The Legal Crusade to Undermine Obamacare—and Rewrite History

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Trump tweets about Obamacare "imploding" after he issues decision to halt subsidies


President Trump said Friday that Democrats should call him after his decision to stop Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies because he said the health care law is "imploding."


Mr. Trump made the comment early Friday on Twitter, after announcing that he's halting the cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments Thursday night.




Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

The Democrats ObamaCare is imploding. Massive subsidy payments to their pet insurance companies has stopped. Dems should call me to fix!

4:36 AM · Oct 13, 2017
13,839 Retweets 61,315


 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
So much for state's rights!

source: CNBC

Trump personally told health chief to deny Iowa's urgent Obamacare waiver: Report


President Donald Trump personally told a top federal health official to reject Iowa's pending request to try to stabilize its individual insurance market with a waiver from Obamacare rules, according to a new report.

And a leading Obamacare expert now says that Trump's reported call seems to be part of a broader effort to actually drive up prices of Obamacare health plans so as to "undermine" the Affordable Care Act.

The new Washington Post article said that Trump in late August called Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, after seeing a Wall Street Journal story detailing Iowa's so-called 1332 waiver request.


That waiver request was being pushed by Iowa's Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, who in an Aug. 21 letter to Verma's then boss, Dr. Tom Price, said, "We face an immediate collapsing [individual insurance] market that could leave thousands without health insurance and the rest with 56 [percent] or higher premium rate increases."

Both of Iowa's senators, Republicans Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, also wrote Price and Verma to ask them to give the waiver request "all due consideration," as they also said state residents "are facing an unaffordable and unstable individual health insurance market."

Despite those urgent requests, the Post reported that Trump's "message" to Verma was clear "according to individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations: Tell Iowa no."

The Post report comes a week after Oklahoma's health commissioner wrote a letter to Price and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin criticizing the Trump administration for having missed the Sept. 25 deadline for approving that state's own request for a 1332 waiver from Obamacare rules next year to stabilize the insurance market there. Like Iowa, Oklahoma is led by Republicans.

"The lack of a timely waiver approval will prevent thousands of Oklahomans from realizing the benefits of significantly lower insurance premiums in 2018," wrote Terry Cline, the health commissioner.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the Post's story about Trump's call to Verma when contacted by CNBC.

But the spokesman said that all decisions about waiver requests such as Iowa's, which remains pending, "will be made by the secretary of HHS," the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.

Price, who had held that job, resigned Sept. 29 after revelations that his use of private planes and military jets had cost taxpayers more than $1 million this year. HHS is currently run by acting Secretary Don White.

CNBC has reached out for comment from spokesmen for CMS, which is a division of the Health and Human Services Department, and from the press office of HHS itself.

Tim Jost, a law professor and Obamacare expert, in a Health Affairs blog post Friday, wrote that Trump's reported call to Verma "appears to be part of a larger strategy to drive up premiums for [Affordable Care Act]-compliant health plans to undermine the ACA."

"It is unclear whether this will end the Iowa waiver process, which in any event faced an unrealistic implementation schedule to be in place by the launch of the 2018 open enrollment period in less than a month," Jost wrote.

Iowa on Thursday submitted to CMS a supplement to the Iowa Stopgap Measure.

The overall request proposes scrapping Iowa's Obamacare marketplace, and replacing it with a "single, standard" health plan available to every eligible state resident from each participating insurer.

It also proposes offering a flat subsidy, based on age and income, to help low- and middle-income people pay for their insurance. That would replace current Obamacare subsidies which are based on the cost of a plan, as well as on income.

The request also proposes setting up a reinsurance program that would support people who had high levels of medical costs.

A spokeswoman for Reynolds, Brenna Smith, told CNBC that the governor's office and the Iowa Insurance Division "are in constant communication with the White House and CMS, seeking approval on our state's Stopgap Measure," which would "ensure 72,000 Iowa farmers and small business owners have access to affordable health insurance in 2018."

