Trump Claims His Pursuit of Executive Order on Pre-Existing Conditions, Which Obamacare Already Protects, Is ‘Just a Double Safety Net’
President Donald Trump offered a confusing and vague response about one of the planned executive orders he mentioned over the weekend when confronted with the fact that the Affordable Care Act already protects pre-existing conditions.
Speaking at a White House press conference on Monday, a reporter asked the president about the need to pursue an executive order for a feature of health care policy that federal law currently covers. However, the Trump administration is suing in the Supreme Court to dismantle the ACA, or Obamacare, which not only protects pre-existing conditions, but sets mandatory minimums for coverage, bans yearly and lifetime coverage caps, and offers significant federal subsidies to make health insurance more affordable to poor and middle income Americans.
“You said that that had never been done before but that is not the case because that is the law under the Affordable Care Act,” Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason noted. “So my question is why do you need to issue an executive order overall that’s already been there?”
“I said as an executive order. As an executive order it hasn’t been done before. We want to be able to assure people that pre-existing conditions is always taken care of,” Trump clarified, before pivoting to talk about how his administration wants to end the law that currently protects pre-existing conditions. “As you know, we’ve done tremendous things having to do with the individual mandate, we got rid of the individual mandate from Obamacare which really ended Obamacare as it would be officially known because the individual mandate was the biggest part.”
The individual mandate was, in fact, only a small part of the law, which is why the Trump administration has resorted to legal action to try to kill the rest of the 2010 law.
“And pre-existing conditions, the Republicans are 100% there and I will be issuing, at some point in the not-too-distant future, a very strong statement on that probably in the form of an executive order,” Trump said, offering no more details about how the executive order would work.
“Why do you need, sir, to do an executive order if it’s already a part of that?” Mason pressed.
“Just a double safety net and to let people know that Republicans are strongly in favor of pre-existing condition, taking care of people with pre-existing conditions,” Trump offered, before suggesting the action would be mostly symbolic in nature. “It’s a signal to a people, it’s a second, a second platform. We have pre-existing conditions, will be taken care of 100% by Republicans and the Republican Party.”
Watch the video above, via Fox News.
