Angelo Carusone discusses how the right-wing echo chamber can't give Republicans any cover for not having a healthcare plan: “People can add it up”
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From the December 15, 2025, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight
SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND (CO-HOST): I remember when I was no longer on my parents health insurance and I did not have a job like a good, like a good, good job I got right now that provides me good health insurance. And so I didn't have health insurance for some years, and not having health insurance meant I wasn't going to the doctor. It meant I wasn't going to the emergency room. I was only going to an urgent care, if that. Only if I really needed some medicine I couldn't get from elsewhere. So, that is the lived reality, that is going to be the lived reality of millions of people, and not for any real reason, except that Congress couldn't get their stuff together, particularly Republicans in Congress.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah. And I think that that thing you just said, that last part is starting to filter through, not for any -- it's just, you know, it's hard to overstate how much disarray the larger right-wing media echo chamber is in right now. There's so much feuding, so that takes a large part of it off the board. So, let's just look at Fox News, which is the one that's the most controlled, the clearest. They've had the most muscle memory for these kinds of things. They've been in these fights, even they are blaming Republicans. It's not universal. They're on every hour on the hour, but it's starting to be.
You hear hosts and personalities, they're acknowledging that healthcare prices are going up. They're -- some of them are blaming Republicans for not having a plan. The assumption is that, you know, they can make rage about Obamacare, and that maybe people will assume it's Democrats' fault because there's some flaw in Obamacare. But most people realize that they had healthcare, and then they just lost it because the prices went up right at the same time that Republicans got in power. People can add it up even if they're not going to get out there and have, you know, there's not a permission structure right now for a lot of day-to-day Republicans to criticize Republicans or criticize Trump, but they can still feel it or think it internally. And I think that's starting to -- what's percolating right now. And we shouldn't discount that.
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ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): I mean, they really are telling on themselves. The fact that they now have floated like several different policies they're workshopping, but they are coming to terms with the fact that none of the ideas that they are floating are actually as good as Obamacare, which is already in place.
CARUSONE: Fact. That is absolutely correct. That's right, that's right. And the other part that -- underneath the surface of this is that there is a little bit of politicking too, which is that there's a large part of the MAHA base, which is furious at Trump and in particular RFK, because he's not doing most of the things that he promised him to do in terms of taking on pesticides and some of the food industry. So, they're leaning into this healthcare, particularly around all these vaccines and other things, because it's the one thing they seem to be able to get through, or at least float in this administration, because they're trying to cater and respond to that audience. And it's intensifying. You know, the worst thing, if they just did something with pesticides, it would be a little -- they'd make a lot of people happy, and we'd all be a lot less sick, you know? But they're not. They're focusing on this because that's the one thing they seem to be able to get through.