"The federal government recently deemed Iowa's Stopgap Measure application complete and is currently conducting a 30 day public comment period that ends October 19," Smith said. "We are working with the White House and CMS to approve Iowa's Stopgap Measure in a timely manner to relieve 72,000 suffering Iowans from Obamacare."
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
This guy willingly hurts poor people, just to get at Obama :eek2::eek2::eek2:

Trump's willingness to hurt poor people supersedes President Obama. The government's housing law suite against Trump, Trump's call to have the exonerated Central Park Five executed, Trump's losing law suite for racial discrimination at his casinos. The list goes on and on!

Not only does Trump have contempt for "poor people", his contempt for being poor, Black and just being "non white" and Christian, places him at a level not seen in the presidency since Woodrow Wilson.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Directive ending key subsidy threatens Obamacare's viability


By Louis Jacobson on Friday, October 13th, 2017 at 6:04 p.m.

After failing in several attempts to pass legislation overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration took a big step toward undercutting the law Oct. 12 when it said it would no longer continue funding a class of widely used subsidies without congressional appropriations.

The payments in question are known as "cost-sharing reductions." They were intended to ease copayments and deductible costs for millions of low-income Americans who have purchased insurance coverage on the Affordable Care Act online marketplaces. The estimated cost of the payments was $9 billion next year and nearly $100 billion over the next decade.

The payments have been subject to a legal dispute since House Republicans sued in 2014, arguing that the Obama administration was improperly paying the subsidies when no money had been appropriated for that purpose by Congress. The House Republicans' lawsuit was initially upheld in federal district court, but the case has continued to work its way through the courts.

In its announcement, the White House specifically cited the legal case as the reason for ending the payments. Insurers had been expecting a new round of payments on Oct. 18.

"Based on guidance from the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is no appropriation for cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies under Obamacare," said a statement from the White House press secretary's office. "In light of this analysis, the Government cannot lawfully make the cost-sharing reduction payments. … Congress needs to repeal and replace the disastrous Obamacare law and provide real relief to the American people."

Health policy specialists agreed that the impact could be serious.

What the president is doing "is a haphazard chipping away" of the parts of the law he can reach, said Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. "It's a very reckless way to make policy because its effects vary considerably across the country and in some cases will destabilize insurance markets with no strategy or policy for fixing them."

Experts said that lower-income Americans would be hurt the most by the change.

"The people in the exchanges are disproportionately low income, most below 225 percent of poverty level, and therefore get support from the cost-sharing reductions," said Gail Wilensky, who headed Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush. Stopping those payments is "a big deal," she said.

But ending the subsidies could have other indirect impacts, experts said.

Some states anticipated the possibility that the Trump administration would stop paying cost-sharing reductions and had the insurers they regulate factor this into their proposed premiums for 2018. But other states did not.

In those states that didn't plan for this scenario, the non-group market -- that is, the market for insurance purchased individually by consumers rather than collectively by employers for their workers -- could face the most significant impacts.

"This would mean insurance costs for nongroup coverage becoming substantially higher," Blumberg said. "This scenario still leaves the nongroup market regulations in place, but it hurts everyone because those eligible for subsidies who can't afford coverage on their own would have to drop out and become uninsured. Since many of these people are healthy, the premiums for all that remain in the insurance system would go up."

Ending the subsidies will not necessarily be tantamount to repealing the law, as Trump promised to do.

For starters, the cost-sharing reductions are one part of the law; eliminating them would not directly affect other parts.

"Obamacare is many things -- Medicaid expansion, insurance regulations, consumer protections, the health insurance exchanges, Medicare benefit improvements, the individual and employer mandates, cost control and delivery system reforms, and much more," said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Trump's move "is a big deal, and could further destabilize the ACA's insurance marketplaces. But … it doesn't impact the other components of Obamacare."

Trump's decision to end cost-sharing reduction payments puts the Affordable Care Act in some degree of peril. We rate this promise In the Works.

