Healthcare

“The party of health care”

Written by SK Ashby

The Trump regime has formally shifted positions and backed a legal effort to strike down the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in its entirety, but don't worry -- Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Mick Mulvaney says no one will lose their coverage if their effort succeeds.

Although Republicans have never successfully passed an alternative health care plan through Congress over the past 8 years, Mulvaney appeared on ABC News yesterday morning where told more than a few lies.

[With] no clear GOP replacement plan, Mulvaney provided few details on how he could make such guarantee.

On "This Week," ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Mulvaney whether he could provide such a guarantee for the millions of people who enrolled through HealthCare.gov, including those with pre-existing conditions and the people under the age of 26 enrolled under their parents' plans.

"Yes and here's why," Mulvaney said Sunday. "Let's talk about pre-existing conditions, because it gets a lot of the attention and rightly so. Every single plan that this White House has ever put forward since Donald Trump was elected, covered pre-existing conditions."

It is not actually true that plans supported by Trump would cover pre-existing conditions.

In fact, none of the plans considered by congressional Republicans or supported by Trump would have guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Each of their plans would have allowed insurers to charge any price they like to cover sick patients with pre-existing conditions, meaning coverage would become so prohibitively expensive it would be the same as though the coverage weren't available.

Republicans defend this position by saying their plans would guarantee "access" to health care, but what they don't like to publicly admit is that only the rich would actually have "access."

In any case, Republicans haven't even been able to pass their own plans through both chambers of Congress and they no longer control the House of Representatives.

I'm sure it goes without saying but, if Obamacare is struck down as the White House wishes for it to be, it will be a human and economic catastrophe. Millions of people would simultaneously lose coverage through expanded Medicaid programs and that would ripple through the economy as hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity vanishes.