The claim, which he has made before on Twitter, has been judged untrue by numerous fact-checkers. The new president’s willingness to bring it up at a White House reception in the State Dining Room is an indication that he continues to dwell on the implications of his popular vote loss even after assuming power.
.. As part of that conversation, Mr. Trump asserted that between three million and five million unauthorized immigrants voted for Mrs. Clinton.
.. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California ..
.. “We talked about the Affordable Care Act and said what the Affordable Care Act has been successful in doing is improving quality, expanding access and lowering costs,” she told reporters. “And any proposal that they might have that does that, we’d be interested in hearing about.”
.. A “beautiful, beautiful relationship,” Mr. Trump told reporters.
With executive order, Trump tosses a ‘bomb’ into fragile health insurance markets
Even before the Republican-led Congress acts to repeal the 2010 law, the new administration will move swiftly to unwind as many elements as it can on its own — elements that have changed how 20 million Americans get health coverage and what benefits insurers must offer some of their customers.
.. Robert Laszewski, president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates, called the executive order a “bomb” lobbed into the law’s “already shaky” insurance market. Given the time it will take Republicans to fashion a replacement, he expects that federal and state insurance exchanges will continue to operate at least through 2018.
“Instead of sending a signal that there’s going to be an orderly transition, they’ve sent a signal that it’s going to be a disorderly transition,” said Laszewski, a longtime critic of the law, which is also known as Obamacare. “How does the Trump administration think this is not going to make the situation worse?”.. the president’s decision to sign the order on his first day in office, coupled with his recent comments about moving swiftly on repealing and replacing the law, has applied pressure on GOP lawmakers to act faster than they might have initially planned... Democratic leaders, however, are casting the executive order as evidence that Republicans are in a state of disarray on health care... Chris Jennings, who served as a senior White House adviser on health care in the Clinton and Obama administrations, said that in the health-care arena, “more than any other domestic policy, details matter. Plans, they live off a comma, or an incentive, or a disincentive, or a penalty, or an enforcement mechanism.”
Donald Trump’s Medical Delusions
Some Republicans appear to be realizing that their long con on Obamacare has reached its limit. Chanting “repeal and replace” may have worked as a political strategy, but coming up with a conservative replacement for the Affordable Care Act — one that doesn’t take away coverage from tens of millions of Americans — isn’t easy. In fact, it’s impossible.
But it seems that nobody told Mr. Trump. In Wednesday’s news conference, he asserted that he would submit a replacement plan, “probably the same day” as Obamacare’s repeal — “could be the same hour” — that will be “far less expensive and far better”; also, with much lower deductibles.
.. the anti-Obamacare campaign has always been based on lies that can’t survive actual repeal.
A prime example is the pretense that health reform hasn’t helped anyone. “Things are only getting worse under Obamacare,” declared Paul Ryan,
.. an overwhelming majority of those covered by the new health exchanges are satisfied with their coverage.
.. the percentage of nonelderly white adults without insurance fell by almost half from 2010 to 2016, from 16.4 to 8.7, a gain surely concentrated in the Trump-supporting white working class.
.. Republican ideas about cost control are all about “skin in the game,” requiring people to pay more out of pocket (which somehow doesn’t stop them from complaining about high deductibles).
.. they’ll probably do it because they believe they can find some way to blame Democrats for the ensuing disaster.
Why Trump’s Obamacare Promise Will Be So Hard to Keep
Mr. Trump accurately describes problems with the current health care system for Americans under 65: “You have deductibles that are so high, that after people go broke paying their premiums which are going through the roof, the health care can’t even be used by them because their deductibles bills are so high.”
.. The real reason health care premiums and deductibles are so high is that medical care is very expensive in the United States — far more costly than it is anywhere else in the world. The United States pays very high prices to doctors and hospitals and drug and device makers, and Americans use a lot of that expensive medical care.
.. Most of the G.O.P. plans manage to be less expensive for the federal government — by offering stingier federal payments in helping people buy insurance and allowing the coverage people buy to be skimpier. But those proposals will tend to increase, not decrease, the amount many Americans spend on their health care.
.. If the bill eliminates requirements to pay for maternity care or prescription drugs, for example, that could lower the sticker price of a health plan, but will make health care much more expensive for anyone who has a baby or takes medication.
.. There will be people who will be better off under a Republican plan. Higher-income, healthy people who buy their own insurance have been the most disadvantaged group under Obamacare, and their fortunes would improve.
.. The consensus Democratic approach to making Obamacare “far better” has been to make it more expensive for the federal government, but less expensive for individuals. Proposals circulated by President Obama and Hillary Clinton would involve more federal spending on subsidies to help make insurance more affordable for more people, but at the expense of higher taxes.
So far, the Republican plans have tended to engage in the same trade-offs, but tilt in the opposite direction, emphasizing government savings over program generosity.