Sources:

White House, statement from the press secretary on cost-sharing reductions, Oct. 12, 2017

New York Times, "Trump to Scrap Critical Health Care Subsidies, Hitting Obamacare Again," Oct. 12, 2017

Washington Post, "White House tells court it is immediately stopping ACA cost-sharing subsidies," Oct. 13, 2017

Email interview with Joseph R. Antos, health policy specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Oct. 13, 2017

Email interview with Jonathan Oberlander, professor in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Oct. 13, 2017

Email interview with Gail Wilensky, head of Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, Oct. 13, 2017

Email interview with Linda Blumberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, Oct. 13, 2017


http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1388/repeal-obamacare/
.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Trump's willingness to hurt poor people supersedes President Obama.

I tried to tell you . . .

_________________________


The real reason Trump is so dead set on crushing Obamacare


Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
October 13, 2017

Washington


Over the past 24 hours, President Donald Trump has taken two actions aimed at mortally wounding the Affordable Care Act.

The first tasks his administration with increasing competition among health care insurers, a move very likely to drive younger people out of the insurance marketplace entirely and driving up costs across the board. The second, announced late Thursday night, stops the federal subsidies being paid to insurance companies to incentivize them to cover lower-income Americans.

The key to understanding Trump's motivations here are entirely contained in the ACA's shorthand nickname:

Obamacare.

It's named after the man — former President Barack Obama (duh) — who shepherded it into existence. And that's exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it.

Trump's entire political life — dating all the way back to his adoption of birtherism earlier this decade — is positioned against all things Obama.

Why? Because for many Trump supporters in this country, Obama — and his beliefs about society and government — were the antithesis of what they believed. (Yes, Obama's race — and multicultural vision of the country and the world — were part of that mix as well.)

The best way to distinguish yourself in Republican politics during Obama's time in office was to position yourself against, literally, everything about Obama — up to and including his legitimacy to be president due to fact-free claims about where he was born.

Trump learned that lesson sooner and better than any of the Republican politicians who were running for president in 2016. (It also helped that he was willing to say things about Obama that no other Republican politician would.) Every move Obama had made since winning in 2008 was not just wrong to Trump's mind, but — and this is super-important — un-American. Obama didn't understand what made America the single greatest nation in the world (faith in its people and the free market). Trump did.

Trump also grasped early on that the symbolic center of Obama-ism — the thing that conservatives hated most — was Obamacare. It was the classic liberal solution: Put the federal government at the center of your life and insist it, not you, knew better about the best way to look after you and your health.

At every rally, every speech and almost every day on Twitter during the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to get rid of Obamacare — and quickly.

"We're going to repeal  and replace Obamacare," Trump said at a Florida rally in February 2016. "Obamacare is a total and complete disaster. It's going to be gone. We're going to come up with a great health care plan, whether it's health care savings accounts, we have a lot of different things."

"We will terminate Obamacare and replace it, believe me, with something good," he said in May 2016 in California. "Believe me. Repeal and replace Obamacare."

"ObamaCare is imploding," Trump tweeted in March. "It is a disaster and 2017 will be the worst year yet, by far! Republicans will come together and save the day."

Trump's calculation — and he placed a VERY big bet on this — was that he could win the GOP nod (and get elected president) by being the polar opposite of Obama on, well, pretty much everything. That started with his condemnation of Obamacare but has continued with his decision to de-certify the Iran nuclear deal, his pullout from the Paris climate accords, his support for the Keystone XL pipeline, his regulatory rollbacks, his plan to end DACA and lots (and lots) of other policy decision from this administration in its first nine months.

It's as though Trump is wearing a bracelet that with the initials WWOD ("What Would Obama Do") — and then does the exact opposite. The unraveling of Obamacare then, which is what Trump is on his way to doing, is a stand-in for the broader unraveling of the Obama legacy.

The problem with that approach, of course, is that being against what the last guy did isn't a proactive set of policy solutions. Unlike in a campaign — in which saying, essentially, "I'll do the opposite of what the last guy did" — where running against something often works better than running for something, governing is a very different animal.

Remember that Trump was elected to bring about needed change in Washington. Getting rid of things Obama did is only part of that promise. Putting in conservative solutions that the GOP believes will work better is the second half — and has very little to do with Obama and the actions he took in office.

Trump will be cheered by conservatives in and outside of Washington for his moves to force the failure of Obamacare. But, if Republicans in Congress can't find a way to pass some sort of meaningful replacement plan, that joy may soon turn to ashes in their mouths.

