White House to take executive action against Obamacare

US president Donald Trump has changed his mind about the value of the executive order.

After repeated attempts to deliver on his oft-repeated campaign promise to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act stalled in Congress, the White House has taken a more hands off approach to frustrating Obamacare.

Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, President Trump plans to use executive action to speed the process along.

"I'll probably be signing a very major executive order where people can go out, cross state lines, do lots of things and buy their own health care, and that will be probably signed next week," he said.

"It's being finished now. It's going to cover a lot of territory and a lot of people. Millions of people."

The order would apparently allow insurers to offer cheaper, so-called ‘skimpy’ plans, a move which could divide the market in two, with one system for wealthier Americans and another for the less well off.

It would also also allow health plans to join forces in associations, so that smaller employers could band together to offer coverage to employees that would not be subject to the full requirements of the law.

President Trump also wants to extend the short-term coverage option, which is permitted to exclude costs for pre-existing conditions and which comes with capped payouts and patchy coverage, to up to almost a year.

09-10-2017

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