Payments that the federal government owes insurers
Evil Donald Trump announces he’s going to kill Obamacare by withholding funds; Chuck Schumer points out that’s not ok.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) urged President Donald Trump to release payments that the federal government owes insurers as part of the Affordable Care Act, firing a salvo in the latest stage of the health care reform fight.
Schumer’s reaction came after Trump launched a Saturday afternoon tweet threatening to end “BAILOUTS to insurance companies” if Congress does not repeal and replace Obamacare.
If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2017
They’re not “bailouts” of course.
Although Trump did not specify exactly what he meant, Schumer interpreted it as an indication that Trump plans to withhold subsidies to insurers for plans on the Obamacare individual insurance marketplaces that provide lower out-of-pocket costs for people with incomes under 250 percent of the poverty line. Delivering on the threat, which Trump has issued more explicitly in the past, would, on average, prompt insurers to increase premiums for typical plans by 19 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and likely plunge the marketplaces into chaos.
“If the President refuses to make the cost sharing reduction payments, every expert agrees that premiums will go up and health care will be more expensive for millions of Americans,” Schumer said in a statement. “The president ought to stop playing politics with people’s lives and health care, start leading and finally begin acting Presidential.”
But acting like a giant bullying baby on a big stage is what he likes, so he never will begin acting presidential.
I look forward to the next round of tweets about “Cryin’ Chuck” from the giant bullying baby.
Do these payments represent an obligation by the government any different in kind than (e.g.) Social Security payments, military salaries, Treasury bond redemption, etc.? I mean, is he doing something other than threatening specifically to default on federal government financial obligations selectively?
It wouldn’t be out of character for Trump, after all, but it would, ahem, be out of character for the U.S. government.
Hardly a surprising move. If he can stop paying towards his seriously ill nephew’s medical bills he’s not going to flinch at doing the same to poor strangers.
Who are the 80,000 psychopaths who LIKED that tweet? I wonder how many of them personally stand to be hurt by this?
99.99% of them are from his POTUS account, he has an aide constantly clearing cookies and liking his tweets.