Trump tweet predicts bipartisan health plan
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Tuesday predicted that Democrats and Republicans will “eventually” work together on “a great new HealthCare plan.”
In a Twitter post sent early Tuesday from his Florida resort, Trump said “the very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate has been terminated as part of our Tax Cut Bill, which essentially Repeals (over time) Obamacare.”
As a result, he wrote, “the Democrats & Republicans will eventually come together and develop a great new HealthCare plan!”
The individual mandate requires that most people have health insurance or pay a penalty.
Later, Trump criticized the FBI and claimed that a dossier containing unsubstantiated allegations about his connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin is a “pile of garbage.”
Trump, who is spending the holidays at his private Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, appeared to be watching and quoting from the morning cable-news show Fox and Friends.
“WOW, foxandfrlends ‘Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.’ And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!” Trump tweeted.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund the dossier, which was
first published by news website BuzzFeed in January. Officials have said that some of the information it contains has been corroborated, but other parts — including the most salacious claims about Trump’s behavior — remain unverified.
Trump and congressional Republican leaders are ramping up their criticism of the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading an investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. On Christmas Eve, Trump tweeted an attack against FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who now plans to retire under
increasing criticism from Republicans.
Trump had no public events on his official schedule Tuesday, and he headed out to Trump International Golf Club shortly after sending his morning tweets. He was golfing there with Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., PGA tour player Bryson DeChambau and former PGA player Dana Quigley.
Trump, in wishing everyone a merry Christmas, tweeted Monday that “tomorrow it’s back to work in order to Make America Great Again.”
Despite Trump’s disdain for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, much of it remains intact, and the sign-up period for the various insurance options was carried out as normal this year.
Republicans, who hold a majority in both the House and Senate, sought repeatedly this year to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health care law but couldn’t get it through the Senate.
Meanwhile, public support for the perennially contentious law has inched up to around its highest point in a half-dozen years. Nearly 9 million people so far have signed up for Affordable Care Act health plans for 2018 during a foreshortened enrollment season, far surpassing expectations.
This dual reality puts the
sprawling Affordable Care Act at a new precipice, with its long-term future hinging on the November midterm elections certain to consume Washington once the new year begins. If Democrats win a majority in either chamber of Congress, the law would be protected; a GOP sweep could further embolden repeal attempts.
“It’s right on the balance there,” said Robert Blendon, a Harvard professor of health policy and political analysis. “The viability of the program is heavily dependent on the outcome of the election, not the changes in between.”
With recent polls showing health care remains a top concern among voters, both major political parties have an incentive to wield it as an election issue. Democrats are likely to argue that the GOP wants to take coverage away from millions of Americans, with Republicans focusing on escalating insurance prices.
What happens in the interim, health-policy analysts say, depends on how events play out in three arenas — Capitol Hill, the White House and the insurance industry.
After a year of full GOP control, congressional Republicans and the White House have damaged the Affordable Care Act but fallen short of their vehement goal of dismantling broad parts of it. More ambiguous is whether their end-of-year victory — removing tax penalties starting in 2019 for people who violate the insurance mandate — will whet the GOP’s appetite for taking apart more of the law.
“To those who believe — including Senate Republican leadership — that in 2018 there will not be another effort to repeal and replace
Obamacare — well you are sadly mistaken,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeted last week.
Graham’s vow was a rejoinder to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who suggested in an NPR interview that “we’ll probably move on to other issues.”
He also noted that the chamber’s slender GOP majority will shrink to one senator once the Democratic winner of a special election in Alabama is sworn in next month.
Meanwhile, the administration is pressing forward with at least one more jab at the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. As directed by an executive order that Trump signed this fall, officials are finishing a draft rule to make it easier for insurers to sell meager but inexpensive health plans that skirt the law’s coverage requirements.
The ground-level effect of such changes for consumers rests in large part on how the insurance industry responds.
Without Congress passing a measure to help stabilize the law’s marketplaces and with greater availability of skimpy health plans, “we risk the individual market on the exchanges becoming a de facto highrisk pool,” said one industry official not authorized to speak on the record.
That means premiums would soar, causing those exchanges to shrink and become the province of sick, expensive customers.
On the other hand, said Joseph Antos, a health care scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, more expensive premiums could “move in the opposite direction of knocking down” the health law because the law’s premium subsidies would rise to keep pace.
For the more than 80 percent of health law customers who qualify for those subsidies, he said, more generous subsidies could make it easier to afford higher tiers of coverage, motivating more people to sign up.
Such hard-to-predict boomerang effects could be true of the insurance mandate as well, analysts said.
The requirement has always been the least popular part of the law. So at a time when the most recent polls show that slightly more than half the public regards the Affordable Care Act favorably, removing the most objectionable feature “could even be a blessing in disguise” for supporters, said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Information for this article was contributed by Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post and by staff members of The Associated Press.