Opinion: Trump is once again leading his party over a cliff on health care
By Karen Tumulty Karen Tumulty Columnist covering national politics Email Bio Follow Columnist March 26 at 6:39 PM Apparently, President Trump didn’t learn much from the first time he did it, because he is once again leading his party over a cliff on health care.
They got a flimsy bill through the House, but their drive to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. The blunder cost the GOP dearly. By putting the law in jeopardy, they achieved what the Democrats who passed it never could: They actually helped make Obamacare popular. Positive feelings began exceeding negative ones almost from the moment Trump and congressional Republicans went to work to dismantle it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks Tuesday at a news conference about strengthening the Affordable Care Act, which the Trump administration seeks to invalidate. The administration was already on record as favoring a partial dismantling of the law — which, among other things, would end its guarantee of coverage for people with preexisting conditions. But now it has thrown its support behind getting rid of the whole thing, and with no apparent plan for what to put in its place.
For starters, the number of uninsured people in this country would increase by nearly 20 million, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. That would include an estimated 15 million who gained coverage through the expansion of Medicaid in the 37 states that have done so under the ACA. But it may also be that Trump believes that the hardball tactic will somehow bring Democrats to the negotiating table. If that is the case, he is making the same miscalculation he did when he shut down the government on the assumption that it would give him leverage to get the money he wanted to build his border wall.
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