Cities Sue Trump for 'Sabotaging' Obamacare

What’s the story?

• Baltimore, Chicago, Columbus, and Cincinnati filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Thursday, claiming that the White House’s “relentless campaign to sabotage and, ultimately, to nullify” the Affordable Care Act violates the Constitution’s provision that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Why now?

• The Department of Health and Human Services recently finalized new rules allowing for people to keep short-term health insurance plans for up to three years. “Short-term” plans do not have to meet the ACA’s benefit requirements—they can cap how much insurers pay in a year and can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
• As a result of these decreased benefits, the short-term plans are cheap and appeal mainly to health people. The Obama administration limited the plans to three months to keep healthy people on the exchanges.
• In the past, the Trump administration has also finalized regulations to expand association health plans, repealed the individual mandate, and cut back on funds to advertise open-enrollment.  

Trump v. Obamacare

• The four cities argue that Trump’s actions against the ACA are “an affront to the rule of law: to our constitutional system, under which Congress enacts laws and the president faithfully implements them.”
• The suit accuses the administration of “deliberately trying to make the [ACA] fail” on its own after the GOP-controlled Congress repeatedly failed to repeal it. They cite “remarkably transparent” statements by the president that they say prove his intent:

“If we don’t get it done” in Congress, President Trump has said, “we are going to watch Obamacare go down the tubes, and we’ll blame the Democrats . . . [a]nd at some point, they are going to come and say, ‘You’ve got to help us.’”

“[W]e are getting rid of Obamacare,” President Trump has boasted, “essentially, we have gotten rid of it.”

“[I]t’s dead[,] [i]t’s essentially dead.”

“There is no Obamacare, it’s dead.”

What do you think?

Do you agree with Trump that Obamacare is a "complete disaster"? Are you glad the administration is chipping away at it? Or do you support lawsuits seeking to save the ACA? Should Congress revisit health care after the midterms? Hit Take Action and tell your reps, then share your thoughts below.

—Josh Herman

(Photo Credit: Bet_Noire / iStock)