Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price can kill Obamacare effective almost immediately without the need to get Trumpcare passed in the Senate. This political science professor explains how.
It is important that American citizens not only oppose Trumpcare but pressure all of their representatives to act now to stop the Obamacare sabotage. Call your politicians every day just like your morning coffee.
Simon Header, Assistant Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University wrote a piece everyone must read and act upon titled “How Trump and Tom Price can kill Obamacare without the Senate.” He explains the regulatory method that Trump through Tom Price can use to cripple Obamacare.
Senate leadership has indicated that passage of the American Health Care Act “will not be quick,” but it may not matter. Individual insurance markets already are shaky, in limbo by a lawsuit that challenges subsidies to help pay out-of-pocket costs for low-income people.
Even without congressional or judicial actions, the White House and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price have many tools at their disposal to significantly reshape the Affordable Care Act through regulatory action. The ACA’s Essential Health Benefits provisions provide an illustrative example, and one that is not getting nearly the attention of the subsidies. Having conducted research on regulatory policymaking and the Affordable Care Act, particularly the implementation of its Essential Health Benefits provisions, I can show you how.
The professor goes on to point out that because the ACA gave a lot of regulatory latitude to HHS, Tom Price can choose to interpret Essential Health Benefits in ways that are more lenient. Of course, this would be a detriment to most Americans because insurance companies would have a license to sell junk.
According to the professor, Tom Price has two options to accomplish this. The first, having HHS regulations preempt state law. The second is to have HHS give more leeway to states which mean, again, Red States will likely allow insurance companies to hurt their citizens just like their governments are currently hurting them by not accepting the ACA expansion to Medicaid. They are willing to have their citizens die because of ideology.
It is important that we are up to speed with all the issues. With the broadcast mainstream media concerned solely on easy to digest issues or shallow stories, it is up to us all to stay informed. As the professor said, Trump can kill sabotage Obamacare from several directions. While stopping out of pocket subsidies is one way to cripple the ACA, the Essential Health Benefits addressed in his article is just as important.