The Trump administration has fought strongly for a repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act since Trump took office this year. The administration failed to get a bill through Congress that would’ve essentially done just that. The intentions of the current administration are clear in wanting Obamacare to “implode,” attempting to do so one more time through last week’s executive order.
Some of the major changes this executive order would bring would be to withhold the cost-sharing subsidies that the government pays insurance companies. These subsidies are important in reducing deductibles for many low-income people. Creating a space for cheap insurance plans to enter the marketplace, plans that do not cover all that much. This would increase risks to all Americans, because healthy people will be fine unless and until they get sick and have an insurance plan that won’t pay for their medical treatment. In the seriousness of these changes the current administration has promised, a new bipartisan deal has been proposed. This deal would restore the government subsidies to insurers, reversing the President’s decision to discontinue the subsidies for the next two years. The bipartisan deal created by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and Democratic Senator Patty Murray currently has the support of 12 Republicans and 12 Democrats, taking it one step closer to the 60-vote super-majority it needs to become a tangible prospect in the Senate. Without Presidential support, Trump reversed his initial support for the agreement on Wednesday, the deal won’t lead to a concrete solution.
Some other alarming re-workings the Trump administration has made have been allowing plans to stop covering various forms of birth control and making cuts to programs that help people enroll in Obamacare, ultimately making the process of looking for and getting health insurance more difficult. In promising to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, this administration is not providing better options to the American people but putting the lives of the more than twenty million people that have been insured through Obamacare and essentially the future of our country on the line.