Trump will be blamed for ACA collapse!!!

Overwhelming majorities in both party’s support making changes to the existing Affordable Care Act. And yet Trump is now saying he wants changes that would directing break many of his campaign promises to lower prices and offer better care, just so he could supposedly save $900 million and throw 24 million people off insurance:

Trump: “I think we’re doing very well on healthcare. It’s been very much misreported that we failed with healthcare. We haven’t failed — we’re negotiating and we continue to negotiate and we will save perhaps $900 billion.” 

Trump is referring to the CBO report on the AHCA … estimated that the bill could cut the federal spending by $880 billion over the next 10 years … (but) After the most recent additions to the AHCA, the CBO updated this estimate to say the deficit could shrink by only $151 billion.

Trump’s new threat is that he will cut off so-called cost-sharing reductions, which subsidize insurance that offers lower out-of-pocket costs to 7 million lower-income Americans. For all the details, see this piece by Jonathan Cohn; if Trump does this, premiums could skyrocket and insurers could flee the individual markets, causing them to melt down and ultimately pushing millions off coverage. As Cohn notes, Trump is basically “threatening to torpedo insurance for millions of Americans unless Democrats agree to negotiate with him.”

Trump told the Journal that “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” adding that “Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.” Trump treats the word “deal” as some kind of magically irresistible end in itself. But under these circumstances, the only known endpoint — the supposed “deal” — is worse than the “threat.” Why should Dems feel any incentive to respond to such a threat?

President Trump threatened to leave the law alone and let it self-destruct. But the April Kaiser Family Foundation survey finds that 75 percent of the public wants the president and the Republicans to do what they can to make the law work, compared to only 19 percent who think they should let the law fail so they can replace it later. Moreover, 61 percent say that the president and the Republicans are now in charge and are responsible for problems with the ACA—not President Obama and the Democrats who enacted it.

A former liberal radio talk host who likes to ask the “follow-up question” at Democurmudgeon.blogspot.com