Campaign Action
The Trump administration is doing just about everything in its power to destroy Obamacare from the inside, as documented by Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt. At the moment, their most destructive efforts are aimed at preventing people from signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act in the enrollment period that opens November 1. They've slashed the budgets for outreach and consumer assistance, shortened the enrollment period, determined that they will take the website down for extended periods for "maintenance" throughout the process, and barred regional federal officials from helping states plan for it.
That's a drop in the whole sabotage bucket right now, but it's a big one because the fewer healthy people signing up, the more insurers struggle within the markets. But all is not lost, because a team of Obama administration veterans are stepping up with a sign-up campaign of their own.
Two former officials who worked on the sign-up campaigns for the Affordable Care Act's health insurance exchanges when Barack Obama was president launched an initiative Wednesday called Get America Covered. In essence, it seeks to stand in for a federal government that, under President Donald Trump, is dramatically scaling back efforts to get the word out that enrollment season is about to begin.
"There needs to be an effort to basically try to fill in as many of the gaps as we can from what the administration is not doing," said Lori Lodes, co-founder of Get America Covered. "We have a clear sense of what they're not going to be doing, and it's a lot."
Joshua Peck, who oversaw outreach, paid media and public education for HealthCare.gov's previous enrollment periods is also on board. They've signed up national co-chairs activist Van Jones, actor Alyssa Milano, insurance executive Mario Molina, former Obama administration HHS official Andy Slavitt and actor Bradley Whitford to help in efforts to build awareness about the open enrollment and to get even more people involved.
"We can't make up for what the administration refuses to do, but working with people like Alyssa, Andy, Mario and Bradley ― along with dedicated local organizations, mayors and other state elected officials, businesses, hospitals, doctors and nurses and anyone else who wants to help ― we will make sure people get the facts," Peck said in the press release. […]
"For 10 months, we've had a very long and hard debate about whether we were going to take away people's health care, and this is sort of the antidote for that," Lodes said. "It's a passion project. I believe so much that the marketplace can work, and part of that means getting new people to sign up and making sure that people have access to the information so that they can decide that getting health coverage through HealthCare.gov is right for them."
There is no way a private effort can match what the Obama administration did in the first four years, Lodes admits. For one thing, it can't reach the millions now covered by Obamacare—their information is in the hands of HHS. Get America Covered just doesn't have the funding or the reach for a national outreach project the scope of what the federal government could do. But Lodes says anything they do will surpass the Trump administration. "They have set the bar so low," she says. "Our focus is really going to be on the facts that people need to know to get signed up." Right now they're operating on a "six-figure" budget raised from foundations and private organizations, and are continuing fundraising efforts.