Just when we thought it was safe to get back in the ‘white water of health reform‘ with needed fixes to this arguably complex and ambitious Act, surprise!
Against all odds and the best and brightest minds in the polling community welcome President-Elect Donald Trump and his litany of public statements regarding the intent to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act ‘day one‘.
There is so much to this story that it’s difficult to fix a single point of entry, so we’ve sourced just a few of his public statements to frame the discussion which we’ll launch here but dive further into at This Week in Health Innovation and PopHealth Week with my colleagues Fred Goldstein and Douglas Goldstein.
Last week the Wall Street Journal posted a piece which began what some now expect to be the inevitable revisionist walk-back on the range and depth of what is realistically possible for the categorical ‘repeal and replace‘ rhetoric of this ‘holographic‘ candidate, now President-Elect Trump. Trump has been rather clear that the ACA aka ‘Obamacare’ is a ‘disaster‘ and must be thrown out and replaced with some ‘beautiful‘, ‘bigly‘ or who knows what else occurs to him as a politically feasible replacement alternative?
Some of my colleagues in the health policy and health-wonk space who’ve inexplicably (in my view, though see: ‘Dear Mr. President-Elect, about that Ryan Plan Thing‘) hitched to the TrumpTrain and it’s Rorschach projection of what is to become ‘TrumpCare‘ have stunned me by proffering seemingly apologist precedent for his now revisionist tune:
Just to make sure you have the facts.. 🙂 He said in early primaries and consistently after that that preexisting and all that stays in.
This was in response to the following tweet given the WSJ piece:
Yet here’s just a sampling of public statements made during his campaign:
This portion of Trump’s health reform agenda is so target rich and ‘on the come‘ while campaign rhetoric meets the real world of policy and politics, so we intend devote a fair amount of coverage and commentary to TrumpCare’s emerging policy indicia.
Meanwhile, here is the vision posited to the people and the Congress of the President Elect’s health reform (similar as ‘guidance‘ offered though materially at variance with Obama’s ‘8 Principles’) submitted to Congress as parameters for the debates and negotiations eventually leading to the passage of ACA:
Some related references here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/here-s-some-advice-you-president-trump-scientists
We do in fact live in interesting times!
acowatch.me 
Leave a comment