Now is not the time for President Trump to deny health care coverage to Americans

It is difficult to write a serious column about President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment since apparently all he wants to do is perform for us as though this is just another episode of “The Apprentice,” or perhaps more aptly “Survivor.”

It has been hard to watch the antics, from the videos he sent out from the hospital to his phony and cheesy drive-by to wave to supporters that endangered Secret Service agents. But nothing compares to his victorious discharge from the hospital, staged to hit the evening news, ending with his photo op on the Truman Balcony, even telling the photographer where to take the shots, trying to look like the conqueror but instead looking like the tin-pot dictator he fancies himself to be.

As he returns to the White House telling us the virus is easy to beat and using himself as proof-positive, he must think we didn’t notice the extraordinary, singular care he received. From being treated by an extensive team of specialists at one of the nation’s finest hospitals and receiving a combination of experimental drugs unavailable to others, it becomes clear to most Americans that the president’s medical treatment was extraordinary.

Indeed, President Trump’s experience at Walter Reed Hospital is light years away from what 27.5 million Americans receive. According to a Census Bureau report released last year, that is the number of Americans who did not have health insurance in 2018. Most of the uninsured are low-income with one worker in the family, but they find themselves working for an employer who does not provide health care coverage and to seek it on the open market is financially prohibitive.

There was a time not long ago when the number of Americans without access to health care coverage was declining. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that, with the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the number of uninsured decreased from over 46.5 million in 2010 to just below 27 million, but that number has increased in recent years by nearly 500,000 people thanks to recent Republican efforts to alter the availability and affordability of coverage.

Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, one of the worst possible appellations given a law of Congress, has become a political football. Even before you get to the details of the legislation and how it actually provided health care coverage to millions who could not afford private insurance, attaching President Obama’s name to the legislation emboldened his Republican enemies to aim all of their anti-Obama venom at the Affordable Care Act, regardless of the benefits to uninsured Americans.

Access to health care has emerged as a key issue of the 2020 presidential election in the midst of a pandemic, given Republican efforts to blow up the Affordable Care Act and President Trump’s failure to come up with a viable alternative.

This is certainly not the moment when you would expect a president to order his Attorney General to march into the Supreme Court and ask it to declare the entire Affordable Care Act null and void. But that is exactly what Attorney General William Barr has done.

Lawyers for Blue Cross Blue Shield claimed that ruling the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional “would do so in the middle of a national economic and public health crisis, where the ACA’s individual markets — including its individual market regulations and subsidies for low-income Americans — ensure life-saving access to health care for millions of Americans.”

That brings us back to President Trump testing positive for the coronavirus and his access to the finest medical care in the land. Is this not a moment for the president to think about the millions of Americans who depend on the Affordable Care Act and the insurance protection it provides our most vulnerable citizens? Is this not the moment for a man who seems to have so little concern or empathy for those less fortunate to reassess what can only be termed a mean-spirited attempt to deny Americans access to health insurance?

This is a president who threw caution to the wind as he continued his scheduled activities when he knew he might have the coronavirus, endangering not only his own health, but also that of his staff and those he met at an evening campaign event. Now that he has checked himself out of Walter Reed, what is truly alarming is the way he is now trying to shrug it off, saying this is just like the flu, contrary to every warning issued by medical and public health experts.

I’m not surprised that a narcissist would judge an entire pandemic by his singular experience, but what is surprising and maddening is that his colleagues in the Republican Party have remained silent with some even echoing Trump’s claim that COVID-19 is overrated as the public health menace we know it to be.

Not one Republican has suggested this is not the time to wipe out the last measure of insurance protection for those who cannot afford private insurance. Not one Republican has called out Trump and Barr and asked them to hold off on their plan to have the Supreme Court deprive uninsured Americans of their last resort for a level of health care far below President Trump’s, but at least one that gives them a modicum of insurance protection.

Republicans who sit idly by without challenging this attack on the uninsured will have the blood of its COVID victims on their hands. Someday this public health disaster will be recorded in the history books, and the children and grandchildren of the current crop of Republicans who have shirked their responsibilities in this regard will read the cowardly legacy they left behind for their descendants.