JD Vance's mom got health coverage under Trump -- by using Obamacare [View all]

Source: washingtonpost


The vice-presidential nominee’s story about family members’ new health coverage illustrates how Republicans inherited — and benefited — from the current system.---But to many health policy experts, Vance’s story reveals something else: the benefits of “Obamacare,” even to its critics, and the audacity of Trump’s attempts to take credit for the work of President Barack Obama and Democrats, who crafted and defended the Affordable Care Act at great political cost. After Democrats enacted the law in 2010, Republicans spent the next seven years vowing to overturn it, culminating in a Trump-led repeal effort that fell one vote short.

“If any Vance family members transitioned to the marketplace because they earned out of Medicaid, they should be grateful that Trump and Republicans in Congress failed to repeal and replace the marketplace with an alternative that would have provided far less affordable coverage,” Andrew Sprung, an independent health analyst who has been tracking Vance’s policy proposals, wrote in an email.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/10/12/jd-vance-mother-health-insurance-obamacare-aca/

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**A few of the ways the Republican Party sabotaged Obamacare -Trump and Congressional Republicans have spent years working to undermine the ACA**

1. the ACA’s Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans, or CO-OPs. Early drafts of the ACA called for $10 billion in federal grants for the CO-OP program. But insurance lobbyists and conservative lawmakers insisted on $6 billion in loans instead of $10 billion in grants, restrictions limiting CO-OPs to the individual and small-group market (and not the more stable and profitable large-group market)

2. Day One legal challenges--On March 23, 2010, the same day the ACA was signed into law, Republican attorneys general from 14 states began the process of challenging the ACA’s individual mandate via the courts

3. Refusal to take the ACA’s Medicaid expansion funding--The ACA scheduled Medicaid expansion to take effect at the beginning of 2014. But at that point, half the states had opted against expansion, despite the fact that the federal government paid the full cost of expansion for the first 3 years

4. Obstruction of enrollment efforts---January 2014, laws had been passed in 17 Republican states that restricted navigators’ ability to help residents understand and enroll in the new plans.

5. Republican Efforts to invalidate premium subsidies--coverage would not be considered affordable without the premium subsidies

6. Republicans Undermined ACA’s risk corridors in late 2014, Republican lawmakers, led by Senator Marco Rubio, added language to a must-pass budget bill (Cromnibus) that retroactively made the risk corridors program budget neutral. Coop insurers were driven out of the market place

7. Republicans efforts to repeal the ACA in 2017 (with a successful repeal of the individual mandate penalty)

8. Republican party refusal to work on bipartisan fixes

9. **Top Republican Brags About His Party’s Sabotage Of Obamacare**--Well, it’s 2017, and the second most powerful Republican in the U.S. Senate just crowed about how he and his colleagues have wrecked part of the Affordable Care Act, undermining a program that helps millions to get insurance. The Republican is John Cornyn, from Texas, who is the Senate Majority Whip. He was talking about a provision of the GOP tax cut bill that eliminates the individual mandate, which imposes a financial penalty upon people who do not get health insurance. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gop-sabotage-healthcare_n_5a3a8adbe4b06d1621b1187f

10. The Trump Administration Announced New Rules Further Dismantling Obamacare
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/paulmcleod/trump-administration-rules-obamacare

11. Trump administration won't reopen Obamacare enrollment for uninsured as coronavirus spreadshttps://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/politics/affordable-care-act-obamacare-open-enrollment-trump/index.html

12. Insurers Turn To Congress After Trump Refuses To Open Obamacare Market https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2020/04/09/insurers-turn-to-congress-after-trump-refuses-to-open-obamacare-market/#2a1bd3c16b35

13. MAY 7, 2020 Trump Still Wants to Kill Obamacare, Pandemic Be Damned
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-still-wants-to-kill-obamacare-coronavirus-aca

14. Trump's pick for federal court under fire for calling Obamacare ruling 'indefensible'--Justin Walker, a 37-year-old protege of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the supreme court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said he would have an open mind on the Obama-era health care law if it came before him as a district or appeals court judge. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/06/justin-walker-judge-confirmed-too-inexperienced

**Republicans**

1. Republicans have voted at least 70 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the protections it guarantees for people with pre-existing medical conditions--Republicans hoped voters would forget they tried to kill Obamacare

2. Republicans in the House and Senate have just recently proposed hundreds of billions of cuts to the Medicare and Medicaid programs

3. Trump tried to throw millions of working-poor people off of Medicaid, then, once that failed, deliberately engineered a spike in health-insurance premiums, out of sheer spite.

4. Trump Proposed a rule allowing companies with less than 250 workers to cease reporting workplace injuries and illness statistics to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — and removed a list of Americans killed in workplace accidents from OSHA’s home page.

5. The Trump administration issued a rule last year that allowed short-term plans to last 364 days and to be renewable for three years. These plans DO NOT COVER PRE-EXISTING CONDTIONS AND IN A NUTSHELL ARE THE SAME PLANS FROM 11-12 YEARS AGO--OBAMA LIMITED AMERICAN'S EXPOSURE TO THESE FRAUDLENT POLICIES-- THESE POLICIES OFTEN REFUSED COVERAGE AND HELPED SEND MILLIONS INTO BANKRUPTCY--**A SCAM AT BEST**

6. The republican party slashed Funds to facilitate HealthCare.gov sign-ups--in a nutshell, they are no longer letting the public know the time period open enrollment for heatlhcare sidning up--it just ended 13 days ago, in case anyone didnt know that

7. Trump appointed one Supreme Court justice who had ruled that a trucker could be justly fired for abandoning his broken-down vehicle, instead of honoring his contractual obligation to freeze to death with his cargo, and nominated another who’d found that San Diego SeaWorld could not be held liable in the death of an employee who was killed by a killer whale. (The former pick ended up producing a landmark decision that gutted funding for public-sector unions, in defiance of decades-old precedent.)

**Democrats**

1. Democrats in congress have passed bills to reduce prescription drug prices

2. Democrats have passed bills to protect preexisting conditions, and condemned the Trump administration’s legal battle to strike down the ACA in the courts

3. Democrats are fighting for universal coverage of some sort or medicare for all

4. Democrats promised to defend Medicaid expansion--A New Study Found that 15,000 People Died Because Their State Didn’t Expand Medicaid--**15,000 Americans Died So Republican Governors Could Stick It to Obama** https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28472403/15000-americans-died-medicaid-expansion-obamacare/

**Democrats want their party to make bold healthcare reform its top priority**
Here are a list of related heatlhcare bills passed by democrats that Republicans and Trump are refusing to bring to the floor of the senate

. House Resolution 259 — Medicaid Extenders Act of 2019

. H.R. 271 — Condemning the Trump Administration’s Legal Campaign to Take Away Americans’ Health Care

. H.R. 986 — Protecting Americans with Preexisting Conditions Act of 2019

.H.R. 987 — Strengthening Health Care and Lowering Prescription Drug Costs Act

.H.R. 1520, the Purple Book Continuity Act (bill aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs)

.H.R. 1503, the Orange Book Transparency Act of 2019 (bill aimed at lowering the cost of prescrition drugs