4) Donald Trump has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something beautiful.
Is it any surprise that the only plan put before Congress was the complete repeal of the Affordable Care Act. That initiative came within one vote in the Senate of being adopted. With many thanks to John McCain of Arizona or America would have lost the one health care legislative success addressing the health concerns of the average American family. Everyone should make a note of the fact that the vote to repeal did not include any alternative plan.
Donald Trump promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something beautiful. Not only had no “beautiful” plan been produced prior to the vote to repeal; no alternative plan, good, bad, or ugly, was produced in the four years of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
2016 Original:
4) Donald Trump has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something beautiful.
The Affordable Care Act has with minimal disruption met target timelines to accomplish many of its intended goals. It has insured twenty million uninsured, half of the uninsured population, left employer based health insurance in place, maintained competitive public and private health insurance and reduced the rate of inflation of health care costs. This reduction in the rate of growth has brought the cost of the Affordable Health Care Act below the costs projected in the 2010 legislation
As many have been quick to point out, there have been a number of problems and many problems remain, not least of which is the other half of the remaining uninsured.
Donald Trump shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how things work in his simplistic critique of the Affordable Health Care Act and how his replacement would work better. Although Trump argues that education should be local, state based, he does not believe something as critical as health care should be. He plans to eliminate the “rings” around the states and by allowing national competition everything would be just “beautiful”.
If society wants more cell phones, a few calls to China can produce more affordable cell phones. There are no calls to make, or better deals to negotiate, to produce more affordable health care and Donald Trump’s planned solution is just another of his popular sound bites backed by a vacant policy.
A history of political intransigence has created the highest percentage of national product devoted to health care, twice the average of developed nations, while being near the bottom of percentage of the population covered by health insurance. The Obama administration has been the only administration to make any meaningful progress with health care and in making America healthy as a nation. Going back to continued political intransigence and wishful thinking will not make everything beautiful.