SABOTAGE

Care Act have failed, and Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein said Trump’s actions and words show he has defied that provision.

“His own actions, his own executive orders, his own words are doing everything but faithfully executing,” Klein told The Dispatch. “In fact, what he’s saying and doing is the exact opposite. He’s trying to sabotage Obamacare.”

The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment through a spokesman.

The lawsuit points to Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the law, executive action he has taken and tweets and statements he has made about the law as evidence that he is violating the “take care” clause.

Paul Larkin, senior legal research fellow at the conservative research group Heritage Foundation, said Trump, in fact, is upholding the Constitution because he believes the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The Heritage Foundation has been critical of the law, also known as Obamacare.

Columbus is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. The cities of Baltimore, Cincinnati and Chicago joined Columbus as plaintiffs, as well as two individuals. Klein said the city filed the suit in Maryland because that is where the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is located.

“When you look at his actions with his tweets, there’s a clear, painted picture that he hates Obamacare and he’s going to do everything in his power to dismantle it,” Klein said. “We have an opportunity to stop criticizing and start holding him accountable under the law.”

Dismantling the Affordable Care Act will directly affect the Columbus city budget because it will result in more uninsured Americans, he said. The city provides City Attorney Zach Klein says the lawsuit against President Donald Trump is based on the belief that the president, by chipping away at the Affordable Care Act, is not following the constitution. about $4.3 million a year to Primary One, a federally qualified health center that Klein said served 3,000 more uninsured patients in 2017 versus the previous year.

The lawsuit contrasts that with 2014, the year the individual mandate took effect, when the number of uninsured patients at Primary One dropped from 17,752 to 14,272.

In 2017, Primary One’s patients increased across the board, from 38,800 in 2016 to 45,616 last year. That included a bump in insured patients: from 4,398 to 6,299.

More uninsured patients also would hit the city’s fire division, which makes about 132,000 medic runs a year. The city seeks to recoup costs from insurance companies if the patient has insurance, typically recovering about 40 to 80 percent of its costs, Klein said.

For uninsured patients, the city sends a bill but doesn’t send unpaid bills to collections, he said. For uninsured patients, the recovery drops to an average of 4 percent.

Klein said that is a policy decision city leaders have made because they don’t want to burden uninsured patients.

“We provide all of our services to everyone, whether they have the ability to pay or not, “said Dr. Mysheika Roberts, Columbus health commissioner. “For those who can pay, we bill. If they have insurance, we bill them. With the Affordable Care Act, we have more clients that are coming to us that have insurance and that

we can bill for. That helps with our bottom line.”

The lawsuit also accuses the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires a court to set aside actions that are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

It alleges that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service’s 2019 Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters results in more-expensive health coverage and erects barriers to enrollment without justification and in violation of the Affordable Care Act.

The lawsuit is a “political stunt,” said Brad Sinnott, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party.

“This is astonishing. Columbus has a record homicide rate, an opioid crisis, violent crime plaguing many neighborhoods, and the Columbus city attorney is taking his time and our money to go to a Maryland courtroom to protest reforms of Obamacare,” Sinnott said.

Klein, a Democrat, said the lawsuit against the Republican president “has nothing to do with politics.”

“I don’t care what party the president is. What this partisan president is doing is undermining the insurance markets and preventing our citizens from providing good quality health insurance for their kids,” he said. “That’s what’s at stake. If you don’t have your health, you have nothing.”