What the columnists said

“It took almost a year, but we now have the ‘Trump Doctrine,’” said Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. On nearly every major issue—health care, the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate agreement, the domestic clean power initiative—the president’s position is the same: “Obama built it. I broke it. You fix it.” His guiding motivation is to smash his predecessor’s legacy—regardless of what happens “the morning after.” Trump’s policy sabotage, and his repeated insistence that Obamacare is “imploding,” has already badly damaged the program, said Greg Sargent in WashingtonPost.com. Polling shows that “only 31 percent of customers insured through the ACA exchanges and 12 percent of the uninsured” know that open enrollment starts on Nov. 1. Trump’s false claim that Obamacare is “finished” will no doubt “fuel [this] lack of awareness.”

I thought liberals wanted to “reduce the number of uninsured,” said Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post. Yet when Trump allows insurers to sell policies at half the price of “bronze” plans on the exchanges, they shout “Sabotage!” The ACA’s “one-size-fits-all package” is patently unfair for young, healthy people who rarely require medical treatment. Why should “the healthy pay the same for insurance as the chronically ill”?

Trump thinks if he inflicts “sufficient damage” on Obamacare, he can blackmail Democrats into cutting a health-care deal “on his terms,” said Ezra Klein in Vox.com. But Republicans control both Congress and the White House, and if the health-care system falls into chaos, the president and the GOP will “absorb the blame.” Trump is “sabotaging himself.”