Trump Unloads: Grievances, Greenland and the Gulf of Mexico

Trump at Mar-a-Lago today
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg

Hey, it’s Tuesday, it’s 26 degrees outside here in New York and not much warmer in our office. Here’s the latest.

Trump Unloads: Grievances, Greenland and the Gulf of Mexico

President-elect Donald Trump again raised the idea of the United States taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal as he rambled through a series of grievances and complaints — some familiar, some new — in a wide-ranging news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday.

Trump started his remarks by announcing that DAMAC Properties, a real estate developer based in Dubai, would invest at least $20 billion in the United States.

“We've been waiting for four years to increase our investment in the U.S. to a very large amount of money,” Hussain Sajwani, DAMAC’s billionaire founder and CEO, told reporters, standing next to Trump.

The president-elect then went on to rail about a disjointed list of topics, including the state of the economy he’s inheriting; the Biden administration’s transition efforts; special counsel Jack Smith and the judge in his hush money case; President Joe Biden’s newly announced ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in federal waters; electric cars and windmills; shower heads with restricted water flow; the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan; and the war in Ukraine.

Among the key points:

* Trump confirmed that he likes the idea of “one big, beautiful bill” to pass key elements of his agenda via the budget reconciliation process but said he would be open to two separate bills, which some Republican congressional leaders prefer. “If two is more certain, it does go a little bit quicker because you can do the immigration stuff early,” Trump said. “I can live either way. I like the idea of the one big bill, but I can live either way.”

* Trump also said he’d be willing to include steep spending cuts as part of his legislation. “I’m ok with spending cuts. I like spending cuts,” he said. He also repeated his call for the debt limit to be addressed, saying he simply wants to avoid a debt default. House Republicans reportedly have made an internal handshake agreement to pair a $1.5 trillion increase in the debt limit with $2.5 trillion in net spending cuts as part of their reconciliation package.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday that Republicans intend to address the debt limit via the reconciliation bill so that they can decide on the details without having to negotiate with Democrats.

* The president-elect would not rule out using the military or applying economic pressure to retake the Panama Canal or force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States. “We need them for economic security,” Trump said. He said he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it does not agree to deal Greenland. And he criticized former President Jimmy Carter for agreeing to let Panama control the canal, which he says the United States is “overcharged” to use.

* Trump suggested that he could use “economic force” to make Canada a U.S. state, an idea he has raised several times. “Canada and the United States — that would really be something,” he said. Trump decried the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and said that the United States subsidizes and provides military support for its neighbor to the north to the tune of $200 billion a year.

“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded in a social media post. “Workers and communities in both our countries benefit from being each other’s biggest trading and security partner.”

* He appeared to confirm that he wants NATO allies to spend 5% of GDP on defense, up from a 2% target. “They can all afford it, but they should be at 5%, not 2%,” Trump said, and he repeated his threat not to protect those allies if they don’t meet his target.

* He complained about economic conditions. “Inflation is continuing to rage and interest rates are far too high,” he said.

* Trump said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. “What a beautiful name,” he said.

* He said he would issue "major pardons" for those who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

* He repeatedly promised “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the hostages held by Hamas are not released by the time he takes office.

Quotes of the Day

“The president has made very clear, Social Security and Medicare have to be preserved. No one is coming in with the intention of cutting benefits in any way or anything. But we have to look at all spending and look at it very deliberately, while maintaining those commitments. The Republican Party is not going to cut benefits. … We do know, however, at the same time, there are many, many areas of fraud, waste and abuse. The government is too large. The agencies are too many. They have too many divisions and employees and all the rest. And there will be a very deliberate auditing of all of that in various aspects as we go through the process.”

− House Speaker Mike Johnson, pledging at a Tuesday news conference that the spending cuts Republicans intend to pursue will not slash benefits under Social Security or Medicare. Johnson did not mention Medicaid.

“Our intention and our mission is to reduce the size and scope of government, to reduce spending in a meaningful way so that we can restore fiscal sanity and get our country back on the right track,” Johnson said in response to a question about the need to raise the debt ceiling. “Raising the debt limit is a necessary step so that we don’t give the appearance that we’re going to default in some way on the nation’s debt.”

