What has been done

Am I alone on this? When candidate Donald Trump promised to repeal and replace the previous administration’s Affordable Care Act with a beautiful health-care plan that would insure everybody with better coverage and lower costs without impacting Medicare and Medicaid, I assumed he was referring to a plan his administration would develop and submit to the Congress and Senate. As far as I can tell, this administration has done nothing along those lines except to demand these legislative bodies put something together that the president could sign that would reflect some actual legislative “accomplishment.” That accomplishment doesn’t seem to be anything more than to repeal the program currently in place.

The replacement bill from the Congress was praised by Trump and even resulted in a White House lawn celebration. When deemed disastrous and dead on arrival by the Senate, it was then deemed by Trump as far too “mean.” Now, the equally mean Senate bill is considered by the president a wonderful, must-pass piece of legislation.

So, has this administration done any real work to produce this promised health-care program? Such a legislative proposal, of course, would take serious concerted effort, thought, deliberation, and input from many affected constituencies, such as the numerous national medical organizations, AARP, CBO, etc., to come up with solutions to the complex issues surrounding health care (who knew the issue of health care could be so complex?).

Such concentrated effort on the part of the president might, unfortunately, interfere with extended golf weekends and incessant nonsensical tweets. Shall we assume the Trump administration has an equally welldeliberated tax-reform proposal to put before Congress? Time will tell. JOSEPH LOMBARDI

Greenbrier