By
Robert P. B0mboy
President
Trump is the kind of man who holds a grudge and bottles up perceived insults
until he can lash out and try to get revenge. He's about to take his own brand
of revenge against Obamacare.
He couldn't get his first cruel Unaffordable
Care Act through the House of Representatives, where even Republicans spit on
it. So he's thought up at least five ways to sabotage necessary medical
care for millions of defenseless Americans like us.
In the first place, he is
threatening to kill an Obamacare provision that enables health insurers
to offer plans with lower deductibles and fewer out-of-pocket expenses to about
seven million low-income and Middle Class Americans like you and me. This kind
of payment is a subsidy, and conservatives hate
subsidies, unless the subsidies are going to the richest one percent of
Americans. Conservatives have been trying for years to end these subsidies
in an effort to wreck Obamacare. Nearly 60 percent of the 12.2 million people
who bought Obamacare health insurance policies this year benefit from these
provisions reducing their deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses.
Without these subsidies, health care could be unaffordable for many of them.
Three years
ago House Republicans ginned up a lawsuit contending that the
Obamacare law doesn't have authority from Congress for these kinds of payments.
That lawsuit is moving through the courts. As an easy way to sabotage
Obamacare, President Trump can order federal lawyers not to put up any fight
against the suit. Like Pilate, he can wash his hands and say, "It's not my
problem!" Without any defense, with the federal lawyers' hands tied, the
Republicans who filed the suit will get their way, and the little people, and
their children, will suffer.
Another kind of subsidy in
Obamacare is the tax credit. Big business gets tax credits all the time, but
don't try to give a new tax credit to people who are not rich. Trumpsters say
that's un-American.
Under the Obamacare law
since 2010, middle-income Americans have been able to get tax credits as
a subsidy to offset what we pay in health insurance premiums. As you might
expect, President Trump wants to reduce the health-insurance tax credit. If he does
that, millions of people will lose the benefit of lower monthly payments or an
end-of-the-year tax savings.
A
third trick that the President can use to wreck Obamacare is to sabotage the
requirement that people must have health insurance.
The existing Obamacare law
requires Americans to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty. That was one
of the reasons 20 million more of us went on health insurance with Obamacare -
we're reasonable; we thought it was cheaper to buy the insurance, and we
don't like tax penalties. Before Obamacare, a lot of people were trying to
slide by without health insurance (I'm OK, right?); then they caught
something awful, wound up in the Emergency Room, and had a $40,000 hospital
bill.
Following one of the gross
executive orders that President Trump so eagerly signed on his first day in
office, those friendly guys at the I.R.S. - the people to whom we just paid our
taxes - took on a policy that could weaken requirements for Americans to have
health insurance, by shoving through tax returns without penalties, even when
the taxpayer doesn't say whether he or she has health insurance. This will
dramatically weaken Obamacare by undercutting public participation in it.
Also,
the Republican health care bill that failed last month in the House of Representatives
would have cut the amount of money the federal government gives to Pennsylvania
and other states to help people on Medicaid. Governor Tom Wolfe has said some
of that Medicaid money is treating and protecting 63,000 Pennsylvanians against
death from drug overdoses. Access to
treatment through Medicaid is keeping Pennsylvanians alive who might otherwise
face overdoses or worse.
Miffed
at what happened to his Unaffordable Care Act, President Trump could waive
normal Medicaid rules and encourage all 50 states to charge insurance premiums
to more Medicaid recipients, making Obamacare unaffordable for them.
Finally,
the Trump Administration can redefine and restrict definitions of the benefits
that Obamacare offers. Under the existing law, all insurers must offer 10
categories of essential health benefits, like maternity care and hospital
treatment. But within those categories, with some tricky definitions, Trump
could say how much and when those benefits would be available, or not.
Whatever tricks the
President employs to injure Obamacare, they will be cruel and recompense for
the insult done to him when the House of Representatives last month exercised
its better judgment.
##
No comments:
Post a Comment