DNC trashes Trump for Obamacare repeal efforts

Source: The Independent

7 hours ago


Democrats continue to keep the pressure on Donald Trump and the broader conservative movement over the ending of federal protections for abortion rights — but a new memo from the national party indicates that those attacks may expand to encompass another issue: healthcare access.

A memo provided to The Indepdendent and issued by the party on Friday outlines angles of attack surrounding the Trump administration’s 2017 push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. That scheme, which represented a long-held goal of the right under Obama’s presidency, ultimately failed after three Republican senators broke ranks with their party to kill the GOP’s repeal effort.

The drama that played out on the Senate floor — culminating in John McCain’s famous “thumbs down” — belied a larger argument around the issue of healthcare access: the mandated coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions that was central to the Affordable Care Act’s legislation and expanded coverage for millions of Americans — people who subsequently would have been ripped off their plans, were it repealed. A so-called “skinny repeal” bill offered by the GOP in 2017 would have kept that central pre-existing conditions tenet while making other sweeping changes to the bill, including a restructure of Medicare. Experts estimated at the time that millions still would have lost access to health insurance under the Republican plan, and as a result it was sunk.

Now, Democrats on the national committee are coming out swinging against their Republican foes over healthcare costs and access to no-cost emergency contraception under the Affordable Care Act. Pointing to parts of the much-maligned Project 2025 that call for an end to FDA approval for mifepristone and other efforts to restrict contraception, the DNC says in the memo that the rollback of access to free emergency contraception would be a blow to the rights of 48 million women who access such treatment, not to mention the milions more who access birth control through subsidized health care plans.

Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/dnc-memo-trump-obamacare-repeal-b2620083.html