Trump Wants to Ditch Preexisting Condition Protections. Here Are the Times He Promised Not To. [View all]

[DonViejo]

The president turns his back on years of promises.

PATRICK CALDWELLJUN. 8, 2018 3:27 PM

The Trump administration declared Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions unconstitutional on Thursday—thanks to the tax bill passed by congressional Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump in December.

The announcement came in a letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a filing in a federal court in Texas. While it won’t cause any immediate changes in health laws, it represents a major break from repeated promises from Trump and congressional Republicans to preserve the protections for preexisting conditions.

Sessions’ announcement involves some complicated legal reasoning. Republicans slipped a provision into their tax-cut bill that effectively eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance. Due to Senate rules, the GOP couldn’t technically erase the mandate without triggering a 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster, so instead it just reduced the penalty for failing to buy insurance to zero dollars. But now, Sessions argues, a 2012 Supreme Court ruling comes into play. The court ruled that the individual mandate was constitutional because it could be considered a tax. But when the penalty is zero dollars, it’s no longer a tax, Sessions claims, so now it’s unconstitutional. And, Sessions says, you can’t separate the mandate from the law’s various consumer protections. So if the mandate is unconstitutional, he argues, the courts need to toss out the law’s regulations on preexisting conditions as well, since Congress determined that the individual mandate was “essential” to the preexisting conditions protections. (Conveniently, the legal filing asks the court to wait until 2019 to strike down these provisions—delaying the full consequences until after vulnerable GOP politicians face midterm elections.)

While Trump and his fellow Republicans have always been eager to describe Obamacare as a horrendous law, they made sure to reassure voters that they intended to keep the Affordable Care Act’s protections that barred insurance companies from charging higher rates to people who have a current or past medical condition. That has always been one of the most popular provisions of the law.

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/donald-trump-preexisting-condition-obamacare-jeff-sessions/