President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are no longer promising to repeal Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean they have given up efforts to take down the landmark health reform law.
Unlike in 2017, when the late GOP Sen. John McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down dashed his caucus’s hope of overturning the Affordable Care Act, Republicans barely mentioned Obamacare as they swiftly pushed Trump’s massive domestic agenda package through Congress this year. Instead, they focused their talking points on eliminating fraud in Medicaid and protecting the program for the most vulnerable.
And this time, they were successful in dealing a major blow to the Affordable Care Act. The “big, beautiful bill,” along with a new rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is expected to leave millions more people without health coverage, raise costs for those who remain in Obamacare policies, and reverse more than a decade of improvement in the nation’s uninsured rate.
In addition, Trump’s package is projected to shrink another major provision of the Affordable Care Act — expanding Medicaid coverage to low-income adults — by requiring many of them to work, volunteer or engage in other activities at least 80 hours a month.
“The net effect of the changes they are making is a partial repeal of the ACA,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan research group.
