Trump targets Obamacare
What happened
Two U.S. senators unveiled a bipartisan proposal to fix parts of the Affordable Care Act this week, after President Trump announced executive actions that critics said would sabotage the beleaguered health-care law. The president’s most significant move was ceasing about $10 billion in federal funding for cost-sharing reductions—key payments to health insurers that offset the cost of covering about 7 million low-income Americans through Obamacare. Under the compromise offered by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Congress would authorize funding for these payments for two years, in exchange for giving states greater flexibility to regulate health coverage. If passed, the legislation would ease the review process for states that want waivers from some of the law’s requirements, and expand eligibility for “catastrophic insurance,” which is cheaper but less comprehensive than other ACA plans. The proposal would also provide $106 million in enrollment outreach funding, largely offsetting the Trump administration’s recent efforts to cut programs that seek to enroll the uninsured.
Republican congressional leaders did not take a position on the Alexander-Murray bill, and several GOP lawmakers came out against it, describing it as a means to prop up Obamacare. Trump initially called the proposal a “very good” deal, but a day later said Congress should “find a solution to the Obamacare mess instead of providing bailouts to insurance companies.” The president vowed to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and eventually replace it. “Obamacare is finished,” Trump said. “It’s dead. It’s gone.”
What the editorials said
Trump’s executive orders were a “malicious” attack on our healthcare system, said the Los Angeles Times. Obamacare works by offsetting the higher health-care costs of older, sicker consumers with the premiums of younger, healthier people. Allowing too many of the young to leave the ACA’s insurance pools will force insurers to raise premiums for everyone else. And halting the cost-sharing payments will force insurers to either steeply raise premiums or abandon the exchanges altogether. If Republicans don’t pass the Alexander-Murray proposal, they’ll “add roughly 20 percent to the premiums faced by millions of their constituents.”