The Clinica Mi Pueblo clinics offer “general medicine services at the most affordable prices possible” and that claim is supported by the very affordable prices listed above. For example, the national average cost for an MRI is $2,611, but only $350 at the clinic. The median national cost of a colonoscopy is $1,626, but only $450 on the price list above. The US average “fair” cost of an ultrasound is $263, but only about half that amount at the Clinica Mi Pueblo.

How does Clinica Mi Pueblo offer these medial services at the “most affordable prices possible”? Here’s how: the clinic operates on a cash-only basis, with transparent prices that are listed both on the clinic’s website and on the wall at each clinic. Further, the clinic accepts no insurance, and it will not submit insurance claims on patients’ behalf. If patients have insurance, they can easily take the paperwork the clinic provides and file an insurance claim on their own. Reducing the costly, time-consuming mountain of paperwork associated with insurance, Medicare and Medicaid is one of the main reasons that cash-only medical clinics can keep their costs down and prices so low and affordable. That’s the same business model that keeps surgery costs so low/affordable at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, the “free market-loving, price-displaying, state-of-the-art, AAAHC accredited, doctor owned, multi-specialty surgical facility in central OK” that has been featured on CD many times over the years.

So how does the cash-only, no insurance, price-displaying business model of the Clinica Mi Pueblo compare to medical coverage under Obamacare? Well, deductibles for individuals enrolled in the lowest-priced Obamacare health plans will average more than $6,000 in 2017, and families enrolled in bronze plans will have average deductibles of more than $12,000. Importantly, the deductible is the amount of money patients must personally pay out of pocket for health services before Obamacare insurance policies covers any medical costs. And what about the monthly Obamacare premiums? A 40-year-old unsubsidized bronze Obamacare plan patient will pay slightly more than $350 per month this year for their “health coverage” with a deductible of more than $6,000. And that’s supposed to somehow be “affordable” health care? In contrast, spending $350 per month out-of-pocket at Clinica Mi Pueblo, instead of going toward an Obamacare plan that provides almost no actual medical care, would actually purchase quite a lot of actual medical services.

Staffers are leaving their phones at home, using secret apps and monitoring each other’s social media.
Aides are going to great lengths to protect themselves. They’re turning off work-issued smartphones and putting them in drawers when they arrive home from work out of fear that they could be used to eavesdrop. They’re staying mum in meetings out of concern that their comments could be leaked to the press by foes.

Many are using encrypted apps that automatically delete messages once they’ve been read, or are leaving their personal cellphones at home in case their bosses initiate phone checks of the sort that press secretary Sean Spicer deployed last month to try to identify leakers on his team.

It’s an environment of fear that has hamstrung the routine functioning of the executive branch. Senior advisers are spending much of their time trying to protect turf, key positions have remained vacant due to a reluctance to hire people deemed insufficiently loyal, and Trump’s ambitious agenda has been eclipsed by headlines surrounding his unproven claim that former President Barack Obama tapped his phone lines at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.

One senior administration aide, who like most others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the degree of suspicion had created a toxicity that is unsustainable.

The analysis found that under the American Health Care Act the coverage losses would include 17 million for Medicaid, six million in the individual market and three million in employer-based plans.

A total of 54 million individuals would be uninsured in 2026 under the GOP plan, according to the White House analysis. That’s nearly double the number projected under current law.

“We disagree strenuously with the report that was put out,” HHS Secretary Tom Price told reporters about the CBO after leaving a Cabinet meeting with Trump at the White House. “It’s just not believable is what we would suggest.” While serving as the House Budget Committee chairman, Price had a role in appointing the current head of the CBO who is a conservative economist.

But that effort to discredit CBO’s projections is undermined by the fact that the White House’s own analysis reached a similar — and slightly bleaker — conclusion about how the GOP plan would increase the number of uninsured Americans.

TAPPER: Joining me now is the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, former Congressman Mick Mulvaney.

Director Mulvaney, thanks so much for being here. We appreciate it.

MICK MULVANEY, WHITE HOUSE BUDGET DIRECTOR: Jake, good morning. Thanks very much for having me. TAPPER: So, did anything actually change at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in terms of methodology or who is running the business there?

MULVANEY: What I think changed is, you start to look at some of the underlying numbers.

TAPPER: But just a point on it -- you're not the one that was attacking the numbers as phony. There's nothing that changed that made them real today?

MULVANEY: Right. The BLS did not change the way they count, I don't think.

Then, in late 2015, I came across a set of pictures with no identifying text. They appeared to show a gigantic apartment in what looked, from the windows, very much like New York. But I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold; there were the usual huge chandeliers, branded relics of famous sportsmen like Muhammad Ali, and mushroom-colored marble floors. There was relatively little in the way of paintings, but otherwise, the place reeked of dictator chic.

As it turned out, this familiar yet unfamiliar apartment—a familiar style to me by then, but in an unlikely location—belonged to Donald Trump, who by then was running for president. This was the penthouse of the potential leader of the free world. The design work, I have since learned, was started by the late Angelo Donghia, a decorator better known for a chic Manhattan look. But the substantive current design had been done by one Henry Conversano, who designed extensively—and perhaps unsurprisingly—for casinos. No matter how you looked at it, the main thing this apartment said was, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.” This was the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche.