WASHINGTON –President Donald Trump wants to “sabotage” health care coverage for millions of Americans in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic by trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the chairman of a House Ways and Means subcommittee said on Tuesday.
The Oversight Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee focused its hearing on what Democrats called the Trump administration is destabilizing the American health care system.
There is “no other word I can think of – except sabotage,” Oversight Subcommittee Chairman William Pascrell, D-N.J., said.
But the top Republican on the committee Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, countered that the rhetoric of the Democratic party has been “flat out wrong and a miscarriage of truth.”
In 2016, one of Trump’s key promises to supporters was that he would get Congress to repeal the ACA and replace it with a different approach to health care coverage. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments about the ACA a week after the Nov. 3 election, and with the anticipated confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, it is more likely that the high court could rule the law unconstitutional.
In the 10 years since former President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law, it has remained a partisan issue, with Democrats heavily supporting the law – and pushing for it to lead the country toward universal health care – and Republicans firmly against the policy.
While the Trump administration has been unable to fully repeal the ACA, the administration has managed to undo some of the Obama-era protections guaranteed in the act.
The administration has added “work requirements” to Medicaid, reducing the number of Americans who qualify for the program; eliminated the individual mandate, or the requirement for all adults to have insurance; and stopped subsidizing cost-sharing reductions, which meant that while insurance companies offered coverage to low-income families, the federal government no longer reimbursed them.
Andy Slavitt, former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the committee that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in nearly 14.6 million unemployed Americans losing their health care coverage and that the Trump administration’s cuts to the ACA has “undermined the law with a clinical callousness.”
Kelly acknowledged those who have lost family members because of what he called the “China flu,” but said that the American health care system is the best in the world.
He called on Democrats to engage in bipartisan negotiation to replace the ACA.
But Slavitt said that with the pandemic still raging, eradicating the ACA could have drastic effects on future generations.
“Children and college students are getting an illness and appearing asymptomatic,” Slavitt said. “Decades from now, they could develop things like heart arrhythmia or asthma and insurance companies would be able to deny them on the basis of pre-existing conditions if the Affordable Care Act is eliminated.”
A 2020 Gallup poll found that 52% of Americans approve of the Affordable Care Act, with 94% of Democrats and 11% of Republicans’ approval.