President Trump held a cabinet meeting on Monday while flanked by Rex Tillerson and John Kelly, who happen to be the two guys most rumored to be exiting the Trump fold. With that signal sent, Trump swooped through a range of topics, but what really stuck out was his anti-Obamacare rant.
Of course, Trump recently eliminated cost-sharing subsidies that help low-income Americans purchase insurance through the Obamacare marketplace. This was the 12th time Trump used his executive power to chip away at Obama’s signature policy while Congress repeatedly attempted to “repeal and replace.” As the tail end of the above clip reveals, the president now fully believes that Obamacare essentially does not exist anymore:
“Obamacare is finished. It’s dead. It’s gone. It’s no longer … don’t … you shouldn’t even mention it. It’s gone. There is no such thing as Obamacare anymore. When the premiums go up, that has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that we had poor health care delivered poorly, written poorly, approved by the Democrats.”
Trump does not mention that his past two executive orders on healthcare (almost as if by design) will send premiums into the stratosphere. In effect, he’s almost unilaterally sledgehammered Obamacare while claiming that it was a total “disaster” for America all along. For what it’s worth, ousted Trump Senior Advisor Steve Bannon told a live audience this weekend that Trump removed those subsidies to “blow up” Obamacare. Indeed and back in August, the CBO determined that Trump’s previous threat to end subsidies would result in premiums that are at least 25% higher.
In this next clip, Trump told his cabinet that he’ll soon make welfare reform a priority: “Some people are really taking advantage of the system,” he stated. And with that, he’s kicked off his next set of controversial moves.
(Via CNN)