USA TODAY International Edition
Obamacare
“I seem to be in the same position as a lot of people around town. I didn’t see this coming,” said Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “Maybe the president believes this is better politics with his base. Maybe this is an opening salvo in what he expects to be a negotiation on health care. Both would be news to me.
“I’m eager to figure out exactly what the strategy is and what the pieces are because this is all quite baffling,” he said.
“The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care – you watch,” Trump predicted Tuesday at the Capitol as he entered a luncheon with Senate Republicans, echoing remarks he’d posted on Twitter minutes earlier.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., shot back, “If that is true, God help middle-class Americans.”
Repeal and replacement of President Barack Obama’s signature health care overhaul has been a rallying cry for the GOP from the moment it was signed into law 10 years ago this month. Trump promised during his 2016 presidential campaign he would get the law overturned.
GOP efforts to repeal Obamacare in Congress have repeatedly fallen short. Half of those surveyed in March by the Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll had a favorable view of the law, and 39 percent didn’t like it.
The battle shifted back to the courts last year when a coalition of Republicanled states brought a lawsuit arguing the entire law should be tossed out.
U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in the Northern District of Texas sided with the states and ruled in December the health care law was unconstitutional. O’Connor ruled that a foundation for the law – the requirement people buy insurance or pay a penalty – was no longer constitutional because Congress had repealed the penalty. Because that provision was so central to the health law, O’Connor said, the whole thing had to be invalidated.
Justice Department lawyers initially argued that parts of the law, including an expansion of Medicaid that provides coverage for millions of people, could stand. The department reversed that position Monday, saying in a letter to the appeals court that the administration agrees with O’Connor that all of the law must go.
That would affect nearly every person in the country, according to experts. Besides expanding insurance coverage, the law made sweeping changes throughout the health care system, including establishing protections for people with preexisting health conditions, removing annual or lifetime caps on insurance benefits, allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans and improving Medicare’s drug benefit. Even the Trump administration relies on parts of the law to meet campaign promises such as reducing prescription drug prices and fighting the opioid epidemic.
Congressional Democrats braced for a battle. “Days before the election, Republicans aired ads pretending to defend health care,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “Today, they have a new message: People don’t deserve quality health care and insurance companies should discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. We will fight tooth and nail.”