U.S. strikes Syrian military airfield.

Officials said President Trump authorized 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to slam into a Syrian airfield to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and damage the Syrian air force, which carried out an attack Tuesday that killed dozens of civilians, including children, in northwestern Syria. It was the deadliest chemical assault on Syrian civilians since 2013.

By Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff  •  Read more » : At least 13 Syrian soldiers and civilians were killed.   The Russian Foreign Ministry called for an immediate meeting of the United Nations Security Council after President Vladi­mir Putin declared the U.S. attack a violation of international law. Russia also said it was pulling out of an agreement meant to minimize the risk of in-flight incidents between U.S. and Russian aircraft operating over Syria. “The Kremlin’s decision to suspend the 2015 memorandum of understanding on the air operations immediately raised tensions in the skies over Syria,”  “Putin’s spokesman said the risk of confrontation between aerial assets of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS and Russia has ‘significantly increased.’” By David Filipov  •  Read more » When Russian President Vladimir Putin got word that U.S. cruise missiles were going to strike his Syrian ally early on Friday morning, he had several options for firing back. He could have used Russia’s air defense systems in Syria to shoot the American rockets out of the sky. As a rebuke to the Americans, he could also have cancelled his meeting next week with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But he did neither. Reading between the lines of Russia’s initial response, at least in the hours following the first targeted U.S. strike against the Syrian military, it seems that Putin is choosing to step back, bide his time and leave plenty of room to smooth things over. In Moscow’s diplomatic circles, there is even hope that Tillerson’s visit on Tuesday could still mark the start of some grand bargain – if not exactly a love affair – between Putin and President Donald Trump.  Acting on Instinct, Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy By MARK LANDLER President Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, putting aside a foreign policy doctrine based on avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands. In doing such a turnabout, Trump perpetuates the notion among his critics that he's amenable to whomever last talked to him, writes The Fix's Aaron Blake: “Arguably his biggest liability was that people — even many supporters — believed he lacked the proper temperament to be president. The prospect of the hotheaded, itchy-Twitter-fingered reality TV star having access to the nuclear codes was an attack ad that practically wrote itself.” “Within the administration, some officials urged immediate action against Assad, warning against what one described as ‘paralysis through analysis.’ But others were concerned about second- and third-order effects,” according to Pentagon reporters Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff. “The attack may put hundreds of American troops now stationed in Syria in greater danger. They are advising local forces in advance of a major assault on the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital.” A direct confrontation with Russia, even if accidental, is now more likely. This back-and-forth could prompt Trump to recalibrate his position toward Putin, potentially taking a more aggressive posture. The U.S. intervention, on the other, might also make Russia more willing to negotiate a deal to end the civil war and remove Assad. You never know. In Europe, despite their frosty relationships with the new U.S. president, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande backed Trump’s actions. Britain also offered backing but said it would not participate if asked. Hillary Clinton supported a no-fly zone over Syria during the campaign last year, putting her in a more hawkish place than Obama. Speaking in New York yesterday, she called on Trump to take out Assad’s air force. "Assad has an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of these civilian deaths as we have seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days," the former secretary of said at a "Women in the World" summit, per CNN. "And I really believe that we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them." She added that if she were in power, she would tell Russia they were either “with us or against us” on the no-fly zone. "It is time," she said, "the Russians were afraid of us because we were going to stand up for the rights, the human rights, the dignity and the future of the Syrian people."

If white America is in ‘crisis,’ what have black Americans been living through?



WASHINGTON POST

Trump Removes Stephen Bannon From National Security Council Post.

-- Trump removed Steve Bannon from his position on the National Security Council Wednesday as part of a major staff reshuffling, elevating key military and intelligence officials to greater roles on the council and greatly reducing Bannon’s influence in shaping day-to-day security policy. Robert Costa, Abby Phillip, and Karen DeYoung report: “The restructuring reflects the growing influence of national security adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army three-star general who took over the post after retired general Michael Flynn was ousted in February and who is increasingly asserting himself over the flow of national security information in the White House. McMaster has become a blunt force within the administration who has made clear to several top officials and the president that he does not want the NSC to have any political elements.

