I suggested the other day – like many other observers – that Trump may be a sheep in wolves’ clothing. Now that he’s won, he may be dropping the more incendiary and radical aspects of the changes he championed on the campaign trail, finding common cause with corporate interests and establishment Republicans.
The newest example of this rapid transition is his about face on repealing Obamacare, Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Trump is now proposing to keep some version of the plan in place, while modifying others. So it won’t be repealed on Day One, as he endlessly promised:
Reed Abelson, Donald Trump Says He May Keep Parts of Obama Health Care Act
Just days after a national campaign in which he vowed repeatedly to repeal President Obama’s signature health care law, Donald J. Trump is sending signals that his approach to health care is a work in progress.
Mr. Trump even indicated that he would like to keep two of the most popular benefits of the Affordable Care Act, one that forces insurers to cover people with pre-existing health conditions and another that allows parents to cover children under their plan into their mid-20s. He told The Wall Street Journal that he was reconsidering his stance after meeting with Mr. Obama on Thursday.
[…]
Beyond Mr. Trump’s comments, new plans laid out on his presidential transition website this week deviate from what he had proposed during the campaign, and he added ideas that appeared to more closely align with the mainstream Republican agenda.
The new plans drop all mention of reining in high drug prices, which Mr. Trump had advocated for months, and add new language about modernizing Medicare, a potential nod to congressional efforts to give people vouchers toward buying private health insurance.
“Health care is shaping up as a priority for the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which closely tracks health policy. “But we still have very little detail about what that really means.”
Presumably his advisors have told him that an outright repeal would be catastrophic for both citizens and the health care industry. But tinkering with just some aspects of the law isn’t really possible. For example, the requirement for coverage of those with preexisting conditions requires a large offsetting pool of healthy people paying into the plans. So you can keep that requirement without the law – and penalties – requiring everyone to participate or pay.
Trump is quickly turning into Romney, a Romney in Robin Hood’s clothes. Now he’ll drop the rob-from-the-rich rhetoric, and get on with the business of screwing the poor arm-in-arm with the ‘special interests’ and denizens of the ‘swamp’ back in Washington DC he has been campaigning against.
He’s channeling WC Fields, who once said – in character – ‘You can’t fool an honest man, never smarten up a chump, and never give a sucker an even break.’
The suckers that voted this man into office will quickly find out they’ve been flim-flammed. But at least we won’t see jackbooted storm troopers marching into every town and rounding up all the untermenschen, and driving them to the borders.
But even in this Romney incarnation, he can still do incalculable harm.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/153081846472
