When Bernie Sanders was on the presidential campaign trail, he famously lambasted the Democratic Party for “often” supporting corporate welfare.

Bernie Sanders surely knows this to be true — as this last week has revealed the extreme lengths that Democrats, including himself, will go to defend the most egregious corporate handouts in America.

After the health insurance lobby rammed through the passage of Obamacare (and forced millions of Americans to buy their product or face punishment), these same companies began to suffer heavy losses in Obamacare insurance markets.

No surprise there, as Obamacare virtually outlawed their ability to price ‘risk,’ defeating the purpose of an insurance market entirely.

Facing mounting losses, insurance companies, logically, began threatening to dump Obamacare plans. As Betsy McCaughey summarized in the New York Post:

Desperate to keep insurers on board, the administration scrambled to find another pot of money. Unfortunately, once again, a big part of that money pot belongs to the public.

In 2016, the Obama administration handed out “a whopping $7.7 billion” to insurance companies diverted from “reinsurance fees.” Reinsurance fees are paid “whether you buy your own plan or get covered at work, even if your employer self-insures. You may be clueless about it, but the fee is buried in your premium or taken out of your compensation. … [Obamacare] states a fixed share ‘shall be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury of the United States and may not be used’ to offset insurance companies’ losses. But the [Obama] administration gave all of it to the insurance companies.”

As the above passage shows, when his signature health care law began taking on water, Obama plugged the holes with your tax dollars.

It’s bad enough that the Obama administration illegally diverted billions from the U.S. Treasury; but using the money to directly bailout corporate America makes it so much worse.

In light of this massive giveaway to Big Insurance, and Sanders’ long-held crusade against corporate cronyism, one would expect the Senator to celebrate last week’s decision by President Trump to end these illegal bailouts through executive order. Instead, Senator Sanders released a statement attacking President Trump’s health care orders, while towing a highly disingenuous narrative from the liberal media.

Here is how left-wing news outlets are deceitfully framing President Trump’s decision to end Obamacare’s corporate bailouts:

• “President Donald Trump plans to halt payments to health insurance companies serving the poorest customers on the Obamacare exchanges” – The Huffington Post
• “Trump guts critical health care for the poor — and nobody noticed” – Salon
• “Trump Administration to End Obamacare Subsidies for the Poor” – NPR (FYI: President Trump, if you want to go after your detractors in the media without violating the First Amendment, you can always defund NPR!)

For the liberal media, President Trump’s decision to end a lawless, unlimited, annual, multi-billion-dollar bailout for corporate America is an attack on ‘the poor.’ How dare we not prop up Big Insurance indefinitely with our tax dollars!

President Trump’s health care executive order revealed, in stunning color, the amazing depths to which Democrats will go to defend the most abhorrent examples of corporate welfare. For Democrats, all is fair in the war to prop up Obama’s failing health care law.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore