The White House is doing a terrible, terrible job of changing the subject from Donald Trump's efforts to cover up the fact that Russia helped him fix the 2016 election by getting Ukraine to help him fix the 2020 election with, get this, health care policy. He's going to Florida Thursday to announce an executive order to "protect" Medicare from Medicare for All.
It's called, and this is the god's honest truth, "Protecting Medicare from Socialist Destruction." It may as well be called "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Because that's how stupid everything is in 2019.
Anyway, what it does in fact is boost the private part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage Plans run by private companies, expanding rules to allow them to "embrace virtual health care and more flexibility for the types of supplemental medical benefits they can cover." The aim is to make Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare, more popular and pull more people out of traditional Medicare. This is apparently an effort to expand to a broader health care policy something. One White House adviser, Joe Grogan, told reporters that the Trump agenda is "much wider than a narrow focus on the Affordable Care Act, which is not at the end of the day that many people."
Except all the people who have health insurance and the 133 million with pre-existing conditions. Those are the people who Trump is arguing in federal courts should not have guaranteed insurance by law. Which is just one of the things that makes this whole push surreal.
The other thing that makes today utterly absurd is that this is supposed to be Trump Making Policy in Florida Day. And in his departure for Florida, he doubled down on the thing that he's being impeached for on the White House lawn, in front of all the TV cameras. He didn't just double down, he piled on extra by putting China in the mix. Because of course he did.
This is all insane, but the insanity can't distract from the damage Trump is inflicting on everything, and particularly on health care. His lawsuit could upend the entire health care system, because the ACA is integrated into the entire system. In doing so, he's ironically making the strongest case for Medicare for All that he could.