Cable News Networks Cut Away from Trump Healthcare Announcement

All three major cable news networks cut away from President Donald Trump’s healthcare policy announcement on Friday, as he unveiled a new rule change designed to expand insurance coverage options for small business employees.

Breitbart News covered the announcement live, in its entirety, via Facebook video. As Joshua Caplan reported:

President Donald Trump announced plans Friday to expand health care for small business and workers through health reimbursement arrangements (HRA).

Trump said that the expansions of HRAs would allow families to start shopping around for health care plans that they wanted and to get reimbursed by their employers.

“It’s popular, it’s really, really been a success,” Trump said, noting that the Obama administration leveled penalties for HRAs, making it essentially unworkable.

Several small business owners stood with President Trump on the stage in the Rose Garden at the White House, and told the audience how the new policy would help them save money and provide health insurance to employees.

But the major cable news networks had already stopped streaming the event, cutting away just a few minutes into President Trump’s remarks, before he described the actual policy change.

MSNBC cut away to a discussion of criticism of President Trump’s healthcare policies; Fox News went to a discussion of the controversy over White House counsel Kellyanne Conway’s alleged violation of the Hatch Act; CNN cut to a commercial.

Ironically, CNN had published an op-ed by one of President Trump’s policy advisers explaining the rule change, but abandoned the event on live television, leaving its viewers uninformed.

It was not clear why the networks chose not to air Trump’s healthcare announcement. Democrats frequently claim that the Trump administration has done nothing on health care and does not have a healthcare policy or plan.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist-turned-political pundit, remarked Saturday that as long as all of the cable news networks rely heavily on advertising by pharmaceutical companies, they were unlikely to devote coverage to the administration’s progress in reducing the cost of drugs and health insurance.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.