Trump’s closed-door, back-room slimy deal to kill people
by digby
I don’t know how they justify trying to make it harder for people to get insurance to their constituents. I guess they just say: “tough shit.”
They have nothing to replace these plans. What are people supposed to do?
Early last year as an Obamacare repeal bill was flailing in the House, top Trump administration officials showed select House conservatives a secret road map of how they planned to gut the health law using executive authority.
The March 23 document, which had not been public until now, reveals that while the effort to scrap Obamacare often looked chaotic, top officials had actually developed an elaborate plan to undermine the law — regardless of whether Congress repealed it.
Top administration officials had always said they would eradicate the law through both legislative and executive actions, but never provided the public with anything close to the detailed blueprint shared with the members of the House Freedom Caucus, whose confidence — and votes — President Donald Trump was trying to win at the time. The blueprint, built off the executive order to minimize Obamacare’s “economic burden,” that Trump signed just hours after taking the oath of office, shows just how advanced the administration’s plans were to unwind the law — plans that would become far more important after the legislative efforts to repeal Obamacare failed.
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) obtained the one-page document from the Trump administration last month after blocking three of the administration’s health nominees to get it. Casey, who shared it with POLITICO, called it a list of options for “sabotage.”
“The primary problem here is government officials, government agencies, were taking steps that would lead to fewer people having coverage and erecting barriers to people having coverage,” he said. “In addition to that, you have kind of a closed-door, back-room slimy deal here that should trouble anyone.”
Here’s what they planned:
The document lists 10 executive actions the Trump administration planned to take to “improve the individual and small group markets most harmed by Obamacare.”
Those include calling for stricter verification of people who try to sign up outside of the open enrollment period; cutting the sign-up period in half; and giving states authority to determine whether insurers had to cover the full range of benefits required by Obamacare and whether their networks of doctors were sufficient.
it’s purely a way to stop people from getting health insurance or pay money for insurance that doesn’t provide decent coverage and will bankrupt you if you get sick. There’s no other reason for it. They want people to suffer.
People like this:
It makes me crazy that anyone would try to sabotage people’s ability to get health care when they need it. I can’t fathom what kind of people these are. There’s something deeply broken in all of them.