The president will decide this
week whether he'll continue payments that control healthcare costs for
Americans
Following the failure of the
Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act last week, President Donald
Trump is on a mission to allow the law to "implode"
by halting all subsidy payments to insurance companies—while progressives
led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are seizing the opportunity to push for
single-payer healthcare.
Presidential advisor Kellyanne
Conway said
Sunday that Trump will decide this week whether to make good on the threat
he made over the weekend to allow the ACA, also called Obamacare, to implode by
ending cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies.
The Obama administration set
up the payment system in which the government pays a total of about $7 billion
per year to insurance companies; the subsidies allow insurers to keep patients'
costs down.
On Saturday, as the Republican
leadership regrouped following the defeat of its healthcare bill, Trump
referred to the payments as "bailouts" and threatened to end them as
well as the federal government's contributions that help cover insurance for Congress
members. An end to the payments would raise premiums by nearly 20 percent for
millions of Americans, according
to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If a new HealthCare Bill is
not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members
of Congress will end very soon!
A lawsuit
filed by the House Republicans against the Trump administration regarding the
payments has already created volatility in the markets, as the GOP has falsely
argued that the federal government doesn't have the authority to make payments
to insurance companies.
On Monday, Trump again
suggested on Twitter that payments to insurance companies should stop.
If ObamaCare is hurting
people, & it is, why shouldn't it hurt the insurance companies & why
should Congress not be paying what public pays?
Meanwhile, the Sanders
Institute, run by Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, teamed up Friday with
National Nurses United to deliver a paper
on single-payer healthcare to the offices of every member of Congress. The
paper lays out the immense costs of the current system and notes the savings
that would come with a federally-funded healthcare system:
Supporters of our
market-driven model typically sabotage efforts to provide Medicare for all by
focusing on how we would pay for it. This is disingenuous. We are already
paying for it; we're just not receiving it. Approximately two-thirds of U.S.
healthcare expenditures already come from taxpayers in the form of federal,
state, and local government spending...The comparisons of U.S. spending and
health outcomes to other countries strongly suggest that there is enough money
in our current system to provide healthcare for all, if we spend that money
fairly and wisely...There is enough money currently being spent on healthcare
in the U.S. to provide Medicare for all.
The paper is just the latest
action taken by the growing contingent that supports a single-payer system.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has urged
centrist Democrats to support single-payer, offering voters a true
alternative to the Republican Party, which last week saw 50 of its 52 senators
vote in favor of a healthcare plan that would strip tens of millions of
Americans of their healthcare over the next decade. Sanders has also vowed to
introduce a Medicare for All proposal on the Senate floor in the coming weeks,
telling CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, "We're tweaking
the final points of the bill and we're figuring out how we can mount a national
campaign to bring people together."
Recent polls show that
Americans are warming to single-payer healthcare. Sixty percent told
the Pew Research Center in June that the government should provide healthcare
to citizens, and 33 percent said they favored single payer—up five percentage
points from January and 12 points from 2014.