CORRECTION: Donald Trump's decision to cut subsidies to insurance companies for lower-income Americans was not an executive order.


© 2017 Cable News Network, Inc. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.



.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor

I tried to tell you . . .

_________________________


The real reason Trump is so dead set on crushing Obamacare


Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
October 13, 2017

Washington


Over the past 24 hours, President Donald Trump has taken two actions aimed at mortally wounding the Affordable Care Act.

The first tasks his administration with increasing competition among health care insurers, a move very likely to drive younger people out of the insurance marketplace entirely and driving up costs across the board. The second, announced late Thursday night, stops the federal subsidies being paid to insurance companies to incentivize them to cover lower-income Americans.

The key to understanding Trump's motivations here are entirely contained in the ACA's shorthand nickname:

Obamacare.

It's named after the man — former President Barack Obama (duh) — who shepherded it into existence. And that's exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it.

Trump's entire political life — dating all the way back to his adoption of birtherism earlier this decade — is positioned against all things Obama.

Why? Because for many Trump supporters in this country, Obama — and his beliefs about society and government — were the antithesis of what they believed. (Yes, Obama's race — and multicultural vision of the country and the world — were part of that mix as well.)

The best way to distinguish yourself in Republican politics during Obama's time in office was to position yourself against, literally, everything about Obama — up to and including his legitimacy to be president due to fact-free claims about where he was born.

Trump learned that lesson sooner and better than any of the Republican politicians who were running for president in 2016. (It also helped that he was willing to say things about Obama that no other Republican politician would.) Every move Obama had made since winning in 2008 was not just wrong to Trump's mind, but — and this is super-important — un-American. Obama didn't understand what made America the single greatest nation in the world (faith in its people and the free market). Trump did.

Trump also grasped early on that the symbolic center of Obama-ism — the thing that conservatives hated most — was Obamacare. It was the classic liberal solution: Put the federal government at the center of your life and insist it, not you, knew better about the best way to look after you and your health.

At every rally, every speech and almost every day on Twitter during the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to get rid of Obamacare — and quickly.

"We're going to repeal  and replace Obamacare," Trump said at a Florida rally in February 2016. "Obamacare is a total and complete disaster. It's going to be gone. We're going to come up with a great health care plan, whether it's health care savings accounts, we have a lot of different things."

"We will terminate Obamacare and replace it, believe me, with something good," he said in May 2016 in California. "Believe me. Repeal and replace Obamacare."

"ObamaCare is imploding," Trump tweeted in March. "It is a disaster and 2017 will be the worst year yet, by far! Republicans will come together and save the day."

Trump's calculation — and he placed a VERY big bet on this — was that he could win the GOP nod (and get elected president) by being the polar opposite of Obama on, well, pretty much everything. That started with his condemnation of Obamacare but has continued with his decision to de-certify the Iran nuclear deal, his pullout from the Paris climate accords, his support for the Keystone XL pipeline, his regulatory rollbacks, his plan to end DACA and lots (and lots) of other policy decision from this administration in its first nine months.

It's as though Trump is wearing a bracelet that with the initials WWOD ("What Would Obama Do") — and then does the exact opposite. The unraveling of Obamacare then, which is what Trump is on his way to doing, is a stand-in for the broader unraveling of the Obama legacy.

The problem with that approach, of course, is that being against what the last guy did isn't a proactive set of policy solutions. Unlike in a campaign — in which saying, essentially, "I'll do the opposite of what the last guy did" — where running against something often works better than running for something, governing is a very different animal.

Remember that Trump was elected to bring about needed change in Washington. Getting rid of things Obama did is only part of that promise. Putting in conservative solutions that the GOP believes will work better is the second half — and has very little to do with Obama and the actions he took in office.

Trump will be cheered by conservatives in and outside of Washington for his moves to force the failure of Obamacare. But, if Republicans in Congress can't find a way to pass some sort of meaningful replacement plan, that joy may soon turn to ashes in their mouths.

CORRECTION: Donald Trump's decision to cut subsidies to insurance companies for lower-income Americans was not an executive order.


