This week, Donald Trump made large strides in his master plan to destroy Obamacare by any means necessary. And he is proud! So proud!
He also bragged about health insurance companies tanking on the stock market:
Which is only sort of true, and even if it was, it would not really mean that it's a good thing for anyone.
He's so very proud of this, really, that it almost seems like he has no idea what he even did this week, and that it was not very good. First, he scrapped the whole "healthcare subsidies for the poors" thing, which -- in addition to being very bad for poor people -- will also cause everyone else's insurance premiums to rise. Like, literally the insurance companies have come out and said that they will have to raise everyone's insurance because of this.
Via The New York Times:
Insurers have said they will need much higher premiums and may pull out of the insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act if the subsidies were cut off. Known as cost-sharing reduction payments, the subsidies were expected to total $9 billion in the coming year and nearly $100 billion in the coming decade.
This plan is so bad that even Republicans are going around saying "Hey, this is actually a very bad idea! Don't do this!"
And if that wasn't enough, he's also expanded the availability of "junk" insurance plans that don't actually cover anything, allowing small businesses to band together in an "association" that will allow them to purchase these cheap plans for their employees. Will their employees actually be able to go to the doctor or anything with these plans? Probably not!
The executive order also expands the amount of time people can be on temporary, short term health insurance up to a year.
Basically what's going to happen with all of this is that healthy people are going to buy crappy, short-term health plans on the cheap, because they don't really need them, and the costs for people who do need to use their health insurance are going to be ridiculous.
Perhaps ironically, states that voted for Trump are going to lose the most here. 9 of the 10 states that get the most in subsidies went to Trump. However, it is likely that many of those Trump voters would be more than happy to lose their ability to access healthcare if it would make a liberal somewhere unhappy.
For some reason though, Trump seems to believe that all of this is going to lead to great healthcare for everybody. Is he lying? Is he stupid? Is he deluded? Is it some mixture of all three? Probably it is that!
