Donald Trump's Sabotage of Obamacare Is Reaching Baroque New Levels
By Jim Newell at Salon
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/10/06/donald_trump_is_sabotaging_obamacare_from_every_direction.html
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In late August, Iowa applied to the Department of Health and Human Services for a sweeping waiver to opt out of Obamacare’s structure and implement its own health coverage model. What Iowa was proposing, as my colleague Jordan Weissmann wrote over the summer, was a significant conservative rewrite of how it would allot its Obamacare dollars. In a number of ways, the Iowa plan mimicked the House-passed American Health Care Act. Other states having problems with their individual markets have been watching closely to see whether the Trump administration will approve something so broad.
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Trump, the Post reports, read a Wall Street Journal story about Iowa’s application in late August and got all het up about it. He first tried to call (now ex-) HHS Secretary Tom Price, who couldn’t be reached, but then got in touch with Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Trump’s message in late August was clear,” the Post writes, “according to individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations: Tell Iowa no.”
There are a couple of possible explanations for why Trump did this. One would be that he objected to Iowa’s proposal on policy grounds. We’d rate this possibility as unlikely, since Trump does not know or care about the specifics of health policy in any way, shape, or form. That he had to read in the newspaper about the major health policy decision his government was facing tells you enough. Observing Donald Trump for five seconds tells you enough, too.
It is far more likely that Trump did this because, if the waiver does go through, it might make Iowa Republicans more content with life under Obamacare, with those revisions. This revelation shows in the most personal terms possible that Trump is willing to squeeze Obamacare from whichever direction he can until he gets his legislative “win” that kills it.
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