Donald Trump has apparently given up in his quest to destroy the Affordable Care Act, so now he’s just going to try to bleed it to death.
Of the multitude of puzzling executive orders and other gimmicks he’s unleashed in an attempt to bring back the days before civil rights laws and guaranteed health care for the elderly, he’s also aimed one directly at Obamacare.
The administration is in the process of cutting annual spending for so-called navigator groups that help Americans enroll in Obamacare health insurance plans, from around $100 million to just $10 million. He claims it’s being done for the cause of efficiency, but it’s just another example of Trump’s disregard for America’s working poor.
Trump spent the early part of his first term repeatedly attempting to overturn the Affordable Care Act. The late Republican Sen. John McCain got in the way, though, providing the deciding vote to save it from repeal.
During this past presidential campaign, he first insisted that if elected he would try to kill it. But then he backed off when polls continued to show strong public support for the now 15-year-old health care law.
By reducing the number of employees who help people enroll in the Affordable Care Act, he’s signaling that his administration plans to influence Obamacare enrollment without having to bother with Congress or the courts.
A record number of Americans have enrolled in health insurance plans through the Obamacare marketplaces in recent years. Republicans have complained that too much is being spent on subsidies that help attract people to the health plans, including the employment of navigators.
Obamacare enrollments dropped slightly during Trump’s first term because of similar cuts in the number of navigators.
“They are primarily there to help people navigate a complex, often byzantine, eligibility and enrollment system,” Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told the New York Times. “And they’re supposed to be working with the most complex cases. And so as a result, they’re not going to be a huge source of enrollment volume.”
Corlette said that appointments between navigators and enrollees often last hours, in part because of the complexity of the lives of the people enrolling. Many rural Americans and immigrants rely on the help, she added. People without easy access to computers or proper employment documents can struggle without them.
That a popular program like Obamacare can so easily be subjected to the swirling political winds and charlatans like Donald Trump is yet one more reason why the U.S. will never have a functional health care plan until it establishes a single-payer, government-run system, like those that work for the rest of the developed world.
Columnist and author Thom Hartmann, a tireless crusader for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All,” doesn’t mince words.
“We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf,” he recently commented. “The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.”
It’s not like we haven’t tried to fix the nation’s health care system before, he added.
Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all made an effort to bring a national health care system to the United States, he pointed out, but every time the effort has run into a juggernaut of opposition and propaganda from those who profit from the current dysfunction.
“Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens,” he writes. “That’s it. We’re the only one left.”
The United States spends about 17% of the country’s GDP on health care, more than any other country in the world. Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia come in between 9.3% and 10.5%. And their health outcomes aren’t any worse than ours, most of them even better.
Hartmann noted that health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll, and he estimated that a national single-payer system would run an estimated 10%.
That’s why Canadians laugh at Donald Trump when he claims they would have better health care if they became America’s 51st state.
“No one’s ever died in Canada because they couldn’t afford health care,” one columnist noted.
Unfortunately, we can’t say that in the United States. People die every day because they can’t afford to see a doctor.
