The White House Wants to Take Away Your Health Insurance
Earlier this week, Attorney General William Barr released his take on the Mueller report in a 4-page letter to congress. The relatively brief letter, christened 'the Barr Report' by Rachel Maddow, claimed that Mueller had essentially exonerated Trump on the issue of collusion with Russia, and that Mueller did not have enough evidence to indict Trump on obstruction of justice.
With that news, Trump gloated for a day, and then quickly moved on to his next objective: ending the Affordable Care Act.
It's as if the end of the Mueller investigation gave Trump carte blanche to do what he has always wanted to do: obliterate President Obama's signature legislative act.
It's not clear why the Republicans are going after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) again. Access to health care is the most important issue for many Americans. The Democrats picked up an historic number of house seats in the 2018 midterm elections by promising to support the ACA and improve access to health care. Obtaining and keeping health insurance despite having one or more pre-existing conditions--chronic illnesses--is also extremely important to most Americans.
Trump and the Republicans are now threatening all of this. They continue to make the same empty promises they have made since 2010 that they will end the ACA and replace it with something better, but have never provided any details of any sort of alternative plan for the country.
I think Trump simply can't stand the existence of a popular program that provided government health insurance to 20 million Americans and helped millions of other Americans obtain market-rate health insurance. He wants to destroy a program named for President Obama--Obamacare--for the sake of destroying it.
This latest attempt at undermining the nation's health represents terrible policy and really awful politics.
The Mueller investigation may be over, but that should not give Trump free range to destroy a critical federal program.
Be careful. The White House is going to try very hard to take away health insurance that millions of Americans need. You may be one of those people.