Monday, June 26, 2017

What did Donald Trump do today?

He suggested that "perhaps" he'd sabotage the current health care system to help pass his own plan.

In one of a dozen tweets he made today, Trump mused that he should "Perhaps just let OCare crash & burn!" This came as Senate Republicans struggled to rally support for their version of Trumpcare, which has so far proved to be very unpopular with voters.

Trump has made these kinds of threats before: when the first version of his plan failed in March, he declared that "the best thing we can do politically speaking is let Obamacare explode." And he's taken steps to carry them out, by deliberately creating confusion about whether he would fund the ACA's subsidies to insurers, or enforce the individual mandate that keeps relatively healthy people in the market. 

As a result, insurers have been forced to "price in" the possibility that Trump really will engage in wholesale sabotage, or abandon the individual market altogether. Trump then blames these consequences on "failing" Obamacare.

Why should I care about this?

  • A president who wants to sabotage health care will probably succeed.
  • It's wrong to use people's access to health care as a hostage in a political debate.