President Donald Trump hands a pen that he used to sign an executive order on health care to Sen. Rand Paul in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on Thursday, October 12, 2017. (Photo: Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
This piece is part of Fighting for Our Lives: The Movement for Medicare for All, a Truthout original series.
Don’t believe for a second that the GOP’s threat to your health care has passed.
Although the GOP has failed, for now, to advance a wholesale Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal bill, the hard right hasn’t given up on its goal of shredding the ACA and Medicaid. They’ve merely switched strategies.
Andy Slavitt, who oversaw the ACA and Medicaid under Obama, calls the GOP’s new strategy a “synthetic repeal”: dismantling health care piece by piece through executive orders, sabotaging the ACA and a budget tax plan with hidden health care cuts. It’s an insidious end-run around the legislative process. But although there’s no single bill to defeat, the citizenry still has the tools to fight back — and even lay the groundwork to go on the offense.
Trump’s anti-ACA executive orders could, in theory, be blocked by new legislation, but that’s unlikely in this Congress. In the near term, the best defense is through the courts — and attorneys general from New York to California are already on the case.
The Republicans want you to believe that their drive for tax cuts for the rich has nothing to do with health care at all.
Trump’s other sabotage efforts, meanwhile, are being directly targeted by new bipartisan legislation. The Alexander-Murray health care bill announced this week would reinstate so-called cost sharing reduction (CSR) payments — reimbursements to insurers for payments they are required to provide to their low-income customers — for two years. It would also go further: It would reinstate ACA outreach budgets that have been spitefully slashed by the Trump administration, unclog approval for health care…