By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives October 20, 2017
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A bipartisan deal from two senators to stabilize Obamacare by restoring subsidies to health insurers suffered major setbacks on Wednesday with the White House saying President Donald Trump now opposes it and senior Republicans speaking out against it. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, Senate Republican leadership member John Thune and others expressed hostility to the deal announced on Tuesday by Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray. It was uncertain if it would ever come to a vote in a Congress controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans. The agreement would shore up Obamacare by reviving billions of dollars of federal subsidies to insurers for two years to help lower-income Americans obtain medical coverage.
Alexander said on Wednesday that Trump had “completely engineered” the bipartisan proposal, but the president backed away from support he had expressed a day earlier. On Tuesday, Trump said the White House was involved in the negotiations and that the agreement was “a very good solution” for a short-term approach, but said on Wednesday he could “never support bailing out” insurance companies.If this means Trump was open to the idea but someone got to him and explained it would neither solve the problem nor benefit the country in any way, good. Here's what you've probably not been understanding about this issue if you're going by the media coverage: The subsidies are not about helping poor people, per se. The insurers have to cover them per the law, but because of the way the law regulates premiums, insurers are almost guaranteed to lose money selling the policies. What the subsidies were doing is bailing out the insurers for selling the policies the law requires them to sell. The Obama Administration was making these payments illegally because Congress has refused to allocate money for them, and a federal court upheld the position of Congress that the payments were illegal. The payments continued with the case on appeal, but the Trump Administration last week announced it would no longer make the payments.
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