Trump's Threat to Sabotage Obamacare Would Drastically Increase Premiums and Deficits

An abbreviated reminder of efforts by Republicans and Trump to destroy the healthcare system so far in 2017:

--On May 4th, the House GOP voted to take healthcare away from at least 23 million Americans according to the Congressional Budget Office report, which came after the vote was rushed through.

--A group of Republican Senators operated in secrecy on the Senate's version of a "healthcare" bill to take away said healthcare from nearly 10% of the country and cut taxes on the wealthiest.  In late June, they unveiled a plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with no healthcare for millions of individuals.  They fortunately failed to garner 50 votes and it failed in its current form in mid-July.

--On July 27, 2017, the Senate rejected the latest Affordable Care Act repeal effort, again seemingly derailing the GOP campaign to strip millions of citizens of healthcare.

At that time, Smart Dissent noted that Republicans have plenty of ways to harm Obamacare nonetheless by stripping reimbursements to insurers forcing them to leave the exchanges, ending marketing of the healthcare plans, and more.  That threat is real and it would be very painful to our citizens and country.

Premiums for the most popular health insurance plans would shoot up 20 percent next year, and federal budget deficits would increase by $194 billion in the coming decade, if Trump carried out his threat to end certain subsidies paid to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.  The subsidies reimburse insurers for reducing deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs that low-income people pay when they visit doctors, fill prescriptions or receive care in hospitals.

Insurers in some states would withdraw from the market because of “substantial uncertainty” about the effects of the cutoff, the budget office said. About 5 percent of the nation’s population would have no insurers in the individual insurance market next year without the subsidies, it said.

...insurers will increase premiums for midlevel “silver plans,” and the government will incur additional costs because, under the Affordable Care Act, it also provides financial assistance to low-income people to help them pay those premiums.

“Try to wriggle out of his responsibilities as he might, the C.B.O. report makes clear that if Trump refuses to make these payments, he will be responsible for American families paying more for less care,” the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said. “He’s the president and the ball is in his court — American families await his action.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/cbo-obamacare-cost-sharing-reduction-trump.html