Now would be a really good time for everyone in the country to have health insurance, and for a health care system that wasn't run on profit, greed, and corporate bureaucracy. It would also be a really good time to have a real president. But we don't have any of those things. Mostly we don't have a real president. In three years, the orange lump in the White House has proven that when it comes to health care, he's as useless every Republican has been for the past decade. The fact that this is a serious problem is finally dawning on some Trumpers.
"Not having a plan for the rising uninsured yet seems to be a blind spot," Dan Eberhart, an oil executive and Trump donor said. "The Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterms largely by having better answers on health care, so I think this could be a massive political liability in the fall." Ya think? Lest word get around to Cheeto Mussolini and Eberhart find himself on the receiving end of a Twitter rampage, he was sure to add that "Trump has provided sober and strong leadership, but this could prove to be his Achilles' heel in November." As could the fact that his administration is going to be in the Supreme Court in a month's time arguing that the Affordable Care Act should be entirely overturned, with not a whisper of a replacement plan in existence.
On top of that, the messages from the White House on the uninsured have been ridiculously mixed. Trump has refused to open ACA enrollments to the millions of uninsured, as well as the people who are on Trumpcare, the crappy no-coverage plan the administration has pushed. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that the newly unemployed and uninsured can sign up for Obamacare, which is true. He left out the part about how he and his boss have been working to systematically destroy that and take coverage away from more than 20 million people on the exchanges and millions more on Medicaid expansion.
The ACA ensures that the eventual vaccine for novel coronavirus would be free for people with health insurance. Trump wants to end that. The existence of the ACA means that people up to age 26 can still be covered by their parents' plan. Trump wants to end that. The ACA means that people who recover from novel coronavirus but have lasting mental and physical health issues from the disease could be denied treatment because it's a preexisting condition.
While a Republican donor is starting to panic about all this, Republican operatives remain oblivious to the true horror of the situation. Like Matt Gorman, a Republican who says that the GOP will "stay on offense" in the 2020 campaign against both Medicare for All and a Biden-style expansion of the ACA. What experience does Gorman have? He "worked for the House GOP campaign arm in 2018." When the Republicans lost the majority. Because of Trumpcare. Not only are Republicans utterly incapable of experiencing empathy and human understanding—they can't learn.