H.R. McMaster

“Bannon's place on the committee had been a subject of intense controversy … [and national security experts] characterized it as an elevation of a White House official with no national security experience, even while other national security officials in the administration were included on the NSC only when ‘issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise’ were involved,” our colleagues write.

-- Bannon threatened to resign from his White House post amid continued West Wing infighting – namely with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – but he was convinced to stay on by Republican megadonor Rebekah Mercer, Politico’s Eliana Johnson, Kenneth P. Vogel and Josh Dawsey report: “Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said. … [but] Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. [One] person familiar with the situation, a GOP operative who talks to Mercer, said: ‘Bekah tried to convince him that this is a long-term play.’ The tension between the two is indicative of a larger power struggle in the White House as Kushner’s prominence and responsibility have ballooned. Kushner has also told people that he thinks Mercer as well as her father … have taken too much credit for their role in his victory, and has expressed misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda.” “If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer. 

Conservative donor Rebekah Mercer

Politico also reports that "Bannon's removal from the NSC is symbolic of a broader realignment in the West Wing that has Bannon increasingly marginalized and at odds both with the president and Kushner....The tension between the two is indicative of a larger power struggle in the White House as Kushner’s prominence and responsibility have ballooned. He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy.

-- “The removal of Bannon from the NSC comes in the wake of a series of other moves -- most notably the arrival of Trump's daughter, Ivanka, in the West Wing -- that suggest that the president is moving away (at least for the moment) from the more hard-line ideological bent of Bannon,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza writes. “It's hard not to see the Bannon move in the broader context of Trump's first 75 days in office, which have been, to put it mildly, chaotic … While Trump -- like all politicians -- is loathe to admit a change of direction is needed or that mistakes have been made, it's hard to look at his current position and conclude anything else. To be clear: Bannon will remain in the White House -- and in a senior role. But the diminution of his power -- and in such a public way -- is a clear sign that a shakeup in the Trump power structure is under way.”

Scores killed in one of Syria’s deadliest chemical attacks in years.


Activists said airstrikes in the northwest delivered an unidentified chemical agent that killed at least 75 people and filled clinics across the area with patients foaming at the mouth or struggling to breathe. This is the deadliest chemical attack since Assad’s forces dropped sarin gas on the Damascus suburbs in 2013.

 Syria turned a northern rebel-held area into a toxic kill zone  inciting international outrage over the ever-increasing government impunity shown in the country’s six-year war.

Western leaders including President Trump blamed the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and called on its patrons, Russia and Iran, to prevent a recurrence of what many described as a war crime.

After gas attack, Trump says crisis in Syria ‘is now my responsibility’

The president said the images of young victims had a “big impact” on him but would not say how he would address the Assad regime's apparent use of a chemical weapon. Earlier Wednesday, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley assailed Russia in blunt terms for protecting the Syrian government.

By Anne Gearan  •  Read more »

-- Foreign policy has dominated the opening chapters of the Trump administration to a degree the president clearly did not anticipate. If he’s got 99 problems, Syria is now certainly one.

“For Trump, a Focus on U.S. Interests and a Disdain for Moralizing,” by the New York Times’s Peter Baker: “Mr. Trump has dispensed with what he considers pointless moralizing and preachy naïveté. … ‘We would look like, to some degree, rather silly not acknowledging the political realities that exist in Syria,’ said spokesman Sean Spicer. … He has taken foreign policy to its most realpolitik moment in generations, playing down issues of human rights or democracy that animated his predecessors, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama. … His foreign policy seems defined more by a transactional nationalism, rooted in the sense that the United States is getting ripped off. Rather than spreading American values, Trump’s policy aims to guard American interests.”

