Campaign Action
The taxpayer dollars you are sending to Washington, D.C., to help people get health insurance coverage are actually being used by the Trump administration to destroy the very program that would achieve that goal. Does that sound like something the federal government should be doing, using funding for a program to destroy that program? No? Well, it's happening.
The Trump administration has spent taxpayer money meant to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act on a public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it.
The effort, which involves a multi-pronged social media push as well as video testimonials designed at damaging public opinion of President Obama’s health care law, is far more robust and sustained than has been publicly revealed or realized.
The strategy has caught the eye of legal experts and Democrats in Congress, who have asked government agencies to investigate whether the administration has misused funds and engaged in covert propaganda in its efforts to damage and overturn the seven-year-old health care law. It’s also roiled Obama administration veterans, who argue that the current White House is not only abdicating its responsibilities to administer the law but sabotaging it in an effort to facilitate its undoing by Congress.
That's on top of popular vote loser Donald Trump's direct threats to insurance companies that he'll take the funding they need to be able to continue to cover lower-income people away. That threat, to the Cost Saving Reduction payments, is old news. The extent to which they are trying to drive people out of the program is new.
So is this:
CMS is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (so, yes, it should be CMMS, but whatever) and has been tasked with getting as many people to enroll in Obamacare as it could, specifically the young, healthy people that keep the whole system going strong, helps to keep premiums down, and makes sure people have—you know—healthcare coverage. That's a thing that used to matter to our government, the well-being of the people. Republicans don't do that.
Without that big pool of people in Obamacare, it’s weakened. So what we’re seeing is a multi-pronged approach from Trump to destroy health care for millions of people—and damage one-sixth of the American economy—because he has a personal grudge against President Barack Obama.