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Trump says administration will continue legal fight to eliminate Obamacare
Donald Trump on Wednesday said he and his administration will continue to supports a Republican-led lawsuit before the Supreme Court which seeks to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re not doing anything. In other words, we’re staying with the group, with Texas and the group,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“Obamacare is a disaster, but we’ve run it very well, and we’ve made it barely acceptable,” Trump said. “It was a disaster under President Obama, and it’s very bad health care. What we want to do is terminate it and give health care. We’ll have great health care, including preexisting conditions.”
And more than 1.2 million Americans have already tested positive for the virus, while nearly 72,000 have died from it, according to a tally from the Washington Post.
Also, more than 30 million people has already lost their jobs, as a result they will loose their employer-sponsored health care.
And without the ACA also known as Obamacare, it’s doubtful how those Americans would secure health insurance to pay for the cost of medical care or hospitalization in case they have the coronavirus.
Trump said his administration had “already pretty much killed it because we got rid of the individual mandate.
“”We want to terminate health care for — under Obamacare because it’s bad, and we’re replacing it with a great health care at far less money and it includes preexisting conditions,” he said. However, the White House has yet to offer an alternative to the 2010 law.
And members of Trump’s own administration, such as Attorney General William Barr, have urged Trump to back off its support of a lawsuit from Republican attorneys general which would invalidate Obamacare.
So, according to CNN, those aides fear the political blow back if Obamacare is repealed, given that the law is popular.
And this could have major political implications if the comprehensive health care law appears in jeopardy as voters head to the polls in November.
But president once tried to repeal Obamacare, but failed due to the unpopularity of the GOP’s replacement plan — says he has no plan to abandon support for the lawsuit.
So, the drive to end the Affordable Care Act in the midst of a COVID19 pandemic threatens to inject more chaos into an already haphazard system. Even with the Affordable Care Act, census estimates say that 27.5 million people in the U.S. were uninsured in 2018.
Instead, he said without providing a concrete plan that he will replace Obamacare with something better that will still cover preexisting conditions and will cost less.
The GOP plan that failed to pass Congress in 2017 did not fully cover preexisting conditions and would have allowed insurers to charge sick people more money for coverage.
Trump’s full comment from a media availability with reporters on May 6 is below:
REPORTER: Today is the deadline for the White House if it wants to modify its argument before the Supreme Court about invalidating Obamacare… Will you continue with the plan to completely invalidate the ACA …
DONALD TRUMP: So what we want to do … We’re not doing anything. In other words we’re staying with the group, with Texas and the group.
But just so you understand, Obamacare is a disaster. But we’ve run it very well, and we’ve made it barely acceptable.
It was a disaster under President Obama, and it’s a very bad health care. What we want to do is terminate it and give great health care, and we’ll have great health care, including preexisting conditions, 100% preexisting conditions.
Now, we’ve already pretty much killed it, because we got rid of the individual mandate.
Now in getting rid of the individual mandate, which was by far the most unpopular thing in Obamacare… That’s where for the privilege of paying a fee you don’t have to buy health insurance at a ridiculous price for not good health insurance. It was a terrible thing. You were mandated to pay something in order not to pay. And we got rid of that, it’s gone, and nobody thinks it’s ever going to come back.
But what we are doing is we want to terminate health care for under Obamacare because it’s bad, and we’re replacing it with a great health care at far less money and it includes preexisting conditions. There will never be a time when we don’t have preexisting conditions included.
So, what I’m saying there, John, is we’re going to replace Obamacare with great health care at a lesser price, and preexisting conditions will be included, and you won’t have the individual mandate, which was expensive and terrible and very unfair to everybody, and it was very unpopular.
“The U.S. performs worse than average among similarly large and wealthy countries across nearly all measures of preparedness for a pandemic,” Cynthia Cox, director of the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, told Vox. “The coronavirus outbreak is already exposing inefficiencies and inequities in our health system, and it is likely to put much more strain on the system in the coming weeks.”
And Andy Slavitt, who was part of the team that fixed Healthcare.gov after a botched rollout, said that all of this isn’t new. He said that Republicans, like Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have been trying to dismantle the ACA prior to the coronavirus.
But the greater problem in his mind is the lawsuit. The consequence of invalidating the ACA, he said, should be obvious:
“A lot more people would die. I mean that’s as simple as that,” he said. “A lot more people would die. And a lot more hospitals would go bankrupt more quickly. And they probably end up spending more money trying to plug the holes in the dike, than they would with the Affordable Care Act, which is actually quite a reasonable deal for taxpayers.”
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