Obamacare leaves Trump with a nasty headache
“Donald Trump’s life story is a pyramid scheme of ambitions,” said Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. His whole brand is based on “selling banality with braggadocio”. But the gap between his promises and reality is becoming ever more apparent, particularly now that he’s trying to pass his first big piece of legislation – the replacement of his predecessor’s signature healthcare reforms. During the presidential campaign, Trump swore that he would abolish so-called Obamacare, and replace it with a cheaper and better system that would cover everyone. Needless to say, that’s not happening. The Republicans have instead come up with a badly drafted bill, dubbed Trumpcare, that would actually shrink coverage. According to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the plan would result in 24 million fewer Americans having health insurance by 2026.
The bill is flawed, said Ian Tuttle in National Review, but let’s not forget that Obamacare is itself in crisis. Obama’s landmark reform made it obligatory – on pain of a tax penalty – for every American to take out health insurance, with subsidies provided for the poorest. But millions of people, put off by high premiums, have chosen to pay the penalty instead. As a result, only 28% of Obamacare enrollees are between the ages of 18 and 34 – far less than the 40% analysts predicted would be necessary to keep insurance premiums stable. The pool of the insured is getting older, sicker and smaller, pushing premiums up and sending the whole system into a “death spiral”.
GOP leaders are in a fix, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. They’re attracting flak from hardliners, who say the bill merely tinkers with the present system and amounts to “Obamacare Lite”; but they’re also being attacked by moderates, who fear the less generous provisions will cause too many people to lose cover. And they have a point. For all its flaws, Obamacare has “changed expectations” by extending cover to 20 million more Americans. When entitlements are given, you take them away at your peril. “There’s a reason not one Western democracy with some system of national healthcare has ever abolished it.” The best option for Trump may be to let the Democrats defeat this bill in Congress, and wait for Obamacare to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.