Via Axios.
Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price resigned today, following the failure of Republicans' efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the revelations that he spent more than $1 million of taxpayers' money on luxury travel. The White House announced that Don Wright, currently the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health, will become the acting HHS secretary.
For a person who attempted to cut Medicaid for Americans by 35%, cut $370 Billion from Medicare and cut the HHS travel budget by $600,000 he sure liked to spend tax payer money for his own comfort.
And his firing wasn’t exactly without some foreshadowing, nor was he exactly alone.
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September 26th —
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Reports surface that HHS Secretary Price — who had a history of trading the stock of companies he was overseeing in the House, and wants to cut spending on Medicare & Medicaid — has taken over $300,000 worth of tax payer funded private plane flights and used much of it to visit family and his own properties, including $17k for a flight from Washington to Philadelphia which is a 2 hour train ride away.
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September 28th —
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Tom Price promises to pay back cost of “his seat” on the 26 private chartered flights amounting to $52,000, leaving the other estimated $350,000 of what he and his staff spent to U.S. Taxpayers. Then Politco reports that Price also took another $500k worth of flights to Geneva, Berlin, Beijing & Tokyo on Military aircraft authorized by the WH. Repubs argue “whataboutism” with Nancy Pelosi but she only used a Military plane as Speaker because GHBush required it for security reasons, and the House Sargent at Arms requested a larger one than Dennis Hastert’s so it wouldn’t need to refuel in order to reach San Francisco.
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CNN reports EPA head Scott Pruit has also been using private jets and military planes for travel as well has spending a another $25k for his own private soundproof booth. All of which is nothing like when Treasury Secretary Mnuchin requested a government plane to take him on his wedding & honeymoon, which was denied, then he used another to fly to Ft. Knox to “check on the gold” at the same time that the total solar eclipse was at 95% in the area.
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Politico reports that Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke used a private plane to fly from his home in Whitefish Montana to Las Vegas at a cost of $12,375. He took a chartered fly between Caribbean islands St. Croix and St. Thomas, he used military planes to fly to Norway, and then to Alaska and a military helicopter to fly from Fort Bliss to see the Organ Mountains monument in New Mexico in June. He then used a Bureau of Land Management helicopter to survey the Basin and Range National Monument at the end of July.
Clearly Price isn’t the only bad apple, and frankly Trump basically fired him for “optics” not because he really believes in anything resembling “ethics” since he himself didn’t fully divest from his 500 businesses, about which he still gets quarterly updates from his sons, doubled the Mar-A-Lago fees to $200,000. price gouged the Secret Service so much they had to leave Trump Tower after draining their coffers protecting 42 people in his family who take repeated overseas trips, is currently both owner and operator of his own DC Hotel which has received $250,000 from Saudi consultants clearly trying to curry favor with Trump, especially when they have an giant arms deal and a $100 Billion Nuclear power plant deal with a sanctioned Russian company on the table.
Some would argue that this is good thing because Price was implementing Trump’s sabotage strategy for Obamacare.
On Wednesday, President Trump announced that he plans to use the powers of his office to jeopardize health-care access for millions of low-income people, while destabilizing America’s insurance markets — because he believes that voters will blame the ensuing chaos on the Democratic Party, leaving Chuck Schumer desperate to negotiate with the White House over Obamacare repeal.
Ever since his plan to finance a tax cut for the rich by throwing millions off Medicaid died without a vote, Trump has repeatedly assured the American people that their health-care system will collapse under his watch. It hasn’t always been clear whether this sentiment was intended as a prediction of an event Trump (wrongly) believed to be inevitable — or as a promise to bring Obamacare down by any means necessary.
These efforts will directly damage healthcare for Americans according to the CBO.
Obamacare premiums for the most popular types of plans will sharply increase — by 20% next year, and by 25% in 2020 — if President Trump ends key federal subsidies to the program, the Congressional Budget Office warned Tuesday in a new analysis, CNBC writes.
The finding is certain to ratchet up pressure on Trump, and his Republican allies in Congress, to continue funding the payments to insurers, which reimburse them for discounts offered most Obamacare customers in their out-of-pocket health costs.
The CBO estimated there would be 1 million more Americans without health insurance next year than there are now as a result of such a decision by Trump to end the so-called cost-sharing reimbursements.
That’s on top of cutting outreach funding for Obamacare enrollment by 90%,
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials announced on a call with reporters Thursday that funding for advertising and other outreach for ObamaCare enrollment will be cut from $100 million last year to $10 million this year.
A department official argued the administration is seeing "diminishing returns" from ObamaCare spending. Officials also pointed to ObamaCare's shortcomings to justify the cuts.
And Obamacare Navigators also by 40%.
Some groups tasked with signing up people for Obamacare plans, called navigators, are facing budget cuts of as much as 90 percent as the Trump administration slashes funding to the groups for the 2018 signup period.
Currently, 98 navigators receive federal grants each year to assist in signing up and educating people about picking a plan on Obamacare. The navigators received $62.5 million in funding for 2017's open enrollment period, but the Trump administration reduced funding 40 percent to $37.8 million.
And it’s not like this is something the public is clamoring for.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “A large share of Americans (78 percent) think President Trump and his administration should do what they can to make the current health care law work while few (17 percent) say they should do what they can to make the law fail so they can replace it later. About half of Republicans and supporters of President Trump say the Trump administration should do what they can to make the law work (52 percent and 51 percent, respectively) while about four in ten say they should do what they can to make the law fail (40 percent and 39 percent, respectively). Moving forward, a majority of the public (60 percent) says President Trump and Republicans in Congress are responsible for any problems with the ACA.”
If Trump breaks Obamacare through sabotage, he will own the consequences. The poll illustrates that the American people aren’t as stupid as Trump believes they are. If Republicans break Obamacare, they’ve bought it.
All of this is on top of the State-based sabotage which has caused many states to only have a single available exchange provider and increased premiums by about 11%.
Charles Gaba, that indispensable tracker of ACA rates and policies, has fleshed out this phenomenon by comparing the weighted average premium increases for states that implemented the ACA cooperatively, even enthusiastically, with the increases in states that have resisted. (Gaba weights the increases by the enrollments of the insurance companies; in other words, a rate increase by a company with 100,000 customers counts more than one by a company with a few hundred customers.)
He finds that the weighted average rate increase for states that expanded Medicaid is 22.1% for 2017; among the 19 states that still have not expanded the program, it’s 28.9%. In states that formed their own marketplace to enroll Obamacare consumers, the increase is 17.3%; among those that rely on the federal government’s exchange, healthcare.gov, it’s 28%.
It’s likely all this sabotage will continue, while Republicans continue to — falsely — claim “Obamacare is collapsing” and it’s a “failure” but it is good to have collected another Trump scalp as the entire administration slowly collapses under the weight of it’s own hubris, mendacity and corruption.