The torch has now been passed from Obama two term presidency now to Trump's first government official job. Lots of things have changed since Obama's first year as president but, in 2009, it was Democratic members of Congress supporting health-care reform who were set upon by outraged constituents. When they passed the Affordable Care Act anyway, it cost their party control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. House Republicans subsequently voted more than fifty times to repeal or cripple the A.C.A. Nineteen Republican-led states spurned the offer of federal funds to expand Medicaid coverage. In January, Donald Trump’s first act as President was to order government agencies to avoid implementing, as much as is legally possible, what has become known as Obamacare. But Obamacare, it turns out, has done a lot of good. It guarantees that people with pre-existing health conditions cannot be rejected by insurers or charged more than others. It has reduced the number of uninsured people by twenty million. It has increased access to primary care, specialty care, surgery, medicines, and treatment for chronic …show more content…
A requirement for people to maintain “continuous coverage”—to take an example supported by the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan—would mean that people who lose their insurance temporarily, because they, say, change jobs or suffer a financial setback, would also lose their preëxisting-condition protections. For these people and for others left behind, Price and Ryan advocate state-run “high-risk pools.” But, in the thirty-five states that offered high-risk pools to the uninsurable before the A.C.A., inadequate funding delivered terrible coverage, with extremely high premiums and deductibles, and annual limits as low as seventy-five thousand dollars. Hardly anyone signed