October 12: On This Day In 2017
Along with promising Mexico would pay for his pet wall, one of 2016 Candidate Trump’s most frequent promises was that he would destroy Obamacare and replace it with something better. Instantaneously.
Like so much of what Trump said, and says, it was both a failed promise and a lie. Turns out…most Americans, and most Members of Congress, felt Obamacare was actually a pretty darn good thing for this country. So, Trump’s efforts to push legislation which could overturn Obama’s Affordable Care Act ended up failing.
Being told “no” by Congress didn’t deter Trump, though. He heroically (to his MAGA fans) resorted to chipping away at the margins of the ACA through a series of executive orders.
OTDI 2017 Trump’s Executive Order 13813 created a means by which insurance companies could ignore some of the ACA’s mandates and thereby start providing insurance to unsuspecting customers which didn’t meet the minimal standards of coverage required by the law.
As part of his overall Destroy Obamacare effort, Trump also reduced the penalties to $0 for failure to adhere to certain mandates, thereby effectively rendering them pointless.
CNN has a nice summary of Trump’s overall efforts to mangle the Act, beginning with: “The Trump administration quickly took steps to weaken Obamacare and unleashed uncertainty into the marketplaces. It cut the open enrollment period in half to six weeks, slashed the advertising budget by 90% and severely cut funding for enrollment assistance. At the same time, Trump increased the visibility of insurance agents, who can also sell non-Obamacare plans.”…and they continued on from there.
Critics worried that Trump’s executive order could cause medical costs to spiral for everybody and in particular for the neediest Americans. A Congressional Budget Office report suggested that Trump’s efforts could cause premiums to rise 20 percent and cost the government nearly $200 billion in a decade.
As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded, “(The executive order) is a spiteful act of vast, pointless sabotage leveled at working families and the middle class in every corner of America.”
The Economist agreed, “The strange thing about Donald Trump’s new executive actions on health care is the identity of those who will suffer their consequences….Both moves are likely to end up inflicting the most pain on self-employed, middle- to upper-income folk—in other words, on a Republican constituency.”
Soon after signing the executive order, Trump bragged “it's gone. There is no such thing as Obamacare anymore.”
(As an aside, it’s ironic that Trump resorted to executive orders to further some of his goals, despite complaining for years that Obama, as president, shouldn’t do such things. Fittingly, Trump’s executive order was repealed by President Joe Biden through an executive order of his own in January 2021.)
2024 update: There has been no end to the avalanche of lies coming from Donald Trump’s mouth. As you know the WaPo recorded 30,573 of them during his four years. But, the spigot didn’t get turned off once he left office. And now they've started coming from JD Vance too.
In perhaps the most jaw-droppingly, outlandish lie of them all, Vance – during his debate with Walz – gave Trump credit for saving Obamacare. Some of the headline reviews of that lie are shown above.
Dive Deeper
On This Day In The Trump Administration:Trump tries to destroy Obamacare through legislation. Fails, then tries executive actions. Lies.