Did Trump just destroy GOP effort to repeal Obamacare?

When even the most committed Republicans came around to support Donald Trump in 2016, they made a kind of bet. It wouldn’t matter much that Trump had no apparent fealty to conservative ideology or knowledge about policy, because he’d be leaving all that boring stuff to them. The Republican Congress would pass its agenda, he’d sign whatever they put in front of him, and they’d all live happily ever after.

But now it’s not looking so simple. In fact, Trump just dealt a huge blow to their top priority: repealing the Affordable Care Act. Accomplishing repeal without causing the GOP a political calamity is a delicate enterprise, and the last thing they want is to have him popping off at the mouth and promising things they can’t deliver. Which is what he just did, as The Washington Post reported Sunday:

“President-elect Donald Trump said in a weekend interview that he is nearing completion of a plan to replace President Obama’s signature health-care law with the goal of ‘insurance for everybody,’ while also vowing to force drug companies to negotiate directly with the government on prices in Medicare and Medicaid ...

“Trump said his plan for replacing most aspects of Obama’s health-care law is all but finished. Although he was coy about its details — ‘lower numbers, much lower deductibles’ — he said he is ready to unveil it alongside Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“ ... Trump said he has paid attention to critics who say that repealing Obamacare would put coverage at risk for more than 20 million Americans covered under the law’s insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion.

“ ‘We’re going to have insurance for everybody,’ Trump said. ‘There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.’ People covered under the law ‘can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.’

“ ‘It’s not going to be their plan,’ he said of people covered under the current law. ‘It’ll be another plan. But they’ll be beautifully covered. I don’t want single-payer. What I do want is to be able to take care of people ...’ ”

Donald Trump just emphatically promised universal health coverage. That’s an absolutely gigantic promise, and it’s one that Republicans have no intention of keeping.

But now they’re stuck with it. Democrats will be saying, “President Trump promised that everyone would be covered!” every day for as long as this debate goes on.

The Republican plan, in whatever final form it takes, will absolutely, positively not cover everyone. Universal coverage isn’t even one of their goals. Republicans believe it’s much more important to get government as far away from health care as possible. In place of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for the purchase of insurance that have extended coverage to 20 million more people than used to have it, they’ll be offering some tax credits and health savings accounts, which would be very good for the healthy and wealthy, but not so great for other people.

They call this “universal access,” which is meant to sound like “universal coverage” but is actually nothing of the sort. The truth is that there are really only two ways you can achieve universal coverage: by having the government cover everyone in some form of single-payer, or with a set of extremely coercive mandates to carry coverage, much more coercive than the ones in the ACA. Republicans would rather pluck out their own eyes than agree to either one of those. So the trick is to make the public think they won’t take away coverage from tens of millions of people, while doing just that.

And now, congressional Republicans are going to have to answer for breaking a promise they didn’t even make. At a moment when opposition to the repeal of the ACA is gathering strength , this was the last thing they needed.

This story was originally published January 16, 2017 at 11:57 PM with the headline "Did Trump just destroy GOP effort to repeal Obamacare?."