The Health 202: Meet Obamacare's biggest Twitter defender
If you could slay the GOP health-care bill with words, Andy Slavitt would have done it by now. Until four months ago, Slavitt oversaw Obamacare for Obama. Since then, he’s been carving out a niche as a top, vocal critic of Republicans and their one-sided effort to overturn big parts of the Affordable Care Act.
Slavitt was always refreshingly talkative, even during his two years as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that also runs most of the ACA's biggest components. And now that he's out from under agency shackles, Slavitt prides himself on being candid -- and highly snarky, at times. His Twitter feed has become a must-read for those following the Republican effort to repeal and replace some of the ACA. Here are some choice examples:
Over the weekend, Slavitt appeared to criticize the news website Axios, for describing Pence's health-care promises as creating "trouble" for the Senate -- instead of calling them outright falsehoods:
"We're still referring to bold-faced lies as "trouble."
A few weeks ago, Slavitt tweeted that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was “just saying goodbye” to young cancer patients Ryan was photographed with during a visit to a Texas children’s hospital -- insinuating that Ryan’s health-care bill would lead to their fatal demise due to its Medicaid cuts:
Just saying goodbye.
Link to tweet
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“What I meant by that tweet is you can’t cut the program that takes care of half the children in this country and not hurt children’s hospitals,” Slavitt explained to me last week over drinks at a Capitol Hill restaurant.
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“So when someone wants to get pictures taken in children’s hospitals [while] at the same time cutting a dramatic amount of resources to those hospitals, it’s not really right, and I was just trying to call that out,” he said.
Slavitt’s son told him no one would listen to him any longer once he left CMS. But Slavitt found his Twitter following grew rapidly in the days after his departure, from 17,000 to more than 70,000 today.
“I don’t know that I can understand it other than people care about health-care -- they want someone to just be straight about what’s going on,” Slavitt told me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-health-202/2017/06/12/the-health-202-meet-obamacare-s-biggest-twitter-defender/593dd89de9b69b2fb981dcd6/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_health202-825a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.7f7d831effcb
