In a stunning turn of events, President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan’s health care bill has been pulled due to a lack of votes in Congress. What’s with all the opposition? Trump Care is just a nickname for the bill, which is actually called the “American Health Care Act”, or AHCA. To really understand how this got into Congress so quickly, we have to rewind back to Inauguration Day.
On January 20th, 2017 Donald Trump was officially pronounced the 45th President of the United States; on this same day, Trump signed an executive order called the “Executive Order Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” I really don’t know why it’s so long, but it could alternatively be titled “We’re Trying to Get Rid of Obamacare But We Don’t Want to Tell You About It”, which sounds like a Fall Out Boy song. NBC describes the executive order:
“the Trump administration will “seek prompt repeal” of the law. To minimize the “economic burden” of Obamacare, the order instructs the secretary of health and human services and other agency heads to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation” of any part of the law that places a fiscal burden on the government, businesses or individuals.”
All this executive order really does is set up a way for the Trump administration to easily get rid of the Affordable Care Act without much protest from Congress or the public. However, this proved to be not as easy as Trump thought. He even said, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”, although, plenty of people, including former Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders let him know that they did, in fact, know how complicated health care was.
The bill itself first came out in mid-March, however, the Congressional Budget Office didn’t come out with a report until a week or so after it was announced. This is unusual for legislation, as the CBO usually analyzes and writes the reports before the bill is announced or put into Congress. The conclusions they came to about the AHCA were completely unheard of and shocking. The most important and noted statistic was that 24 million less people would have health care by 2026. Other discrepancies included defunding Planned Parenthood for a year, cutting 1 billion in funding for the Center for Disease Control, and changing subsidies based on income to being based on age. Now, I’m not an expert on health care legislation, mostly because that stuff is difficult as hell to understand, so I found myself some videos explaining what exactly everything meant.
Now, the good thing about this bill is that it was pulled by Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump himself, making it gone for good. Why, you might ask? Mostly because radical conservatives, who call themselves the Freedom Caucus, thought it wasn’t radical enough and included too much Obamacare, therefore, it failed to secure their votes. This gives cause for concern; Trump isn’t going to give up changing health care after one failed attempt, even though he probably does have a bald-eagle sized hole in his ego. What’s to come next? An even worse bill? Only time will tell.
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