© 2017 Cable News Network, Inc. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.



.

Does Trump's post Obama behavior mimic his lifetime racism?
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Does Trump's post Obama behavior mimic his lifetime racism?

Don't confuse the issue though, that S.O.B. is, and in all likelihood has always been, exactly what you say he is.

But, there can be no denying, he's turned it up to a whole nother level since Obama became a serious presidential candidate and even higher following that White House Press/Correspondents Dinner after Obama shut him up by producing his birth certificate. I can still see him on that clip where Obama tore into his orange-ass, the crowd was laughing its ass off, and Orange-ass stared a most telling stare at Obama: "I'm gonna get your blackass even if I have to destroy the country in doing so."

And everyday we see evidence of the destruction . . .




.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Now this is resistance! Trump's Obamacare sabotage thwarted with record number of early sign ups


source: NY Daily News

Obamacare registrations hit record total days after enrollment began

obamacare7n-2-web.jpg

As Trump removes key parts of Obamacare, a record number of Americans have signed up for the program. (DITA ALANGKARA/JIM WATSON/GETTY IMAGES)


A record number of Americans have signed up for Obamacare in the first few days of open enrollment — despite White House cuts to outreach and promotion.

More than 200,000 people signed up Nov. 1, a Trump administration source told The Hill, which first reported on the surge.

That’s double the 100,000 who signed up on the first day of enrollment a year ago.

Web traffic to the healthcare.gov site that enrolls people in the Affordable Care Act also set a new record. Roughly 1 million visitors browsed the site, compared to 750,000 on Nov. 1 a year ago, The Hill said.

The rush to enroll came after a social media push designed to let people know ACA is still the law of the land — despite President Trump’s rollbacks of several key parts of the plan.

“Starting today, you can sign up for 2018 health coverage. Head on over to http://HealthCare.gov and find a plan that meets your needs,” former President Barack Obama tweeted Nov. 1.

Democrats had worried that the Trump administration’s cutbacks to outreach and advertising would result in lower enrollment.

The window to sign up for health care for 2018 opened Nov. 1 and will close Dec. 15. That’s about half as long as the enrollment period under Obama.

Last week Standard & Poor's forecast that 2018 signups might drop by as much as 1.6 million people from the 12.2 who registered for ACA the prior year — thanks to uncertainty about what Trump will do to the program.

Trump and GOP lawmakers have made dismantling Obamacare a priority — even though Republican efforts to repeal the law without a replacement have so far stalled on Capitol Hill.

Trump recently cut off important Obamacare subsidies to insurance companies to help lower out-of-pocket medical costs for low-income Americans.

The President also signed executive orders that dialed back certain requirements on insurance companies and de-funded outreach efforts to let people know the dates of the enrollment period.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Maine voters approve ObamaCare Medicaid expansion in referendum

On Tuesday, voters in Maine approved a first-of-its-kind referendum to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, going over the head of Gov. Paul LePage (R), who has vetoed five previous attempts to take the ObamaCare expansion. Assuming the state legislature doesn't step in, Maine will become the 32nd state to expand Medicaid. Supporters of the referendum outspent opponents, and organizers are already pushing similar referenda in some of the remaining 18 states, mostly controlled by Republicans, that have declined the ObamaCare program, 90 percent of which is funded by the federal government. In Maine, 80,000 more low-income adults will now qualify for Medicaid, adding to the more than 11 million people covered under the ObamaCare expansion program.

Source: The Associated Press, Politico
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Trump administration asks Supreme Court to invalidate Obamacare (AGAIN)



Ariane de Vogue,
Tami Luhby and
Sarah Mucha,
CNN
Fri June 26, 2020



(CNN). In the midst of a global pandemic with the presidential election just months away, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health care law that enabled millions of Americans to get insurance coverage and that remains in effect despite the pending legal challenge.

In a late-night filing, Solicitor General Noel Franciscosaid that once the law's individual coverage mandate and two key provisions are invalidated, "the remainder of the ACA should not be allowed to remain in effect."

The justices will hear arguments in the case sometime next term, although it is unclear if they will occur before the November election.

