA

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Hollywood intimacy coordinators unanimously vote to unionize under SAG-AFTRA

Intimacy coordinators have unanimously elected to unionize under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Members of the bargaining unit voted 100% in favor of unionization in an official election overseen by the National Labor Relations board, the union announced Tuesday.

Intimacy coordinators are the professionals who help actors navigate scenes involving nudity, simulated sex and other sensitive scenarios on set.

“In these sobering times with looming threats to environmental protections and women’s equality, it is refreshing to see the entertainment industry’s recognition of intimacy coordinators and their important contribution to productions and to performers in intimate scenes,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement.

“We at SAG-AFTRA are proud to include this esteemed group of trained professionals as the newest to join our member body. May this continue to carve the path of elevated consideration for the feelings of safety for people and planet.”

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SAG-AFTRA formally requested a union election for intimacy coordinators in September, about four years after the labor organization established rules regarding the presence of intimacy coordinators on set. On the heels of the #MeToo movement, the guidelines were introduced as part of a larger effort to reduce sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry.

The use of intimacy coordinators has generated significant media attention and become increasingly commonplace in the film and TV business over the past several years.

“Working in scenes involving nudity or physical intimacy is some of the most vulnerable work an actor can do,” Drescher said in a statement in September.

“Intimacy coordinators not only provide assistance in navigating these scenes but they also create a safety net for performers ensuring consent and protection throughout the entire process. Shifting the power imbalance that has been ingrained over a century is challenging but important work. Work that can be done even more effectively with the backing of a union.”

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Netflix says ad-supported plan now has 70 million monthly active users

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Netflix says ad-supported plan now has 70 million monthly active users

Netflix said Tuesday that it had reached 70 million monthly active users on its ad-supported plan, two years after launching its cheaper subscription tier that includes commercials.

That’s up from May, when the company reported having 40 million monthly users on the ad version.

The Los Gatos, Calif., streamer has also been diversifying its content, including increasing its streams of live events, in order to boost its nascent advertising business.

Netflix said it had sold out of the in-game inventory for its live NFL Christmas Day games this year, with sponsors that include sports betting company FanDuel and Verizon. The streamer has partnered with Nielsen to provide live ratings for the games.

Netflix also said it had sold ads across its scripted programs, including the anticipated second season of the Korean drama “Squid Game.”

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The company said that more than half of new sign-ups in countries where Netflix offers ads are for the cheaper ad-subscription tier.

“There has been continuous momentum over the last two years, but we’re just getting started and can’t wait to see what’s to come,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising, said in a blog post.

Netflix began offering a cheaper ad subscription plan in November 2022 after the streamer saw its subscriber growth in decline earlier that year. In the U.S., Netflix with ads cost $6.99 a month, compared to ad-free options that start at $15.49 a month.

At first, Netflix’s ad-supported tier was powered by Microsoft’s technology through a partnership, but the streamer is transitioning to using its own in-house ad technology which will make it function independently from third parties.

The ad-supported tier was part of a broader push to diversify Netflix’s offerings and boost revenue. In addition to commercials, Netflix has started streaming live events, cracking down on password-sharing and promoting games on its platform.

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This week, Netflix will up its live sports ambitions with a boxing match between former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and influencer-turned-fighter Jake Paul.

Netflix in the third quarter added 5 million subscribers, bringing its total to about 283 million globally.

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Grindr targeted nascent union with return-to-office ultimatum, labor board alleges

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Grindr targeted nascent union with return-to-office ultimatum, labor board alleges

When the LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr told its staff last year that the days of fully remote work were over, more than 80 employees — nearly half off the company — said they wouldn’t report to the company’s West Hollywood headquarters or other newly established offices around the country. As a result, they were let go.

Now, federal labor regulators say the company’s back-to-office order was an unlawful ploy to retaliate against the workers’ union organizing efforts.

In a recent complaint, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional office in Los Angeles accused Grindr of interfering with employees’ right to organize and refusing to recognize the union workers had elected to join, calling the company’s actions “serious and substantial unfair labor practice conduct.”

About the 120 of the company’s roughly 180 employees were poised to form a union bargaining unit represented by Communications Workers of America, according the complaint. All 80 of the terminated employees were part of that group.

