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Trump Is Now Threatening to Sabotage Millions of Insurance Plans

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump is now threatening to wipe out health insurance for millions of people in order to make a political statement. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Trump suggested that unless Democrats agree to his plans to dismantle Obamacare, he might use his executive authority to intentionally trigger a death spiral for the individual insurance markets.

Specifically, Trump threatened to stop making payments to insurance companies to reimburse them for subsidies that help offset the costs of deductibles and copayments for low-income people. Those subsidies are mandated by Obamacare; if the feds stopped reimbursing insurers for this expense, they would likely abandon the individual markets and leave millions without coverage.

The president seemed to acknowledge in the interview that halting the reimbursements would likely result in the healthcare markets collapsing, but he said he might go through with it in order to extract concessions from Democrats. “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Trump told the paper. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt…What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”

Obamacare includes a host of mechanisms to make buying insurance easier and more affordable for people who don’t receive coverage through their employer and have to buy it on the individual market. The law primarily does this by offering subsidies—varying by income—to offset the costs of premiums for people who earn up to 400 percent of the poverty level. But the law was also designed to provide $7 billion per year in “cost sharing reduction” payments to insurance companies so that people below 250 percent of the poverty line would have lower deductibles and copayments.

These payments were explicitly included in the health care law, but through the convoluted quirks of legislative procedure, Republicans have alleged that Congress technically didn’t “appropriate” money for the program. The Obama administration went ahead and started making the payments anyway, and in 2014 House Republicans sued the White House, saying that the administration shouldn’t be able to spend that money. A federal district judge sided with Republican last year, and the Obama administration appealed.

After Trump’s inauguration, both the White House and Congress sought to stall the lawsuit, asking the courts to give them more time to figure out whether or not Obamacare will be repealed. When the GOP repeal bill failed last month, Trump was faced with a dilemma: He could order the his administration to keep fighting the House’s lawsuit, or he could ditch the appeal and end the reimbursement payments. It sounds like Trump may now be leaning toward the latter. In addition to his Journal interview, Trump reportedly has become active behind-the-scenes, as well. According to Politico, the president called Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and dictated a statement that he wanted the agency to release on the issue.

As Trump himself said, ending the program would be a disaster for Obamacare. It would cause insurance companies to flee the individual markets (which, in some parts of the country, already suffer from a lack of insurance options). And the remaining insurance offerings would jump in price. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that premiums for a baseline plan would jump 19 percent if cost sharing disappears.

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Trump Is Now Threatening to Sabotage Millions of Insurance Plans

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

Mother Jones

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House and Senate Republicans in Virginia announced Monday that the GOP would sue to block Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s restoration of voting rights for more than 200,000 felons in time for the November election.

McAuliffe, a Democrat and longtime friend of and fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, used an executive action on April 22 to restore voting rights for felons who had served their sentences and completed their parole or probation as of that date. “There’s no question that we’ve had a horrible history in voting rights as it relates to African Americans—we should remedy it,” the governor told the New York Times when he announced the decision. The paper noted that the decision would have a major impact in a potential swing state this November, as many of the felons are African Americans who are “a core constituency of Democrats.”

The governor estimated his actions would apply to 206,000 people and said he instructed state officials to prepare similar monthly orders that would apply to felons who would qualify to vote after the original April 22 cutoff date. In a statement issued Monday, Brian Coy, McAuliffe’s communications director, said the governor was acting on his “constitutional authority” when he issued his executive order.

“The Governor is disappointed that Republicans would go to such lengths to continue locking people who have served their time out of their democracy,” Coy said in the statement provided to Mother Jones. “While Republicans may have found a Washington lawyer for their political lawsuit, they still have yet to articulate any specific constitutional objections … These Virginians are qualified to vote and they deserve a voice, not more partisan schemes to disenfranchise them.”

Republicans in the state legislature said Monday they will not use taxpayer money to fund the lawsuit they say is necessary to fight McAuliffe’s executive order.

“Governor McAuliffe’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution of Virginia and the rule of law must not go unchecked,” Virginia Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, Jr. said in a statement. “His predecessors and previous attorneys general examined this issue and consistently concluded Virginia’s governor does not have the power to issue blanket restorations. By doing so now with the acknowledged goal of affecting the November election, he has overstepped the bounds of his authority and the constitutional limits on executive powers.”

The Times noted in a separate piece that the impact of McAuliffe’s decision could be pivotal in a close election—President Barack Obama won the state by 149,000 votes in 2012—but not as significant as one might imagine. “Ex-felons are disproportionately young and less educated, the two most powerful demographic predictors of low voter turnout in the United States,” the paper wrote.

Nearly every state—with the exception of Maine and Vermont—has restrictions on the voting rights of felons. Virginia’s restrictions have been in place since after the Civil War, when the state’s constitution permanently barred former felons from being able to vote.

This piece has been updated to include a statement from McAuliffe’s office.

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

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