But it is absolutely possible to craft a health-reform agenda that conforms to Trump’s core policy principles: (1) repealing and replacing Obamacare; (2) near-universal coverage; (3) lower health insurance premiums. As a bonus, these goals can be achieved by a plan that reduces federal spending, cuts taxes, and improves health outcomes for the poor.
Few would have predicted that Donald Trump could be a more successful health reformer than Barack Obama. But if he can get over a few important hurdles, it could very well end up being true.
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House Republicans and Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Thursday agreed on a plan to punt the government funding debate into early next year and begin preparations to repeal Obamacare.
Emerging from their meeting with Pence in the Capitol, House GOP lawmakers unified behind a continuing resolution that would extend government funding, set to expire on Dec. 9, through March.
“I think the main reason was the Trump admin had a desire to have an input on what’s in that spending bill when they take office,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) told reporters after the meeting.
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The main objective of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to increase enrollment in health insurance among those who were previously uninsured. Official estimates from the Census Bureau have consistently overstated the number of people who are uninsured. A major factor in the overestimate is the undercount of people in Medicaid. Also, millions of Americans have been officially uninsured despite their eligibility for public insurance or employer coverage. With the passage of the ACA, fewer than 10 percent of the remaining uninsured do not have a realistic path to securing health insurance. The future of the ACA is now uncertain, but any future policy changes will likely need to provide a sure path to insurance coverage for all Americans as well.
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President-elect Trump has made waves by saying that though he plans to repeal Obamacare, he wants to keep the aspect of it that bans coverage for those with pre-existing conditions. But this is not possible without broader changes to the healthcare system.
The pre-existing condition ban is ultimately one of the primary drivers of the premium hikes we’re seeing within Obamacare. The reason is that with insurers forced to offer coverage to anybody who applies, they incur higher medical costs, and they thus require more signups from younger and healthier people — but those signups aren’t materializing in a large enough volume to offset costs.
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Republicans on Capitol Hill are growing confident that they can begin to repeal Obamacare once President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in, along with a pledge to replace it later.
“We have an Obamacare emergency right now,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate HELP Committee. “I think we could move forward in January on some aspects of repeal but we need to make sure that we are helping people and that we do no harm.”
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Congressional Republicans may be mulling a plan to repeal Obamacare before President-elect Trump takes office, a top GOP leader said Wednesday.
“Nothing has been decided but that is certainly one of the options,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters after a closed-door GOP meeting on Wednesday.
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Steven Lopez has gone without health insurance for 15 years, and the Affordable Care Act hasn’t changed his mind. Once again this year he will forgo coverage, he said, even though it means another tax penalty.
Last tax season, the 51-year-old information technology professional and his family paid a mandatory penalty of nearly $1,000, he said. That’s because they found it preferable to the $400 to $500 monthly cost of an Obamacare health plan.
“I’m paying $6,000 to have the privilege of then paying another $5,000 [in deductibles],” said Lopez, who lives in Downey, a suburb of Los Angeles. “It’s baloney — not worth it.”
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Virtually every Republican member of Congress who has been interviewed on TV has assured the national viewing audience that a top priority come January will be to repeal Obamacare. They make it sound easy. It is easy. At least defunding Obamacare is easy. And without any money to spend, what we call Obamacare would wither on the vine in short order.
Congress has already done this once. A procedure known as “reconciliation” deals with budget matters and it can’t be filibustered. That means if Republicans all vote in lock step the Democrats can’t stop them. Last year, Republicans in the House and the Senate voted to take all they money out of Obamacare through their reconciliation bill. The bill did not repeal the Obamacare mandates or Obamacare regulations because those are non-budget matters. But with no money to spend, all those mandates and regulations aren’t worth the paper they are written on.
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According to a recent statistical analysis, medical care determines only about 11 percent of health—far less than individual behavior (38 percent), social circumstances (23 percent), and genetics and biology (21 percent). The preponderance of evidence demonstrates that much of what we spend on health care does not translate into better health outcomes and that collectively we don’t receive nearly enough benefit to justify the costs in higher taxes, higher premiums and lower wages.
As Congress and the incoming Trump administration consider how to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), they should focus on the drivers of excessive spending, the primary one of which is comprehensive health insurance. By doing so, President-elect Trump can best attempt to deliver on his promise of “great health care for much less money.”
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President-elect Donald Trump says he wants to preserve health insurance coverage even as he pursues repeal of the Obama-era overhaul that provided it to millions of uninsured people.
How his administration handles a pending lawsuit over billions of dollars in insurance subsidies will reveal whether Trump wants an orderly transition to a Republican-designed system or if he’d push “Obamacare” over a cliff. Stripping away the subsidies at issue in the case would put the program into a free-fall.
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