Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Does Donald Trump Know What the GOP Health Bill Does?
Must-Read: How, you ask, did Donald Trump’s Mad Management Skillz take DJT from $15/share to $0? This is how:
Ezra Klein:Does Donald Trump Know What the GOP Health Bill Does?: “With the help of Vox’s Jacob Gardenswartz, I collected and read absolutely everything Donald Trump has said publicly about the AHCA…
- Trump has a very limited set of talking points on health care, and he repeats the same words and sentences constantly—his comfort zone on both the issue and the legislation is very narrow….
Trump seems confused about what the GOP bill does… spun by more ideologically motivated advisers (that’s certainly the narrative pro-Trump outlets like Breitbart are pushing)….
Trump has bought into a caricature of Obamacare… that heavily informs his thinking…. This could prove more consequential than people realize.
The AHCA does literally none of the things Trump says it does…. The AHCA doesn’t lower costs… “premiums would be 13% (~$1,000) higher under the AHCA than under current law, holding plan generosity and the individual market age distribution fixed at their current law levels.” To the extent that the AHCA sees lower premiums, it’s because older people can’t afford care and younger people buy sparer plans…. Most people will have fewer affordable choices…. Competition is likely to fall…. The idea that the AHCA will “ensure health care access for all Americans” is sufficiently absurd that I’m not even going to spend time on it.
But the idea that it will let you choose your doctor and plan is more interesting—it seems entirely possible to me that Trump doesn’t realize the limited choices people complain about in Obamacare are the result of people being unable to afford more generous plans with broader networks, and it seems likely to me that he doesn’t know the AHCA will make that problem worse, or why conservative health reformers think that’s a good thing…. On March 10, Trump said this:
You all remember, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. I know, Greg, you’ve never heard that, right? But it was said many, many times, and it turned out to be not true. This is the time we’re going to get it done.
This is either an extremely foolish thing to say or it is the comment of a man who doesn’t realize that the plan he’s backing would, in a stroke, mean millions of people could no longer afford the subsidized insurance they were using, and would react with fury and surprise when they realize they were betrayed.
The absolute constant in Trump’s health care rhetoric is the idea that Obamacare is dead no matter what he does…. If your only trusted source of information on Obamacare were the furthest reaches of the conservative press, this is the impression of the law you would have. But it’s not true…. Trump… thinks “unless we gave it massive subsidies in a year from now, or six months from now, it’s not even going to be here,” and argued that “there’s not even going to be any people on the plan” unless he does something. This is flatly nonsense, but it might be nonsense Trump believes. The irony, of course, is that the AHCA will destabilize individual insurance markets further, and lead to far greater coverage losses than if Obamacare were left untouched…