“One big thing that jumps out from the outrage and the opinion surveys is how skewed our priorities are in health care. I live in the Silicon Valley where daily I see the effort and money that goes into high-end innovation in health care and new digital technologies. But for average people it’s the basics that are broken: they can’t tell what their insurance covers and doesn’t; decipher their bill; get an appointment with a primary care doctor, let alone a specialist; appeal a coverage decision they feel is wrong; or even talk to a human with more compassion and nuance than they can find on their health system’s AI-assisted app.

“We know costs are a problem, but for many people, it’s the complexity of the system that is equally daunting. So far, neither the complexity of the system nor the need to do more to protect consumers in it has found a champion. It could be a lost opportunity.”

− Drew Altman, president and chief executive officer of KFF, a nonprofit focused on healthcare policy, writing Tuesday about the failure of policymakers to respond to widespread discontent about the U.S. healthcare system expressed following the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson.

“The news media did not over-hype the underlying frustration with the complexity and cost of health care following the Thompson murder, but it did sometimes conflate an outburst on social media—always from the most motivated or aggrieved—with the potential for policy change,” Altman writes. “So far, no president, Secretary of Health and Human Services, or member of Congress has seen the opportunity for a larger package of consumer protection reforms that is big or bold enough to grab media attention or appeal to voters. Instead, we are likely to see a patchwork of pinprick actions at the federal and state level. Progress, but whack-a-mole.”

Bipartisan Senate Report Slams Private Equity Involvement in Healthcare

Private equity investments in healthcare may harm patients, providers and hospitals, according to a new report released by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat who chaired the Senate Budget Committee in the 118th Congress, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s senior Republican.

The 162-page report highlights private equity’s growing role in the U.S. healthcare system, with a focus on two specific firms, Leonard Green & Partners and Apollo Global Management. After examining more than 1 million pages of documents from the investment firms and some of their subsidiaries and properties, including the Ottumwa Regional Health Center in Iowa, Senate investigators concluded that private equity’s financial model appears to pose “a threat to the nation's health care infrastructure, particularly in underserved and rural areas.”

In a statement, Grassley criticized the effect Apollo’s involvement in Ottumwa’s hospital has had on the local community. “Under private equity ownership, wait times at Ottumwa Regional Health Center have gone up as patient experience has gone down,” Grassley said. “The diminishing quality of care, service availability and care capacity at the hospital is forcing Ottumwa residents to travel significant distances in order to receive appropriate treatment. Iowans deserve better.”

More broadly, Whitehouse said that “private equity has infected our health care system, putting patients, communities, and providers at risk. As our investigation revealed, these financial entities are putting their own profits over patients, leading to health and safety violations, chronic understaffing, and hospital closures.”

Whitehouse said that documents obtained by the Senate investigators showed that executives at Leonard Green and hospital operator Prospect Medical Holdings discussed profit-maximizing techniques for their various properties at board meetings, including cost-cutting, increasing the number of patients and reducing labor costs, with little attention paid to quality of care. “And while Prospect Medical Holdings paid out $645 million in dividends and preferred stock redemption to its investors—$424 million of which went to Leonard Green shareholders—it took out hundreds of millions in loans that it eventually defaulted on,” White said. “Private equity investors have pocketed millions while driving hospitals into the ground and then selling them off, leaving towns and communities to pick up the pieces.”

Representatives for the investment firms told CBS News that they disagree with the conclusions reached by the Senate investigators.

Biden Admin Moves to Ban Medical Debt From Credit Reports

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule on Tuesday that will remove medical debt from consumer credit reports. CRFB said the new rule will eliminate roughly $49 billion in unpaid medical bills from the credit reports of an estimated 15 million people.

“People who get sick shouldn’t have their financial future upended,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said. “The CFPB’s final rule will close a special carveout that has allowed debt collectors to abuse the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying medical bills they may not even owe.”

CRFB research indicates that medical debt does little to predict an individual’s creditworthiness. Three major credit rating agencies have already removed some medical debts from their reports, including outstanding collections worth less than $500.

The new rule is scheduled to take effect in March, but it could be delayed by legal challenges or opposition from the incoming Trump administration. The debt collection industry has come out against the bill, claiming it will be harmful, with the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals saying it would result in “reduced consequences for not paying your bills, which in turn will reduce access to credit and health care for those that need it most.”

The rule also bans the repossession by lenders of certain medical devices, including wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs.

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