“WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday laced into President Trump, condemning him for saying he ordered a slowdown of coronavirus testing and comparing the sitting president to a whiny child.
“He admitted telling people, and I quote, ‘You have to slow the testing down, slow it down please,’” said Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “He thinks that finding out that more Americans are sick will make him look bad. That’s what he’s worried about, he’s worried about looking bad.”
Mr. Biden’s speech, delivered at a gymnasium in Lancaster, Pa., was designed to focus attention on his call to expand protections under the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Biden warned that insurance companies, if freed from the federal mandate to cover pre-existing conditions, could deny people coverage if they had suffered from the coronavirus. And he called the Trump administration’s legal efforts to overturn the 2010 health care law “cruel.”
“If Donald Trump has his way, complications from Covid-19 could become a new pre-existing condition,” Mr. Biden said.
Agreed. Biden seemed to be on top of his game for this one. Let’s hope that he can keep it up for the next 4 months. Perhaps a weekly energy shot?
But Biden has other problems.
Belatedly, Senator Amy Klobuchar(Minnesota) came to the conclusion that her 10 years in “law and order” as County Attorney in George Floyd’s Minneapolis disqualified her to be Biden’s running mate so she wisely withdrew her name from the running.
Representative Val Deming’s 28 years as a police officer including as the Police Chief of Orlando, Florida, and Kamala Harris’ 27 years as a DA and then as California Attorney General are not a good fit for Biden at this time in history either.
Neither Deming nor Harris is intelligent enough to take Klobuchar’s lead to bailout gracefully as Biden’s VP choice and that is a shame.
We could do far worse that Biden as president. I was a Warren supporter, but Biden will sign the legislation she writes, so maybe she’s right where she should be.
He’s a fundamentally decent and competent man, and as a country we are in need of the kind of empathy that is the foundation of his personality.
The ACA may be a flawed first step toward truly universal coverage, but without the first step, there won’t be universal coverage, and without it I would be blind from the cataracts it helped me pay for the surgeries to fix.