Making America Underinsured Again

Health insurance policy was not a major topic during a presidential campaign dominated by talk of immigration, inflation, reproductive rights, and threats to democracy. The issue’s main appearance was during the September debate, when Trump made his much-ridiculed remark about having “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act.

Now it turns out that Republicans have chosen healthcare as one of their priority issues as they prepare to assume full control of Congress. The Washington Post reports that GOP lawmakers and Trump advisers are discussing significant cuts in Medicaid—both the traditional part of the program designed to provide coverage for those in poverty as well as the expansion to middle income families that made up part of Obamacare.

This would serve several purposes. First, the purported savings would make it easier to gain support for an extension of the 2017 tax cuts scheduled to expire at the end of next year. Extending the giant giveaways to corporations and the wealthy would add an estimated $4 trillion to the national debt. Offsetting some of that with Medicaid reductions would allow Republicans to depict themselves as fiscally responsible.

It would also fit into the campaign being spearheaded by Elon Musk to give the impression that the new administration is going to do something about government waste.

There is no indication, however, that either Musk or Congressional Republicans intend to target the real culprits behind any wasteful spending in the Medicaid system: improper and fraudulent billing by healthcare providers and the inflated prices of prescription drugs.

Instead, the crusade against Medicaid will apparently focus on the phony issue of work requirements. This is the same scheme used by conservatives for decades to undermine safety net programs: make exaggerated claims about abuse and use this to justify complicated new eligibility rules that are designed to eject large numbers of beneficiaries. In the case of Medicaid, this will be coupled with cuts in the subsidies that make premiums more affordable for those receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges. Millions of people would have to drop out of their plans.

Reducing government costs for traditional Medicaid and ACA subsidies is just one part of the Republican strategy. The other aim is to push people from government programs entirely and place them at the mercy of the private insurance marketplace.

Trump’s concept of a plan is not entirely fiction. He and other Republicans do have an alternative to Obamacare: junk insurance. Their idea is to replace the decent coverage mandated by the ACA with bare-bones policies that are inexpensive but which provide little in the way of actual financial protection.

This is nothing new. Starting in the 1990s, large insurers such as Aetna, now owned by CVS, began selling such policies to low-income individuals who did not get employer coverage and could not qualify for Medicaid. These policies had low premiums but sky-high deductibles and numerous exclusions. In cases of a serious accident or illness, they were all but worthless. The ACA curbed this predatory market by establishing a set of essential benefits that most plans would have to include.

During the first Trump administration, Congressional Republicans repeatedly sought to abolish or cripple the ACA and allow junk insurance to return. They now seem poised to work with Trump 2.0 to try it again.

—————

I’ve just joined Bluesky. Feel free to follow me there:
https://bsky.app/profile/philmattera.bsky.social

The New Swamp

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump led his supporters to believe he would “drain the swamp” by ending the influence of special interests over government. This time around, he did not bother to make such a vow. In fact, Trump himself can be seen as the ultimate special interest: his entire campaign was largely motivated by the desire to make his legal entanglements disappear. And that is already beginning to happen.

A close second in the self-promotion department goes to Elon Musk, who shamelessly used his wealth to sway the election in Trump’s favor and ingratiate himself and his business interests with the new administration. He has already been rewarded by being named to co-lead a new entity called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will recommend ways to slash federal spending and regulation. Musk’s main aim may be to protect the hefty contracts and subsidies his space and electric vehicle businesses enjoy while eliminating those going to his competitors.

He could also target rules that his businesses have been charged with violating. For example, Tesla has been fined dozens of times by OSHA for workplace safety violations and is the subject of investigations about the safety of its autonomous driving systems. His SpaceX business has had disputes with agencies such as the EPA.

Musk’s co-head of DOGE is to be Vivek Ramaswamy, the one-time presidential candidate and anti-ESG crusader who is involved with business interests such as the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, which also stands to benefit from a reordering of federal policies.

Corporate executives and billionaires have long sought to alter regulatory practices through their political influence. Musk and Ramaswamy are taking corporate capture to a new level by getting themselves installed in positions designed to decimate oversight—while continuing their private sector activities.

Trump’s cabinet picks are likely to include others with checkered business records and conflicts of interest. The president-elect is thus seeking to ram through the nominations by pressuring the Senate to allow him to make recess appointments that circumvent the confirmation process.

Key posts are also being handed to MAGA zealots whose main qualification is unquestioning loyalty to Trump. That applies to the selection of former Rep. Lee Zeldin to head the EPA. Zeldin once held relatively moderate positions on some environmental issues such as offshore drilling, but he has increasingly embraced pro-fossil-fuel views in recent years as he aligned himself with Trump.

Most troubling is the announcement by Trump that he will nominate Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz, regularly described as a firebrand and a political bomb-thrower, seems perfectly prepared to carry out Trump’s vow to purge the Justice Department of those who participated in the supposedly politicized investigations of him for seeking to overturn the 2020 election and for improperly retaining classified documents. Gaetz may also be looking for payback in relation to a DOJ investigation of him for sex trafficking, which did not lead to criminal charges but Gaetz is still the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation.

At the same time, Gaetz is likely to go along with Trump’s inclination to use the powers of the DOJ to prosecute his opponents, while possibly declining to pursue transgressions by Trump-friendly corporations and billionaires such as Musk.

It has been only a week since the election, but the second Trump Administration already seems poised to usher in a wave of self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and personal vendettas: the New Swamp.