After much talk from the Trump Administration about repealing and replacing Obamacare, Trump has finally taken a major step on Thursday to halt key payments to health insurers that sell Obamacare plans. The signed executive order has now made it accessible for small business, lower income families, and individuals to have the choice of purchasing different packages of health insurance that are inexpensive, not federally controlled, and possibly have fewer benefits.
Note that this is not the failure of Obamacare yet, but more so the beginning steps of the repealing and replacing process that Trump has been speaking on since his run for candidacy in 2016. If anything, it’s taking the active measures of weakening Obamacare for the public.
The $7 billion in subsidies is what health insurance companies have been receiving from the government as compensation from the discounted prices that low-income purchasers receive under Obamacare.
The rollback received immediate criticism from fellow Democrats and Republicans. “It is a spiteful act of vast, pointless sabotage leveled at working families and the middle class in every corner of America,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York has stated. Republican Representative. Ileana Ros-Lehtine tweeted: “Cutting health care subsidies will mean more uninsured in my district.”
Trump’s justification for his actions is that there is no longer any grounds to continue the subsidies. In a statement made by the White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee, she declared that the “bailout of insurance companies through these unlawful payments is yet another example of how the previous administration abused taxpayer dollars and skirted the law to prop up a broken system.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, around 1 million people may have to surrender their coverage under Trump’s plan.
Unfortunately, more than a million may be affected by the Administration’s plans. Middle-class citizens may be damaged the most with the cuts in subsidies.
Middle-class people that have chosen alternative plans to Obamacare will probably see an increase in their premiums in the following year. Insurers have already raised their premiums by 20% this current year in wake of Trump’s arrangement to rollback on subsidies.
A larger number of citizens could increase in having no individual plan or coverage whatsoever. With health insurance companies leaving the market, “about 5% of people live in areas that would have no insurer in the non-group market in 2018,” CBO revealed.
The ultimate achievement in the grand scheme of things is not to have Trumpcare instilled by our federal government. It’s to privatize the healthcare market so the role of the government in health care becomes virtually nonexistent. It has now become our jobs as consumers to be informed when shopping for healthcare.
