When the new Congress and President-elect Trump take office in January, Republicans will have a real chance to repeal President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. If they succeed, it will be the result of their carefully executed strategy to repeal the law and repeated congressional votes to do so. This approach was the subject of much derision from Democrats, but sticking to it has now put the Republicans in a position where they can reach their goal.
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Throughout the campaign, President-Elect Donald Trump’s entire health message consisted of promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
That remains difficult with Democrats still commanding enough power in the Senate to block the 60 votes needed for a full repeal. Republicans could use fast-track budget authority to make some major changes to the law, although that could take some time. In the short term, however, Trump could use executive power to make some major changes on his own.
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The GOP’s long-discussed dreams of repealing Obamacare became closer to reality early Wednesday morning when Donald Trump was elected president.
Six years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law and after more than 60 attempts to repeal it, Republicans now have a good chance to advance their own agenda.
While on the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised voters that he would repeal Obamacare if he was elected president and even called on congressional Republicans to call a “special session” to move forward with rolling back the law.
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Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber told CNN’s Carol Costello on Monday that it is not possible to just “get rid of the parts” of the health care law that people do not like because that was tried and “premiums went through the roof.”
Costello interviewed Gruber on her show and asked how Americans’ health care premiums would be affected if President-elect Donald Trump repealed parts of the Affordable Care Act that are unpopular after taking office.
“So, let’s say he keeps the parts of the law that people really like,” Costello said. “What would that do to all of our premiums? If he could keep all of the elements that you say that Congress might reject.”
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President-elect Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress can repeal Obamacare pretty easily, but the biggest question is when and if there will be a transition while a replacement gets crafted.
Trump has promised to repeal Obamacare in its entirety and congressional Republicans are on board. However, when the repeal would take effect is largely in doubt, as some Republicans are wary of immediately ending coverage for millions of people without a replacement.
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President-elect Trump said that he was open to keeping parts of Obamacare. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Mr. Trump said he favors keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies.” He’s not the first Republican to advocate keeping these popular provisions of the law. Keeping the under-26 provision is pretty close to a consensus among Hill Republicans. It’s not the ideal policy, in my view. But it’s compatible with a much freer and better-functioning health-care market than we have now, and it’s worth accepting as part of legislation that enables that market.
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Donald Trump hadn’t been president-elect for a week when he appeared to abandon his oft-repeated pledge to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. In interviews with the Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump appeared to want to keep, or at least to be willing to accept, the Affordable Care Act’s centerpiece: it’s supposed prohibition on discrimination against health-insurance applicants with pre-existing conditions. Ramesh Ponnuru, my friend and a senior editor of these pages, says the downside of Trump’s triangulation is that retaining those provisions “makes it much, much harder to get rid of the individual mandate” — as if the mandate were the bigger problem. On the contrary, the pre-existing-conditions provisions are the centerpiece of Obamacare.
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Colorado voters rejected a ballot measure that would have created a first-in-the-nation single-payer health insurance system, a significant setback for progressive proponents of universal health care.
Tuesday’s defeat of Amendment 69 was decisive, as predicted. Polling ahead of Election Day showed that two-thirds of residents opposed the measure, which would have established a program called ColoradoCare to cover most people in the state.
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