Trump Tweets at Odds With His Latest Drive to End Obamacare
Trump Puts His Obamacare Opposition Back at Center of Election
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump has again tied himself and congressional Republicans to getting rid of Obamacare just months before the election and as voters are getting daily reminders about their own health care vulnerabilities to Covid-19 and other conditions.
A legal brief his administration filed Thursday in support of voiding the Affordable Care Act -- and its protections for patients with pre-existing conditions -- underscores how big a bet his campaign is making on energizing his most enthusiastic supporters rather than reaching out to the wavering voters who may decide the presidential election.
Trump on Saturday took to Twitter with an diametrically opposite message, saying he would “ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS” protect people with pre-existing health conditions. Trump also said the ACA could be replaced with a better alternative, although the White House and Republican lawmakers have no detailed plan.
Democrats rode the health care issue in the 2018 midterm elections to retake control of the House and they’re planning to do it again in November, when the White House and both chambers of Congress will be on the line. They seized on the administration’s filing with the Supreme Court supporting a suit to invalidate the law and tied it to the coronavirus pandemic that’s led to more than 120,000 deaths in the U.S.
“If Donald Trump won’t end his senseless crusade against health coverage, I look forward to ending it for him,” Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said in a speech Thursday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The coronavirus pandemic and the wave of job losses it has produced has only focused more attention on the fragility of employer-provided insurance and the importance of health care access. Through May, nearly half a million people enrolled in Obamacare after the end of the annual sign-up period because they lost their prior insurance, a 46% jump from last year.
The Trump administration filed its brief with the Supreme Court -- brought by a group of Republican state attorneys general -- just as surging coronavirus cases in Sunbelt states raised new fears the pandemic is again getting out of control. The U.S. stock market’s benchmark S&P 500 slumped to a more than two-week low on Friday as the jump in new infections began halting progress on reopening the economy.
The court is set to hear arguments on the case around the time of the November election, meaning the gambit will be capturing the nation’s attention as voters prepare to cast ballots.
The health care brief was filed the same week Trump saw the worst polling of his re-election campaign, with Biden edging him in the usually reliable Republican states of Texas and Georgia and racking up sizable leads in the key battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. The president trails Biden by 9.5 percentage points in the average of national polls compiled by RealClear Politics.
The biggest wave of job losses since the Depression has swept away Trump’s main political asset going into the election, economic prosperity. And many Americans believe he has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic, with 61% of swing voters saying so in a May poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Republican control of the Senate also is at risk. Democrats are likely to keep their House majority even though they’ll be defending 30 seats in districts Trump won four years ago.
As in Saturday’s tweets, the president has frequently claimed he is a champion of keeping those with pre-existing conditions from paying higher costs. At a political event in Phoenix earlier this week, Trump vowed to “always protect people with pre-existing conditions.”
Since beginning his campaign for office, Trump has promised to replace Obamacare with something better, but the White House has yet to offer a detailed plan for an alternative.
A White House spokesman said Trump was undeterred in his opposition to his predecessor’s signature health care program.
“A global pandemic does not change what Americans know: Obamacare has been an unlawful failure and further illustrates the need to focus on patient care,” Trump spokesman Judd Deere said in an email.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued that because the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated Obamacare’s tax penalty for being uninsured, other provisions of the law -- including the popular provision that protects those with pre-existing conditions -- “must also fall.”
Polls consistently show health care at or near the top of issues important to voters, but Trump has gotten consistently low marks from the public for his handling of it. In a June 13-16 Fox News poll, 39% said they approved of the way the president handles health care, in line with answers to the question in the poll over the past three years and with other recent polls.
Yet, as with many issues, there is a clear partisan divide. Three-quarters of Republicans still oppose Obamacare even as swing voters--those who haven’t already decided their presidential vote--back the insurance plan 58% to 34%, according to the Kaiser poll.
The Affordable Care Act has become far more popular than it was when it first passed a decade ago, and Republicans have yet to propose an alternative that would both ensure the same protections for people with pre-existing conditions and replace the ACA’s marketplaces, subsidies and Medicaid expansion without kicking millions of people off of insurance.
Republicans have been playing defense now for years on the subject.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who has gone from one of the most popular senators to one of the most endangered, has come under fire from Democrats because she provided a key vote for the 2017 GOP tax law ending the individual mandate, without which there would be no case. She’s been vocal in her opposition to the lawsuit to invalidate the law.
She issued a sharply worded statement slamming the latest administration brief on both the law and the substance.
“The Administration’s decision to submit this new brief is the wrong policy at the worst possible time as our nation is in the midst of a pandemic,” she said. “The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land, and it is the Department of Justice’s duty to defend it.”
Senator Martha McSally in Arizona, who was appointed to her current seat and faces voters again in November, has a television ad promising to protect people with pre-existing conditions. She lost her race against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema two years ago after she voted for a House Republican bill that undermined those protections, including state waivers that would have let insurers charge sick people more.
Likewise, Thom Tillis of North Carolina has proposed legislation intending to restore pre-existing conditions protections if the court overturns the ACA, but no GOP bill would fully restore the ACA’s benefits that aid people with pre-existing conditions, like guaranteed coverage for prescription drugs, hospital stays, maternity, an end to lifetime caps and so on.
All three Republicans are regarded as vulnerable to Democratic challenges in the November election.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has credited the lawsuit against Obamacare in large part with helping him win reelection in 2018 as a Democrat in state where Trump got 68% of the vote two years earlier. Manchin used a mend-it, don’t-end-it message and cut a campaign commercial blasting a copy of the suit against Obamacare -- which his GOP opponent supported -- with a shotgun.
Manchin, who had personally warned Trump that repeal would be unpopular, blistered the latest effort to overturn the law given the pandemic.
“I’ve said again and again that the ACA is not perfect but we simply cannot throw the baby out with the bath water, especially during a global health crisis that has already killed 92 West Virginians and over 120,000 Americans,” Manchin said in a statement Friday.
The legal fight stems from a provision known as the individual mandate, which originally required people to acquire health insurance or pay a tax penalty.
The Supreme Court upheld that provision in 2012, with Chief Justice John Roberts calling it a legitimate use of Congress’s taxing power. A Republican-controlled Congress later joined with Trump to zero-out the tax penalty, leaving the mandate without any practical consequences.
All five justices who voted to uphold the ACA in 2012 -- Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- remain on the court.
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