Back in late August, Trump administration officials confirmed that Obamacare’s outreach and advertising budget would see sharp cuts. They ended up reducing Obamacare’s advertising spending 90 percent, from the $100 million that the Obama administration spent last year to $10 million this year, and cut the budget for in-person enrollment by 41 percent. Together, that represented a 72 percent cut to efforts to enroll eligible Americans into ObamaCare.
As a result, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting a sharp decline in those enrolling in ObamaCare, assuming the law remains in effect.
“In March 2016, the CBO expected about 18 million people to be in these plans purchased through the marketplace in 2026. It now expects about 12 or 13 million people to purchase their insurance that way,” Reuters reported.With the Congress impeding his effort to repeal ObamaCare, executive orders are his only line of attack. There was clear success in Trump gutting the law’s advertising budget, as well as the birth control mandate — and now he’s planning another executive order this week. According to The American Spectator,
Having provoked much progressive sputtering and head spinning last Friday by issuing new regulations weakening the notorious HHS contraception mandate, President Trump is poised to sign an executive order that will further dry up Obamacare’s regulatory morass.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the order will expand enrollee options restricted by the Obama administration — allowing coverage to be purchased through association health plans, encouraging the sale of short-term medical insurance, and permitting pretax funds from health reimbursement accounts (HRAs) to be used for premiums on health plans. The impending order has already drawn satisfying charges of “sabotage” from Obamacare apologists.
Under the draft executive order as described, new regulations would allow association health plans to be considered large employers when it comes to health insurance. Large employers are not subjected to the same rules as individual or small-group plans under Obamacare. Most notably, they do not have to cover all of the law’s essential health benefits or meet the requirement that insurance cover a minimal percentage of a person’s medical bills.
According to the liberals over at Vox, the executive order will “blow a huge hole in the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare).”
[Note: This post was written by Matt Palumbo. He is a co-author of the new book A Paradoxical Alliance: Islam and the Left, and can be found on Twitter @MattPalumbo12]