-- Trump is learning that the panaceas he promised so often as a candidate do not actually exist. "No one — not even President Obama, as far as I could tell — was satisfied with the Obama administration’s approach to the conflict in Syria," Andrew Exum, who was an Obama appointee at the Pentagon, writes for The Atlantic. "But if you assembled all of the Obama administration’s critics in one room, they would not agree on an obvious alternative. The problem is wicked enough to confound easy solutions, and each policy alternative had strategic and moral deficiencies."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Assad believes he can commit war crimes with impunity,” and he challenged Trump to do something. The question now confronting Washington, he said, “is whether we will take any action to disabuse him of this murderous notion.”

-- “Jared Kushner has a singular and almost untouchable role in Trump’s White House,” by Ashley Parker and John Wagner: “In an administration riven by competing factions and led by a president who demands absolute loyalty, Kushner’s position — elevated and so far nearly untouchable — emanates from his familial relationship with [Trump]. Kushner’s portfolio has already grown to encompass slices of foreign policy (Mexico, the Middle East) and domestic issues (opioid addiction, veterans affairs), in addition to serving as the in-house mediator for the various feuding camps within the West Wing (the ideologues, the Wall Street guys). But Kushner’s outsize role has led to larger-than-life sniping and resentments, with rivals whispering that he has little depth and lacks the self-awareness to know what he doesn’t know. Simply put: Kushner’s role and relationship with the president — neither chief of staff nor regular political adviser — come with no precedents.

”

Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, compares the Trump-Kushner dynamic to “a mob family operation”: “It’s as if Trump is the don and he only trusts his close family members. There’s no indication that experience in the real estate business prepares one for the tasks at hand. It’s the hubris of a businessman imagining he can run government just because he’s a businessman. I don’t know if Jared Kushner shares the hubris of his father-in-law, but he’s certainly willing to say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

IN TRUMP'S AMERICA, LOYALTY -- OR DENIAL -- RUNS DEEP:

-- Jenna Johnson files from Durant, Oklahoma, where Trump’s budget would hit hard but his supporters are still willing to trust him. “In this town of 16,000 — located near the Texas border in Oklahoma’s Bryan County, where Trump won 76 percent of the vote — excitement about Trump’s presidency has been dulled by confusion over an agenda that seems aimed at hurting their community more than helping it. Many red states like Oklahoma — where every single county went for Trump — are more reliant on the federal funds that Trump wants to cut than states that voted for [Clinton].” Still, many Trump supporters are holding out hope that the possible budget sacrifices will be worth it. Tire shop owner Rick Munholland said he wants to see more jobs in the area, fewer undocumented immigrants and lower monthly health-insurance premiums. “Working people like me can’t afford it. Now, if you’re low-income, they can get it for nothing — but the low-income gets taken care of regardless,” Munholland said. “God bless America, but it has gone to the dogs.”

-- The New York Times’ Yamiche Alcindor goes to Trumball County, Ohio, where residents are heavily reliant on affordable housing programs and HUD-sponsored initiatives. “For years, Tammy and Joseph Pavlic tried to ignore the cracked ceiling in their living room, the growing hole next to their shower and the deteriorating roof they feared might one day give out. Mr. Pavlic [was forced to leave his job as his multiple sclerosis advanced] ... By 2015, Ms. Pavlic was supporting her husband and their three children on an annual salary of $9,000 …” That year, they tapped a Congressionally-funded county project called HOME to help repair their house. The next year, they voted for Trump, who has moved to cut the program in favor of beefing up military spending and building a U.S.-Mexico border wall. “Keeping the country safe compared to keeping my bathroom safe isn’t even a comparison,’ Joseph Pavlic said of Trump’s proposed budget cuts. ‘We have people who are coming into this country who are trying to hurt us, and I think that we need to be protected.’”

• “Our county voted for [Trump], so I’m not sure they quite understand what is going to happen,” said Julie Edwards, the county’s economic development coordinator. “I don’t think people realize how much we rely on these services. I don’t think people are making the connection between cutting the HUD funds and paving our streets or building new affordable housing.”

