The former president said that he would look at ‘alternatives’ to the 2010 law.
Former President Donald Trump announced that he is looking at making changes Obamacare and said that Republicans should have rescinded the health care law.
In a post on Truth Social over the weekend, the former president said he is “seriously looking at alternatives” to the 2010 Affordable Care Act if he is elected next year. He attempted to repeal the law in 2017 as president but was blocked by the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
“We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it,” he wrote, referring to McCain. “It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”
The reason why he wants a change, President Trump said, is because the “cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare.”
He was responding to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Elizabeth Warren Has an ObamaCare Epiphany,” responding to a letter Sen. Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) sent to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Even worse,” the senators wrote in a recent letter, “insurers can use their PBMs to steer patients to their own pharmacies, while disadvantaging competing pharmacies with lower reimbursements and predatory fees,” WSJ reported. They are referring to Pharmacy Benefit Managers.
“Just a year after the MLR requirement was put in place, UnitedHealth Group formed Optum, which now includes a PBM and a specialty pharmacy, as well as over 70,000 physicians,” the senators wrote. “Today, UnitedHealth Group sends 25 percent of its medical claim revenue to its Optum subsidiaries—in other words, to itself,” they added.
After President Trump took office in early 2017, he endorsed the passage of a Republican-backed tax overhaul bill that reduced the “individual mandate” penalty for not having insurance to $0. After it passed both chambers at the time, President Trump signed it into law in December of that year and later said it “[liberated] millions of low-income Americans from a tax that penalized them for not purchasing health-insurance coverage they did not want or could not afford.”
