Trump says, “Let it fail!”, but he is responsible for it failing and risking millions of lives in the process.
Obamacare is not “collapsing under its own weight,” as Republicans are so fond of saying. It was sabotaged from the day it was enacted. And now the Republican Party should be held accountable not only for any potential replacement of the law, but also for having tried to starve it to death.[4]
Trump Pulls Ads
Although the HealthCare.gov website is still active (it’s the law of land as of July 19, 2017), all advertising and social media accounts which help individuals signup has been pulled by Trump. Even ads that have already been paid for.[1]
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a consumer group that supports the law, called the decision “a mean-spirited effort that can only result in fewer people getting coverage who need it.”
Anti Obamacare Ads
Trump undermines advertising campaign.
The Trump administration has spent taxpayer money meant to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act on a public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it.
The effort, which involves a multi-pronged social media push as well as video testimonials designed at damaging public opinion of President Obama’s health care law, is far more robust and sustained than has been publicly revealed or realized.[9]
Pulled Funding for the Risk Corridors
Marco Rubio took steps to undermine the Risk Corridors.
Rubio said, “When they passed Obamacare, they put a bailout fund in Obamacare. … We led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund.”
Rubio incorrectly labeled the risk corridors as a “bailout”. Nothing is further from the truth. As the exchanges were created, a plan was put into place to stabilize the costs and spread the risk for insurers in the new law’s marketplaces.[2]
Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”[3]
The truth behind Anthem’s pullout of the exchanges.
Are these moves more evidence that Obamacare is fundamentally unworkable? Hardly. Of greedy insurance companies callously disregarding their customers’ health? Not that either. Anthem explained clearly what is responsible for its retreat: Republican sabotage of the health-care system.[7]
Trump Extorting Insurers
Verging on the edge of illegal and an abuse of government power, Trump sends a warning to insurers.
One of the most plausible predictions of the kinds of long-term damage Donald Trump might do to the United States was written by Matthew Yglesias a week after the election. He described a scenario in which Trump used government power to coerce business to support him and his agenda. “Those who support the regime will receive favorable treatment from regulators, and those who oppose it will not,” in this haunting scenario, which resembles the nexus between business and government that prevails in Russia and other authoritarian capitalist states.[5]
Reversing STLDs
Even as they seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act, GOP lawmakers look for ways to undo it from the inside.
Fourteen Senate Republicans sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price on Thursday, asking him to reverse an Obama-era regulation that places restrictions on short-term limited duration (STLD) insurance plans, also called short-term insurance. The Obama-era regulation was meant to safeguard the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health exchanges by penalizing patients who purchased short term insurance as a type of primary coverage — thus protecting the risk pool.[6]
And The List Continues
The website HealthInsurance.org gives a great summary list of the 10 Ways the GOP Sabotaged Obamacare.[8]
The Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress are fond of saying that the ACA is collapsing under its own weight, and that the exchanges are exploding (or imploding, depending on the day).
Most of the exchanges headed into 2017 on fairly stable footing though. Whether that will continue to be the case in 2018 is still unknown – largely because of the considerable uncertainty that the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans have introduced to the market this year.[8]
References:
- Politico, January 26, 2017, Paul Demko – Trump White House abruptly halts Obamacare ads
- Politico, February 25, 2016, Joshua Gillin – Marco Rubio: We ‘wiped out’ Obamacare ‘bailout fund’ for insurance companies
- Salon, March 22, 2017 – How Republicans quietly sabotaged Obamacare long before Trump came into office
- New York Times, May 25, 2017, Abbe R. Gluck – How the G.O.P. Sabotaged Obamacare
- New York Magazine, May 18, 2017, Jonathan Chait – Trump Extorted Insurers to Make Them Support Health-Care Bill
- Think Progress, June 12, 2017, Amanda Michelle Gomez – Senate Republicans ask Trump administration to kneecap Obamacare
- The Washington Post, June 10, 2017, Editorial Board – The GOP’s Obamacare sabotage continues
- HealthInsurance.org, May 17, 2017, Louise Norris – 10 ways the GOP sabotaged Obamacare Trump and Congressional Republicans say the ACA is collapsing under its own weight, but they’ve been dragging it down for years
- The Daily Beast, July 20, 2017, Sam Stein – Team Trump Used Obamacare Money to Run PR Effort Against It