-- New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also journeyed through “Trump country" to see how his most fervent supporters were reacting to news of the budget cuts. None said they regretted their votes in November, and they all said that they might vote for Trump for re-election: “Judy Banks, a 70-year-old struggling to get by, said she voted for Trump because ‘he was talking about getting rid of those illegals.’ But Banks now finds herself shocked that he also has his sights on funds for [a senior citizen service program], which is her lifeline. It pays senior citizens a minimum wage to hold public service jobs. Banks said she depends on the job to make ends meet … ‘If I lose this job,’ she said, ‘I’ll sit home and die.’ Yet she said she might still vote for Trump in 2020.”

-- “Every president in recent history except [Trump] has understood (as Putin surely does) that America has a strategic as well as a moral interest in standing with democrats around the world, and that America grows stronger and more powerful the more successfully it represents universal values on the world stage,” Foreign Policy’s Daniel B. Baer wrote following last weekend’s massive protests across Russia. “The silence of Trump and his team (last weekend) was exactly what Putin wanted — his investment in Trump’s election paying dividends in the form of what (former Hillary Clinton adviser) Jake Sullivan … called Trump’s ‘unilateral moral disarmament.’”

-- Critics believe Trump’s lack of moral leadership has allowed Russia to more forcefully assert itself in the Middle East:

• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani plans to meet with Putin in Moscow later this month, and both countries are expected to sign a slew of documents on economic and political issues.
• In Libya, there are new accusations that Russia is sending operatives to bolster an armed faction.
• In Afghanistan, U.S. generals have also said Moscow may be supplying weapons to the Taliban.

-- Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen said Putin feels emboldened by Trump’s lack of moral leadership. “It took the [past] administration many years to understand the severity of the situation [and] it’s gone from bad to worse,” Gessen said in a phone interview last week.

-- The Post’s Moscow bureau chief David Filipov sees a “power vacuum” created by a silent Trump administration. Though we can't know for sure what Putin expected of Trump, “they’re loving the fact that there’s no leadership” from Washington so far. “They’ll definitely move … to fill in that vacuum,” Filipov said.

• Former Russian MP and Putin critic Denis Voronenkov was shot dead in a crowded Kiev square less than 72 hours after telling a Washington Post reporter he was in danger last month, making him the eighth high-profile Russian who has died since Trump’s November presidential victory. 

-- Almost every day brings a fresh illustration of the degree to which Trump is unconcerned with promoting democracy or holding America’s moral high ground. From last week alone:

• The president did not speak out after Putin’s forces cracked down on mass protests across Russia last week.
• The U.S. government backed off its policy of regime change in Syria, saying that the Syrian people will decide President Bashar al-Assad's future. (As if that’s something they could do.) “Do we think he's a hindrance? Yes. Are we going to sit there and focus on getting him out? No," said U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.
• Trump's State Department told Congress it plans to approve a multibillion-dollar sale of F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain without the human rights conditions imposed under Barack Obama.

-- Trump today will welcome Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, his favorite Middle East stongman, to the White House. Trying to reboot the bilateral relationship, he will steer clear of discussing human rights issues in the country. Aides said they will instead focus on economic and national security concerns.

“The Obama administration did not allow Sissi to set foot in Washington after he staged a bloody coup against a democratically elected government in 2013,” deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl writes. “His regime is holding, according to Egyptian and U.S. monitors, between 40,000 and 60,000 political prisoners, including thousands of secular liberal democrats. His security forces were responsible for 1,400 extrajudicial killings in 2016 alone, and 912 disappearances between August 2015 and August 2016, according to Moataz El Fegiery of Front Line Defenders. Eighty-five civil society activists have been banned from leaving the country and dozens of journalists are being held without trial, according to Bahey el-din Hassan of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. None of it matters to Trump, who has called Sissi ‘a fantastic guy’ because of his supposed support for the war against the Islamic State — never mind that Egypt has been losing the battle against the jihadists in its own Sinai Peninsula.”

“Sissi’s brutal repression has made Egypt a mass-production facility for violent extremism,” add Robert Kagan from Brookings and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment in an op-ed for today's paper. 

Who is to blame for the opioid epidemic?

Prescription drugs killed 183,000. Those who made and sold them owe America an explanation.



WASHINGTON POST

DEA falters in major effort to hold drug company accountable in opioid epidemic

After six years and four investigations that spanned five states, the government has taken no legal action against Mallinckrodt, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of the highly addictive painkiller oxycodone. Instead, the company has reached a tentative settlement with prosecutors in a case that shows how difficult it is to hold a drugmaker responsible for the damage done by its product.

• By Lenny Bernstein and Scott Higham

Small hand of government: Trump's aim to shrink the state pleases conservatives

President is not a natural Reagan Republican and healthcare reform has failed – but many top activists applaud his approach to power and deregulation.

GUARDIAN

Disabled America Disabled or just desperate? Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up. Across large swaths of the country, disability has reshaped scores of mostly white, almost exclusively rural communities, where as many as one-third of working-age adults live on monthly disability checks, according to a Post analysis. The increases have been worse in working-class areas, worse still in communities where residents are older, and worst of all in places with shrinking populations and few immigrants. By Terrence McCoy  •  Read more »

Who is ‘Source D’? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim.




WASHINGTON POST



-- In the years he spent building his real estate brand, Trump, his company, and his partners repeatedly turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet Republics – several of whom were reportedly connected to organized crime. USA Today's Oren Dorell reports: “The president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering.” Among them:

• “A member of the firm that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York is a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man and later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.” An investor in the same project was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.
• 
  
• “Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.”
• 
  
• “A Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.”
• 
  
• In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. told Russian state media, while in Moscow, that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” And New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz said she sold about 65 “Trump World” condos to Russian investors, many of whom sought meetings with Trump. “They all wanted to meet Donald,” she said. “They became very friendly.”

MORE BAD HEADLINES FOR PAUL MANAFORT

:

-- A Cyprus bank investigated accounts associated with the former Trump campaign chairman after the transactions raised red flags of possible money-laundering. NBC News reports: “Manafort — whose ties to a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin are under scrutiny — was associated with at least 15 bank accounts and 10 companies on Cyprus, dating back to 2007 ... At least one of those companies was used to receive millions of dollars from a billionaire Putin ally, according to court documents. Banking sources said some transactions on Manafort-associated accounts raised sufficient concern to trigger an internal investigation at a Cypriot bank into potential money laundering activities. After questions were raised, Manafort closed the accounts." Offshore banking is not illegal, and the island has long been known as a hub for moving money in and out of Russia. A spokesman for Manafort defended his accounts, saying they were set up at behest of clients in Cyprus “for a legitimate business purpose.” "All were legitimate entities and established for lawful ends," the spokesman said.

-- Manafort also spent the past decade engaging in a series of puzzling real estate deals in New York. WNYC reports: “Between 2006 and 2013, Manafort bought three homes in New York City, paying the full amount each time, so there was no mortgage. Then, between April 2015 and January 2017 – a time span that included his service with the Trump campaign – Manafort borrowed about $12 million against those three New York City homes: one in Trump Tower, one in Soho, and one in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Manafort’s New York City transactions follow a pattern: Using shell companies, he purchased the homes in all-cash deals, then transferred the properties into his own name for no money and then took out hefty mortgages against them …. Real estate and law enforcement experts say some of these transactions fit a pattern used in money laundering; together, they raise questions about Manafort’s activities in the New York City property market while he also was consulting for business and political leaders in the former Soviet Union.”

RIGHT WING CONTROL OF THE MEDIA



MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

One truth that the first few weeks of the Trump presidency have driven home to me more than any other is what an enormous influence this Republican-conservative solidarity has on the very way our political discourse is shaped.

