Trump is attacking the ACA again
Trump's order, expected as soon as this week, would allow small businesses or other groups of people to band together to buy health insurance. Some fear that these Association Health Plans (AHPs) would not be subject to the same rules as ObamaCare plans, including those that protect people with pre-existing conditions. That would make these plans cheaper for healthy people, potentially luring them away from the ObamaCare market. The result could be that only sicker, costlier people remain in ObamaCare plans, leading to a spike in premiums.....Andy Slavitt, a former top health care official in the Obama administration, warned that insurers could drop out of the Affordable Care Act markets because of the order.
There's some uncertainty about whether, or to what extent, Trump has the authority to do this. If he issues such an order, there will be legal challenges. If it goes into effect, however, over time it will become harder to oppose, since some voters (healthy people on AHPs) will benefit from it, creating a constituency against repealing it. The time to stop this is before it's issued, or at least before it's implemented.
That may not be easy, however. The public helped stop legislative repeal of the ACA by deluging Congress with anti-repeal phone calls and other messages, but Trump is less likely to be swayed by such methods. The sane people in the Cabinet are probably focused on stopping Trump from blowing up the Korean peninsula and don't have time for this. Our best hope may be the fact that some insurance companies are apparently worried about the order too -- businesses don't like unpredictable changes in their regulatory environment. Or perhaps Trump will bungle the drafting of his executive order as he has in the past, making it ineffectual.
But the underlying reality is that it's inherently difficult to keep a system running smoothly when Congress and the White House are held by people grimly opposed to that system's very existence. The ACA will not be safely re-stabilized until we vote them out.
posted by Infidel753 at 5:32 AM
4 Comments:
You're absolutely right - the best (and only) way to stymie these nihilists is to vote them out -- at all levels. They are relentless, and so must we be.
This is why I remain furious at the purists who ran to Stein or Johnson or didn't vote at all or kept screaming that Hillary was going to be a monster and Trump would be a dove. If Hillary were President, she would have protected the ACA regardless of whatever the GOP did by using her veto power.
But no....some people just had to follow their purist urges. Add to that the ridiculous belief of Rosanne DeMarco that Trump would "bring about single-payer"--say what?--and the rush to "Medicare for All" even though it does not stand a snowball's chance in hell of passing.
These bastards want to destroy the ACA. It was glaringly obvious, but some people...no, I've ranted enough.
We need to vote them out--every last one of them if we can. Which is why 2018 is so important, and why we need to get the vote out then.
Yes, we need to vote them out. But do we know what the chances are for that when we consider gerrymandering's stranglehold on many of the districts they represent? The voter supression laws passed in many states? Voter apathy in off-year elections? There's a lot to overcome to throw the bastards out. Will America do it?
Hackwhacker: Myself, I'm feeling pretty relentless about it.
Marc: It's maddening. You'd think the Bush-Gore 2000 debacle would have cured people of this self-defeating purism, but I guess the lesson just doesn't last.
Shaw: Those are daunting problems. We have to do way better just to come out slightly ahead. There's at least some hope that the Supreme Court will rein in gerrymandering, though.
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