Weird 180 on health keeps pols guessing

HE SAYS, THEY SAY

HE WAS FOR it before he was against it.

President Trump gave whiplash to lawmakers on Wednesday — sending them spinning as he oscillated between opposing views on a bipartisan health care deal.

Trump sent mixed signals to senators seeking to stabilize Affordable Care Act by restoring subsidies to health insurers.

The deal announced Tuesday by Lamar Alexander (RTenn.) and Patty Murray (DWash.) was intended to shore up Obamacare by reviving billions of dollars of subsidies to insurers for two years to help lower-income Americans obtain medical coverage.

The bill is needed after the Trump administration followed through on the President’s plan from last week to end the subsidies — withholding a payment of hundreds of millions of dollars to insurers.

Alexander said Trump had “completely engineered” the bipartisan proposal, something Trump shied away from on Wednesday after expressing his support a day earlier.

“Lamar Alexander’s working on it very hard from our side. And if something can happen, that’s fine,” Trump said. “But I won’t do anything to enrich the insurance companies . . . . They’ve been enriched by Obamacare like nothing anybody’s ever seen before.”

Trump’s populist message didn’t sit well with critics who say he’s being disingenuous and contrary.

“This President keeps zigging and zagging so it’s impossible to govern,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor. “Our only hope is that maybe tomorrow he’ll be for this again.”

Insurers say they do not profit from the subsidies but pass on the savings directly to consumers to reduce the deductibles, co-payments and other out-ofpocket medical expenses for low-income Americans.

Ending the subsidies, which are called cost-sharing reduction payments, will likely sow chaos in the 2018 Obamacare health insurance markets.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump does not support the deal in its current form, although she called it “a good step in the right direction.”

Myeshia Johnson grieves over casket of husband, Sgt. La David Johnson (left), who was killed in Niger. President Trump coldly told the widow the soldier “knew what he signed up for,” according to Rep. Frederica Wilson (facing page, left), as well as...