The dispute ensures another major shift in the political landscape during the election season on an issue that has dominated American politics for the last decade. It will be the third time the court has heard a significant challenge to the law. The case pits a coalition of Democratic attorneys general led by California and the House of Representatives, which are defending the law, against the Trump administration and a group of red state attorneys general led by Texas.


At issue is whether the law's individual mandate was rendered unconstitutional because Congress reduced the penalty for remaining uninsured to zero and, if so, whether that would bring down the entire law. A federal appeals court in December ruled that the mandate was unconstitutional but punted the decision on which, if any, of the law's provisions could be retained back to the district court -- which had previously found the entire law to be invalidated.

The administration has generally sided with the Republican attorneys general but recently argued that the entire law should fall but that the ruling should only apply to the 18 states that brought the challenge.

In Thursday's filing, Francisco stressed, "Nothing the 2017 Congress did demonstrates it would have intended the rest of the ACA to continue to operate in the absence of these three integral provisions."

He said that "the entire ACA thus must fall with the individual mandate, though the scope of relief entered in this case should be limited to provisions shown to injure the plaintiffs."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sharply criticized the administration after the late-night filing:

"President Trump and the Republicans' campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty," she said in a statement Thursday.

Earlier Thursday, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, lashed out at President Donald Trump for continuing to support upending the law.

"Today, his Administration is filing a brief with the Supreme Court to rip health care coverage away from 23 million Americans — including 224,000 Wisconsinites," Biden said, remarking on Trump's visit to the Badger State Thursday. "Every American deserves the peace of mind that comes (with) access to affordable, high-quality health care."
Biden, who is planning to make a new health care push on protecting the Affordable Care Act this week, was vice president when former President Barack Obama signed the bill into law in 2010. He is calling for strengthening it by making federal premium subsides more generous and allowing more people to qualify for subsidies. He would also add a government-run public option and would lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60.

Meanwhile, Priorities USA, a pro-Biden super PAC, is rolling out a television ad entitled "Failing On Health Care," which highlights Trump's continued effort to undermine Obamacare and will run in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Also, it is releasing a digital ad entitled "Pull the Plug," which emphasizes that 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions could lose protections and their costs could rise if Trump's Supreme Court challenge is successful.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra defended the law at a campaign event for Biden on Wednesday, saying it enabled millions of Americans to gain coverage, particularly Black, Latino and Asian Americans.


"The ACA has been life-changing and now through this pandemic, we can all see the value in having greater access to quality health care at affordable prices," he said, noting that Black Americans are four times more likely to be hospitalized with coronavirus. "Now is not the time to rip away our best tool to address very real and very deadly health disparities in our communities."

About 11.4 million people signed up for 2020 Obamacare polices on the exchanges, while nearly 12.7 million low-income adults have gained coverage through Medicaid expansion. It allows young adults up to age 26 to stay on their parents' policies and bans insurers from denying coverage to those who buy their own policies or charging them more because of pre-existing conditions. And it lets many people obtain free birth control, annual physicals, mammograms and cholesterol tests.

It affects nearly all Americans, many of whom aren't aware of the law's impact.

The filings come a day after House Democrats unveiled a bill to enhance the landmark law. Similar to Biden's plan, it would make Obamacare policies more affordable by bolstering federal premium subsidies -- limiting monthly premiums to 8.5% of enrollees' income and allowing more middle class Americans to receive the subsidies by eliminating the income cap of four times the poverty level. It also tries to entice more states to expand Medicaid to low-income adults by covering 100% of the cost for the first three years.

And it would reverse several moves made by the Trump administration to weaken the law, including restoring funds for marketing and enrollment assistance during Obamacare's annual sign-up period.

The move in the House, led by Pelosi, seeks to draw a sharp contrast between the parties on health care, an issue that's become even more pressing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"It was wrong anytime," the California Democrat said of the administration's stance. "Now, it's beyond stupid."

This story has been updated with reaction from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.


 

xxxbishopxxx

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The dems should make a million ads about this. As of now, everyone who has been diagnosed with Covid 19 technically has a pre-existing condition.
 
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