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    HomeHealth CareRepublicans are serious about cutting public health care

    Republicans are serious about cutting public health care

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    Johnson stands behind and to the left of Trump as he speaks into a microphone.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans will seek “comprehensive” health care reform if Donald Trump is elected president in 2024. Joe Riddle/Getty Images

    If you’re confused, it’s not an accident.

    Republicans are trying to do it both ways on health care during the 2024 campaign. They boast that they want to deregulate insurance and drastically cut government spending, yet they claim they would never do anything to jeopardize public coverage.

    These two steps tend to get them into trouble. Recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Caught on a tape Promise to carry “a blow torch to the regulatory state”. Donald Trump, Johnson said, will want to “go big” in his second term because he can’t run for a third term, the speaker told a group of Republican voters in Pennsylvania. And health care, Johnson said, will be “a big part” of the GOP’s agenda.

    One attendee asked Johnson directly: No Obamacare? “No Obamacare,” Johnson said.

    “The ACA is so deeply entrenched, we need comprehensive reform to make it work. We got a lot of ideas,” the House Speaker added. He wasn’t more specific than that.

    Kamala Harris’ campaign is fast flagged Johnson’s comments, and Republicans backed down. Donald Trump’s campaign said It was “not a policy position of President Trump.” Johnson stressed that he had not promised to repeal Obamacare, emphasizing his comments that the 2010 law was “coherent” while ignoring his later promise of “comprehensive reforms.”

    Trump himself indicated only “Concept of a plan“For American health care. That leaves other Republicans to fill in the blanks and the party’s specific proposals are poorly defined. But if many details remain to be filled in, the theme of the GOP’s health care agenda is clear: Cuts. Cutting regulations. Cutting costs.

    Johnson’s comments were not an isolated incident. Just last month, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, called for “a deregulation agenda so people can choose a health care plan that’s right for them.” If you really parse his words about the health insurance risk pool, it would be a return to a world where people could be charged more for coverage if they had pre-existing medical conditions, the pre-Obamacare world.

    Johnson promised the same. This is the reality: If they win control of the White House and Congress in this election, Republicans will try to cut public health care.

    Republicans still want big health care cuts

    When the Obamacare repeal died in 2017, it might be tempting to think that a chapter had ended. Instead, the fight over the future of US health care has entered a new era.

    Make no mistake: Republican leaders still want to lower health care costs and open up health insurance regulations.

    And Trump, no matter what he says, has proven before that to be flexible on conventional conservative health policies. His people continue to put health care in the crosshairs, sometimes in ways that may not be obvious.

    Elon Musk, who is occasionally seen campaigning Shadow President United States, yes commitment To cut $2 trillion from the federal government’s $6.8 trillion budget. he has Recognized That the cuts would result in “temporary” hardship, but insisted they would be for the country’s long-term benefit.

    About $1 in every $5 The federal budget goes to health care. Barring a severe cutback (unlikely) to the US military, such a plan would require massive cuts to health care programs. Trump has often said he would protect Medicare, which covers the elderly, but he has in the past supported large cuts to Medicaid, the program for low-income people that provides insurance. 73 million AmericansAs part of the 2017 ACA repeal-and-replace bill.

    The main Republican bill to repeal and replace the ACA that nearly passed in 2017 was as much about sweeping Medicaid cuts by capping the program’s funding as it was about relaxing health insurance regulations or repealing the individual mandate.

    Republicans may try to pass another Obamacare repeal bill with a comprehensive Medicaid overhaul. Or they could increasingly move away from health care, as we saw in the first Trump term after the Obamacare repeal bill failed. Trump has slashed funding for the ACA marketplace to promote enrollment while rolling back rules for incomplete plans, which has had disastrous results for some patients who don’t know what they’re signing up for.

    In Trump’s four years in office, the number of people covered by the ACA read More than 1 million, to 11.4 million. Since Joe Biden became president, and Democrats expanded the law’s insurance subsidies as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the number of people covered by Marketplace plans has nearly doubled to 21.4 million.

    If Trump takes office again, a repeat of that earlier sabotage seems likely, even if a major withdrawal effort fails to materialize. Republicans may cut outreach funding again. They can make subtle changes to health insurance rules, such as raising the premiums that older people can be charged compared to younger ones or giving insurers more flexibility in limiting benefits, networks and other aspects of a person’s health coverage. They could make more targeted cuts to Medicaid or allow states to set Medicaid work requirements again, as they did in the first Trump term only to be blocked by the courts.

    Why Republicans Can’t Be Honest About Their Health Care Plan

    The failure to repeal Obamacare is because Republicans insist that their health care agenda is clearly not what they want every time they accidentally make their intentions very clear.

    It’s easy to forget now, but Obamacare was originally a winning issue for Republicans. they are Historic Congress win in 2010 midterms Voters rally against new health care law. Then they take Dozens of votes to repeal all or part of it While Barack Obama still holds the veto pen. For much of its first decade, the ACA was deeply unpopular.

    Then Trump won the presidency and Republicans had to fulfill their promise to repeal and replace the law. GOP leaders got the new president on board with a pretty conservative plan: It would have left the skeleton of the ACA, but rolled back its rules and funding while making those huge cuts to Medicaid.

    Then something changed. As the repeal plan began to move through Congress, and projections of millions of Americans losing health insurance dominated news coverage, the politics of health care turned upside down. The Act quietly grew to cover a vast swath of –More than 25 million – and, importantly, it began Change Americans’ minds about the role of government in providing health care. “Pre-existing condition” became a loaded term, and when people realized the GOP wanted to loosen the ACA’s health insurance rules, they objected loudly.

    Medicaid also sparked a political innovation that had never been seen before Especially disabled supporters They feared what cuts to that program would mean for them and drew widespread coverage for their protests. Senate Republicans in states that expanded Medicaid through the Health Care Act were ultimately responsible for blocking the repeal effort.

    In the 2018 midterms, Democrats hammered Republicans on health care and won stunning electoral victories. Today, the ACA is It is as popular as ever And US voters say they are Democrats trust health care more than the GOP.

    This series of events has left Republicans reeling. The relative success of the ACA has expanded the welfare state and influenced Americans’ perceptions of the role of government in ways that run counter to conservative economic thinking. They want some of those progressive wins back. But they also need to be aware of the changing politics of healthcare.

    Once in a while, especially in “safe” conservative places, they slip up, admit they want to repeal the ACA, and then back down. Mike Johnson’s only mistake was being blunt.

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