Trump tries one more pre-election scam
Opinion by
Columnist
September 25, 2020 at 11:46 a.m. CDT
If you
got taken in by Trump University or the Trump Institute or the Trump Network, you’re the target audience for
the Trump health-care plan.
“Scam”
would be a better word than “plan” to describe what President Trump is trying
to do with just over a month until the election. Time is short, but a president
who built an entire career on cons and grifts is hoping he can manage one more
swindle to alleviate one of his greatest electoral vulnerabilities.
On
Thursday, Trump gave a speech touting an executive order that
is supposed to deliver us all to health care nirvana. Apparently unable to
ignore the elephant in the room, he mentioned the lawsuit filed by Republican
states — supported by his administration — that seeks to nullify the entire
Affordable Care Act:
I’m in court to terminate
this really, really terrible situation. If we win, we will have a better and
less expensive plan that will always protect individuals with preexisting
conditions. If we lose, what we have now is better than the original — the
original version of Obamacare, by far. Much better. Much better. Again, we will
always protect patients with preexisting conditions.
This
lawsuit will stand a much better chance of succeeding once he fills the Supreme
Court seat opened up by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If it does succeed,
the lawsuit will kick 20 million people off coverage, take away subsidies that
make coverage affordable for millions more, reinstate the Medicare prescription
drug “doughnut hole,” disallow young people from staying on their parents’
insurance and remove the protections for people with preexisting conditions
that the ACA created for the first time in U.S. history.
But
Trump has a “better” plan. Just like the better future you’ll have once you
give your life savings to Trump University to learn his real estate secrets.
In the
software industry they call this “vaporware”
— a product announced with great fanfare that never actually exists.
I would
point out that the ACA is over 900 pages long, as befits a law that
sought to re-engineer an impossibly complex system. As Trump himself marveled when he first tried to repeal
it, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Everybody knew that,
except for him.
Trump’s
executive order, on the other hand, is not complicated at all, nor is it a
“plan.” After a few pages extolling the fantastic work his administration has
done on health care, it says it will do things like lower costs and expand
access. How? Don’t ask.
It’s as
though I said “I have a plan to become a billionaire”; you said, “Interesting —
how will you do it?”; and I replied, “Step one: Become a billionaire.”
I want
to focus in particular on this part:
Sec. 2. Policy. It has
been and will continue to be the policy of the United States to give Americans
seeking healthcare more choice, lower costs, and better care and to ensure that
Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice
at affordable rates.
It
is already the law that people with preexisting conditions are
protected, the very law Trump is trying to overturn. It’s as though Trump
walked into a liquor store, pointed a gun at the cashier, and said, “It has
been and will continue to be my policy that armed robbery is wrong. Now give me
all the money in the register.”
But
there’s one more piece of this “plan.” Trump said in his speech that in the
next few weeks the government will be sending $200 prescription drug discount
cards to 33 million Medicare beneficiaries. “Nobody has seen this before,” he
said. “These cards are incredible.”
Given
that doing so would cost $6.6 billion and the president can’t
simply do that without an act of Congress, if it actually happened it would
almost certainly be illegal (the White House claims they can do
it through a program they’ve proposed but that does not yet exist, I kid you
not). Furthermore, a one-time $200 payment does nothing to solve the enormous
problem of high drug costs.
And
there’s a back story here, which is that the administration attempted to
negotiate a deal with drug companies to lower costs, but the deal fell apart.
Why? As the New York Times reported:
Mark
Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, insisted the drugmakers pay for $100 cash
cards that would be mailed to seniors before November — “Trump Cards,” some in
the industry called them.
Some of the drugmakers
bridled at being party to what they feared would be seen as an 11th-hour
political boost for Mr. Trump, the people familiar with the matter said.
So the
administration wants to do it anyway — which, to repeat, they can’t legally do.
I’m
reasonably sure that the entire reason this happened at all is because of how
Trump was humiliated in an ABC News town hall earlier this month. When he
claimed that he would soon release a fantastic health care plan, host George
Stephanopoulos pointed out that for years he has said his health care plan
is about to be delivered, usually “two weeks”
hence from whenever he’s speaking, yet it never comes.
Trump
replied weakly that “I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you.”
Somehow
the audience refrained from bursting out in a gale of derisive laughter.
Following
that debacle, Trump probably ordered his aides to come up with something he
could call a “plan,” and this is what they delivered.
In its
way, it’s an appropriate coda to Trump’s efforts on health care, a combination
of lies and cruelty, stopping short of outright cataclysm only because he and
Republicans are too incompetent to follow through on the promise they’ve made
for so long to drop a nuclear bomb on the system.
But as
always, Trump has faith that there are enough simple-minded marks out there to
allow him to pull another con. That faith has gotten him pretty far in life,
but his luck won’t last forever.