Take as an example of a big matter the botched raid against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) on January 29 in Yemen. In the first twenty-four hours, the White House managed to spin it as a success, as it took out fourteen suspected AQAPoperatives. But it also killed two dozen civilians, including nine children. And it resulted in the death of one American Navy SEAL team member. Withering post-operation reports appeared in The New York Times, Reuters, and elsewhere; on background, military officials criticized the raid and even Trump himself. The next week, Yemen withdrew permission for further US-led anti-terror strikes.

After a month of mostly silence and shirking responsibility, Trump defended the raid in his joint-session speech. He introduced from the gallery Carryn Weigand Owens, the widow of William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the attack. What appeared to be her heavenward prayers to her husband made for effective television—most TVcommentators gushed, even as a number of military people observed on Twitter that they found the moment grotesquely manipulative. In any case, many questions about the raid remain unanswered—and with Republicans running Congress, they will remain so. Whereas we can be certain that if President Hillary Clinton had ordered exactly the same raid with exactly the same results, House Republicans would have started issuing subpoenas in mid-February.

It’s that way on smaller matters, too. You may recall that the Trump White House took some criticism for failing to mention Jews in its official Holocaust Remembrance Day statement. But now imagine that the Obama White House had done that. It would have been a major three-day story, and the odor of it would have lingered around Obama forever—two years later, news reports would have included sentences like “Prime Minister Netanyahu, still smarting from that Holocaust Day slight…”

Democrats and the “liberal” media simply do not have the power to shape the terms of discourse in the same way that the congeries of talk-radio hosts, websites, blogs, and social media outlets of the right do. They don’t even attempt to. Hardly a day goes by without the Trump White House doing something that makes me wonder about an “imagine if Obama had…” scenario.

-- Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul says the Kremlin is the real beneficiary from the House Intelligence Committee investigation: 

"Trump already seems to many Russian observers as a weak president, incapable of delivering on his pro-Russian campaign pledges. But the spectacle of the ... hearing on Russia must have given the Kremlin renewed inspiration about achieving another foreign policy goal: weakening the United States. In the Trump era, our society is deeply divided, even on the Russian threat. That serves Russia’s purposes well. Even more amazing is how the United States’ current ruling party, the Republican Party, (mostly)  does not want to acknowledge the Russian attack on our sovereignty last year, let alone take steps to prevent future assaults in 2018 or 2020. Putin violated our sovereignty, influenced our elections, smugly dared us to respond and now gets to watch us do nothing because of partisan divides. Imagine hearings after Pearl Harbor or 9/11 that barely mentioned the attackers? Without question, Putin was the big winner from last Monday’s hearing.”

 Medicaid Comes of Age.

Medicaid now covers more Americans than Medicare, and it played a major role in stopping the Republican drive to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

When it was created more than a half century ago, Medicaid almost escaped notice. Front-page stories hailed the bigger, more controversial part of the law that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that July day in 1965 — health insurance for elderly people, or Medicare, which the American Medical Association had bitterly denounced as socialized medicine. … But over the past five decades, Medicaid has surpassed Medicare in the number of Americans it covers. It has grown gradually into a behemoth that provides for the medical needs of one in five Americans — 74 million people — starting for many in the womb, and for others, ending only when they go to their graves.”

Some remarkable figures: “In 2015, the nation spent more than $532 billion on Medicaid, of which about 63 percent was federal money and the rest from the states. … Medicaid now provides medical care to four out of 10 American children. It covers the costs of nearly half of all births in the United States. It pays for the care for two-thirds of people in nursing homes. And it provides for 10 million children and adults with physical or mental disabilities. For states, it accounts for 60 percent of federal funding — meaning that cuts hurt not only poor and middle-class families caring for their children with autism or dying parents, but also bond ratings.”

NY TIMES




DAILY 202, WASHINGTON POST

New momentum for Medicaid expansion, as more Republicans conclude Obamacare won’t get repealed.

Paul Ryan promised his donors yesterday that he will keep pushing to overhaul the health care system this year, despite his failure last week. But in the 19 states that never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, the calculus has quickly changed.