The popular app, which uses a location-based model that allows users to browse potential dates in their area, has gone through several ownership changes in recent years, but has continued to post solid profits from a dedicated user base in the tens of millions.

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“We hope this NLRB filing sends a clear message to Grindr that, with a union, we are committed to negotiating fair working conditions in good faith,” the union, Grindr United-CWA, said in a statement Monday.

Grindr called the allegations “meritless,” arguing it had alerted employees it would do away with its remote work culture before they went public with their union drive.

“Grindr team members work from one of our offices just two days per week under our hybrid work model, and our decision to transition from fully remote to hybrid work in 2023 predated the union election petition. It was only after it was known that the transition back to in-office work was underway that some employees began signing union cards,” Grindr spokesperson Emily Wright said in statement. “Our focus continues to be on ensuring Grindr remains an exceptional place for our team to work, and an invaluable resource for the global LGBTQ+ community.”

The complaint is the NLRB’s first step in litigating the case after investigating an unfair labor practice claim submitted by employees and finding merit to the allegations. If a settlement with Grindr is not reached, the case will be reviewed by an administrative law judge, who could order the company to take steps to address the issues in the complaint.

In interviews, two former employees said employees began the union effort in late 2022. They pointed to employees who they said had been laid off without clear reasons and unsettling remarks by their then-incoming chief executive George Arison in support of conservative figures who had made bigoted remarks about transgender people.

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Workers went public with their campaign to join CWA in July 2023, and two weeks later the company delivered its return-to-office policy in an all-hands meeting conducted on a Zoom video call on Aug. 3, according to the NLRB complaint. Under the new rules, workers who had been living elsewhere were required to move to either the Los Angeles area, Chicago or San Francisco in order to be close to the Grindr office where their job was based. The company offered up to $15,000 to cover relocation expenses, or six months of severance pay for those who chose not to move.

One of the former employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals as he continues to search for a new job, said that although his contract designated him as having a remote assignment, he was nonetheless included in the back-to-office mandate.

The employee, who was a member of Grindr’s customer experience team, said the company was slow to provide information about the terms of the back-to-office order and that he was forced to decide in less than a day whether to agree to move. He and many others ultimately signed a severance agreement because they were unable to decide so quickly whether to uproot their lives, he said.

The second former employee, Leo Feldman, said he was not given an opportunity to commit to the hybrid work plan and alleges his involvement with the union was behind the decision to fire him from his job as product manager.

The company’s actions seemed intended to disrupt the union drive, he said, noting that some engineers living near the West Hollywood office, for example, were told they had to move to Chicago.

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Despite the turmoil, Grindr appears to have satisfied investors with strong growth even as the broader dating app industry has slowed.

As one of three publicly traded dating app companies, Grindr dominates the dating app market along with Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge. Bumble has seen its stock fall 46% so far this year after missing revenue estimates, but Grindr shares have risen nearly 70% this year, closing at $15.10 on Monday.

The company recently reported $89 million in revenue in the third quarter, up 27% from the same period last year. Net income during the same period grew to $25 million, compared to a loss of $437,000 a year ago. Grindr also saw a 15% year-over-year increase in the number of average paying users, reaching 1.1 million.

“Our product work starts with our users, their needs, their behaviors and their preferences,” Arison said in a recent earnings call. “We are setting Grindr up for another great year of growth in 2025.”

The company, however, continues to face criticism about its privacy practices: earlier this year, it was sued by hundreds of users in the United Kingdom for allegedly sharing personal information — including HIV status and test dates, ethnicity and sexual orientation — with advertising companies without users’ consent. Grindr has denied the claims.

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Nick Jones, an equity research analyst at Citizens JMP, said Grindr is outpacing investor expectations and is not alone in requiring employees to return to in-person work.

“A lot of companies believe they can keep their employees more focused if they’re in office,” Jones said. “The market is indicating that this is not a problem for the company,” he added of the NLRB complaint.

Grindr Chief Product Officer AJ Balance said the app has set itself apart from others in the crowded online dating market and is working on new features.

Grindr’s unique user interface known as the grid allows for quick and abundant connections and avoids the swiping model that some users have grown tired of, he said.

“This was built by the community, for the community, which is part of why it really meets the needs of its users in a unique way and why it’s been differentiated as a product over time,” Balance said.

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