Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle Obamacare during the pandemic could be his riskiest move yet

The Republican Party has been fighting to gut Obamacare since it was passed a decade ago. But the effort to strip Americans of health care has never been deader than during a pandemic, when more than 125,000 Americans have died, more than 2.4 million have been infected and many have lost employer-sponsored health. safe in the waves of layoffs that have decimated the economy.

In April and May alone, nearly half a million Americans sought coverage through a special enrollment period that allowed Americans who experienced life changes or lost coverage as a result of the coronavirus crisis to apply for coverage under the ACA, according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released this week.

The political risk to Republicans of rushing to abolish the 2010 health care law was so clear in the discreet manner that the administration proceeded with its late-night filing, that it was accompanied by little fanfare at a time when the Americans’ health has never seemed more fragile, and in the way Democrats took advantage of the GOP movement when Joe Biden aimed to make protecting the law a centerpiece of his fall campaign.

Democrats see a winning issue

Democrats are confident they have history on their side. In a Democratic campaign committees election memorandum in May, party officials noted that the party “experienced tremendous electoral success in ’17, ’18 and ’19 in seeking medical attention” and argued that “Republicans everywhere the levels own the attack of this demand on the health care of the Americans “.

Democrats in the House and Senate races pledged on Friday to make healthcare a problem and tried to link their Republican opponents with efforts to roll back the law, a tactic Democrats used against the headlines. Republicans in the interim periods of 2018, regardless of whether they voted to revoke it.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican facing one of the toughest reelection races in the country, criticized the administration’s decision to release the report this week. His aides noted that he sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr in May 2019 urging him to uphold the health care law, and she said in a statement on Friday that the Trump administration came to a wrong conclusion about the intent of Congress when members they included the individual mandate to repeal in the tax law.

“The Administration’s decision to present this new report is an incorrect policy at the worst possible time as our nation is in the midst of a pandemic,” he said of the new presentation in a statement on Friday. “The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the country, and it is the duty of the Department of Justice to uphold it.”

Priorities USA Action, a leading super Democratic PAC supporting Biden, immediately aired a television ad in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan arguing that the President is “failing in healthcare,” highlighting both the impact of the pandemic and the management effort to override the ACA

The Priorities announcement highlighted Trump’s May 6 vote to remove the Affordable Care Act. “Obamacare is a disaster, but we have handled it very well and have made it barely acceptable,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during an event that day, calling it “lousy medical care.”

“What we want to do is finish it and provide excellent medical care,” he said.

Biden called on the president and administration for trying to end the Affordable Care Act during his health-focused speech Thursday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. On Friday alone, his campaign held at least three events focused on his plans to expand the Affordable Care Act and detailed how eviscerating the law would affect struggling Americans, particularly African Americans.

But due to the pandemic, overall health care has taken on enormous importance this year as Americans worry about how they or their loved ones will manage coronavirus infections and pay medical bills. To compound the Republican Party’s difficulty in addressing the health care issue, Americans are giving Trump less and less ratings for his handling of the coronavirus crisis, and many more Americans say they trust Biden about Trump to handle the pandemic. .

Although Trump has made wearing masks a political problem, this week’s new Pew poll suggests he’s on the wrong side. More than 70% of Americans said that masks should be worn in public places most of the time.

Obamacare becomes the center of the 2020 campaign

But there was no coverage in the administration position this week. Attorney General Noel J. Francisco argued that now that Congress has removed the ACA’s individual tax penalty on those who did not purchase health insurance, “it necessarily follows that the rest of the ACA must also fall.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the administration’s move “an act of unfathomable cruelty” amid the coronavirus crisis.

And Biden went a step further by linking the potential effect of the court filing to the medical complications that many Covid-19 patients might face in the future.

Problems caused by Covid-19, such as lung scarring and heart damage, could become “the new pre-existing condition,” Biden argued.

“If Donald Trump prevails in court, insurers would once again be allowed to remove coverage, increase premiums, simply because of the battle they survived, fighting the coronavirus,” Biden said.

The former vice president argued that those coronavirus survivors would live their lives “stuck in a press” among Trump’s twin legacies: his inability to protect the American people from the coronavirus and his ruthless crusade to remove the health protections of American families. ”