Thom's blog
What Trump Means w/"Insurance for Everybody"
Donald Trump just made the Republican push to repeal Obamacare a whole lot more complicated. In an interview with the Washington Post Sunday, just days after Congress set the wheels in motion for scrapping the Affordable Care Act through a filibuster-proof process called budget reconciliation, Trump said he would soon announce his own healthcare replacement plan.
That alone wasn't all that surprising - it's more or less what Trump said last week in his first press conference as president elect.
But what was surprising as how Trump described his Obamacare replacement plan. According to Trump, his replacement plan would provide for "insurance for everybody" AKA universal coverage.
As he told the Post -
"We're going to have insurance for everybody... There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can't pay for it, you don't get it. That's not going to happen with us. [People] can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better."
Trump has said a lot of shocking things in the two months since he was elected president - but those comments about his Obamacare replacement plan might be the most shocking.
"Insurance for everybody" or universal coverage is the worldwide gold standard for healthcare - and no country other than Switzerland has achieved it without single payer or socialized medicine.
I mean - Obamacare doesn't even provide for universal coverage.
So what's going on here?
Does Trump actually want to go beyond Obamacare?
Is he lying?
Or was this just a clever ploy to get Republicans to keep things as they are and scrap their politically disastrous plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act?
-Thom
(What do you think? Tell us here.)
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