President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at Democrats on Thursday over their efforts to preserve Obamacare, denouncing the measure as a “lie” as he called for a less expensive and more effective health care system. “The Democrats, lead by head clown Chuck Schumer, know how bad Obamacare is and what a mess they are in,” Mr. Trump wrote in the first of three posts on Twitter. “Instead of working to fix it, they do the typical political thing and BLAME,” Trump continued on Twitter. “The fact is Obamacare was a lie from the beginning. ‘Keep you doctor, keep your plan!’” He said it was time for Republicans and Democrats to work together on a “plan that really works — much less expensive & FAR BETTER!”
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Congress often waits for a new president to take office before it gets down to business. This year, Republicans will drop that custom in their dash to scrap the Affordable Care Act.
Within hours of the new Congress convening on Tuesday, the House plans to adopt a package of rules to clear the way for repealing the health care law and replacing it with as-yet-unspecified measures meant to help people obtain insurance coverage.
Then, in the week of Jan. 9, according to a likely timetable sketched out by Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, the House will vote on a budget blueprint, which is expected to call for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
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About 6.4 million people have signed up for health insurance next year under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration said Wednesday, as people rushed to purchase plans regardless of Republican promises that the law will be repealed within months.
The new sign-ups — an increase of 400,000 over a similar point last year — mean the health care coverage of millions of consumers could be imperiled by one of the first legislative actions of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Hundreds of thousands of other people who took no action will be automatically re-enrolled by the federal government in the same or similar plans, officials said, and their coverage could be threatened as well. Consumers still have until the end of January to enroll.
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When President-elect Donald Trump chose Representative Tom Price of Georgia to be his health and human services secretary, the American Medical Association swiftly endorsed the selection of one of its own, an orthopedic surgeon who has championed the role of physicians throughout his legislative career.
Then the larger world of doctors and nurses weighed in on the beliefs and record of Mr. Price, a suburban Atlanta Republican — and the split among caregivers, especially doctors, quickly grew sharp.
“The A.M.A. does not speak for us,” says a petition signed by more than 5,000 doctors.
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House Republicans, responding to criticism that repealing the Affordable Care Act would leave millions without health insurance, said on Thursday that their goal in replacing President Obama’s health law was to guarantee “universal access” to health care and coverage, not necessarily to ensure that everyone actually has insurance.
“Our goal here is to make sure that everybody can buy coverage or find coverage if they choose to,” a House leadership aide told journalists on the condition of anonymity at a health care briefing organized by Republican leaders.
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Republicans will need to deliver something else that works better than the Affordable Care Act, while avoiding overpromises and disruption of care. “Repeal” of many portions of the ACA is important – done, of course, in a manner that improves, not worsens, people’s lives. The Republicans in Congress and Tom Price, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services would repeal as much of the ACA as they can reach through the budget reconciliation process.
Within the individual insurance market, people with costly pre-existing conditions will gain and maintain protections against coverage exclusions or higher premiums, as long as they maintain “continuous” eligible coverage, an approach that already operates effectively across the employer-based group insurance market. This will replace the individual mandate, by operating as a positive incentive, rather than a negative burden, to become and remain insured. As mandated coverage requirements are loosened, willing buyers will be able to find willing sellers who can match their preferences and resources.
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Arizona was shaping up to be one of the more unlikely battlegrounds of the 2016 campaign when a political bombshell appeared to explode last week: The Obama administration revealed that the cost of midlevel plans on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace here would increase next year by 116 percent on average.
Senator John McCain, running for re-election against the headwind of Donald J. Trump, took the bad news as a gift, highlighting it in a new television ad that begins, “When you open up your health insurance bill and find your premiums are doubling, remember that McCain strongly opposes Obamacare.”
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The architects of the Affordable Care Act thought they had a blunt instrument to force people—even young and healthy ones—to buy insurance through the law’s online marketplaces: a tax penalty for those who remain uninsured. The full weight of the penalty will not be felt until April, when those who have avoided buying insurance will face penalties of around $700 a person or more. But for the young and healthy who are badly needed to make the exchanges work, it is sometimes cheaper to pay the Internal Revenue Service than an insurance company charging large premiums, with huge deductibles. The IRS says that 8.1 million returns included penalty payments for people who went without insurance in 2014, the first year in which most people were required to have coverage.
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Donald J. Trump, desperate for a winning political issue in the final two weeks of the presidential race, fiercely attacked Hillary Clinton on Tuesday over sharp premium increases that will hit some Americans covered under the Affordable Care Act.
“The rates are going through the sky,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Sanford, Fla., referring to double-digit increases in battleground states like North Carolina and Iowa.
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When the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace opens in two weeks, many consumers will have a new option for the law’s fourth open-enrollment period: standardized health plans that cover basic services without a deductible.
With many health plans on the marketplace coming with deductibles in the thousands of dollars, consumers have complained that they were getting little benefit beyond coverage for catastrophic problems. The new standardized options are meant to address that concern — to ensure that “enrollees receive some upfront value for their premium dollars,” as the Obama administration said.
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