How Trump and GOP Can Still Sabotage Health Care for Millions

Moral bankruptcy: Republicans laughing it up when millions would be harmed.  

One can hope that Trumpcare is finally dead, but even if Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan - in my view two of the most horrible, amoral men in America after Der Trumpenführer - admit that they cannot summon the votes to pass a bill mostly motivated by a desire to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy, there remain numerous ways in which they can, and likely will sabotage the Affordable Health Care Act damaging access to health care for millions of Americans.  Why would they do this?  In my view, two main reasons: (i) they have lied about Obamacare for 8 years and they will want to make their lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and (ii) if they can cause the ACA to fail, they open a back door route to kill it and give those ever sought at tax cuts to the wealthy.  That millions will be harmed simply doesn't matter because many of those to be harmed are viewed  rightly or wrongly as as "those people" - blacks, Hispanics, people in big cities - and the rest don't matter in the GOP quest for a new Gilded Age.  Paul Krugman looks at the insidious means of sabotage that may be employed.  Here are highlights:

Is Trumpcare finally dead? Even now, it’s hard to be sure, especially given Republican moderates’ long track record of caving in to extremists at crucial moments. But it does look as if the frontal assault on the Affordable Care Act has failed.

And let’s be clear: The reason this assault failed wasn’t that Donald Trump did a poor selling job, or that Mitch McConnell mishandled the legislative strategy. Obamacare survived because it has worked — because it brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of Americans without health insurance, and voters didn’t and don’t want to lose those gains.

Unfortunately, some of those gains will probably be lost all the same: The number of uninsured Americans is likely to tick up over the next few years. So it’s important to say clearly, in advance, why this is about to happen. It won’t be because the Affordable Care Act is failing; it will be the result of Trump administration sabotage.

Notably, [under the ACA] people aren’t automatically signed up for coverage, so it matters a lot whether the officials running the system try to make it work, reaching out to potential beneficiaries to ensure that they know what’s available, while reminding currently healthy Americans that they are still legally required to sign up for coverage. You can see this dependence on good intentions by looking at how health reform has played out at the state level. States that embraced the law fully, like California and Kentucky, made great progress in reducing the number of the uninsured; states that dragged their feet, like Tennessee, benefited far less. Or consider the problem of counties served by only one insurer; as a recent study noted, this problem is almost entirely limited to states with Republican governors.

But now the federal government itself is run by people who couldn’t repeal Obamacare, but would clearly still like to see it fail — if only to justify the repeated, dishonest claims, especially by the tweeter in chief himself, that it was already failing. Or to put it a bit differently, when Trump threatens to “let Obamacare fail,” what he’s really threatening is to make it fail.

On Wednesday The Times reported on three ways the Trump administration is, in effect, sabotaging the A.C.A. (my term, not The Times’s). First, the administration is weakening enforcement of the requirement that healthy people buy coverage. Second, it’s letting states impose onerous rules like work requirements on people seeking Medicaid. Third, it has backed off on advertising and outreach designed to let people know about options for coverage.

Actually, it has done more than back off. As reported by The Daily Beast, the Department of Health and Human Services has diverted funds appropriated by law for “consumer information and outreach” and used them instead to finance a social media propaganda campaign against the law that H.H.S. is supposed to be administering — a move, by the way, of dubious legality. Meanwhile, the department’s website, which used to offer helpful links for people seeking insurance, now sends viewers to denunciations of the A.C.A.

And there may be worse to come: Insurance companies, which are required by law to limit out-of-pocket expenses of low-income customers, are already raising premiums sharply because they’re worried about a possible cutoff of the crucial federal “cost-sharing reduction” subsidies that help them meet that requirement.

[T]his isn’t about policy, or even politics in the normal sense. It’s basically about spite: Trump and his allies may have suffered a humiliating political defeat, but at least they can make millions of other people suffer.

Can anything be done to protect Americans from this temper tantrum? In some cases, I believe, state governments can insulate their citizens from malfeasance at H.H.S. But the most important thing, surely, is to place the blame where it belongs. No, Mr. Trump, Obamacare isn’t failing; you are.

I'm sorry if I offend my Republican "friends," but Trump is basically human excrement.  The man is foul and toxic and he is harming the nation - perhaps at Vladimir Putin's bidding - and will harm millions of Americans before his reign of terror is over.