This bill is not the ‘insurance for everybody’ Trump promised - Philip Bump

It was one thing for Donald Trump to pledge on the campaign trail that his plan for health care would assure that every American had coverage. He did so repeatedly, including during a town hall event in February 2016 at which he said his promise to “take care” of everyone might sound as if he was talking about a single-payer system, but he wasn’t. “That’s not single-payer,” he said. “That’s not anything. That’s just human decency.”

It was another thing, though, for Trump to make similar claims after the election. Before the election, it was anything goes in a way that most politicians would avoid. Afterward, one might expect Trump to zero in on his preferences a bit more narrowly, to scrape away the rhetoric and describe, instead, what it was that he wanted to see.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump toldThe Washington Post’s Robert Costa and Amy Goldstein during an interview less than a week before his inauguration. Although Trump was characteristically confident and equally characteristically light on specifics, he did outline several things that he anticipated the Republican replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act might include.

The plan would have “lower numbers, much lower deductibles.” The “philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it”? Trump insisted that “that’s not going to happen with us” — implying that there would be universal coverage regardless of income. What’s more, people could “expect to have great health care” that would be “in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

Trump told Costa and Goldstein that people wouldn’t keep their existing plans but would have some sort of insurance plan. “[T]hey’ll be beautifully covered,” he said. “I don’t want single-payer. What I do want is to be able to take care of people.”

That is not the proposal that passed the House on Thursday.

The American Health Care Act, passed on the strength of 217 Republican votes, is another beast entirely. The bill would overhaul the Affordable Care Act, cutting Medicaid spending and changing the incentive structure to reduce government subsidies and eliminate the individual mandate. - More, washingtonpost

This bill is not the ‘insurance for everybody’ Trump promised

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