Rep. Mark Meadows tears into Democrats’ outrage over Trump ‘sabotage’ of ObamaCare
Kari Donovan
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The chairman of the House Freedom Caucus defended President Donald J.Trump’s efforts to complete his promise to repeal and replace the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act also called Obamacare, in an Oct. 19 op-ed for Fox News.
“Hysteria makes for a nice messaging tactic, but facts are stubborn things,” wrote Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) in a recent op-ed for Fox News that he co-wrote with Rep. Ralph W. Norman Jr. (R.-S.C.).
“Remember: ObamaCare was sold on false promises that could never be kept. Recall what they told us in order to sell this bill: If you like your health care plan, you can keep it; if you like your doctors, you can keep them; premiums will go down – and for families they’ll go down by an average of $2,500; deductibles will go down; emergency room visits will go down,” he said.
“All of these assertions were false. Seventy-five percent of the ObamaCare-created state health care co-ops have gone out of business. Premiums have gone up drastically. Deductibles have risen,” he said.
“People lost their health care plans and couldn’t keep their doctors,” he said. “This law made health insurance costlier and it made the business of offering it riskier.”
Meadows and Norman also saluted the president’s Oct. 12 executive order that began the process for approving regulations that would allow organizations and associations to create health insurance plans and expanded Health Reimbursement Arrangements.
These HRA programs are employer-funded and a response to the Obama administration’s hostility to the Health Savings Accounts, which were employee-funded and directed like an Individual Retirement Account.
In the preamble to the executive order, Trump laid out out his own frustration with President Barack Obama’s landmark health care reform legislation.
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, however, has severely limited the choice of healthcare options available to many Americans and has produced large premium increases in many State individual markets for health insurance,” the president said.
“The average exchange premium in the 39 States that are using www.healthcare.gov in 2017 is more than double the average overall individual market premium recorded in 2013,” he said.
“The PPACA has also largely failed to provide meaningful choice or competition between insurers, resulting in one-third of America’s counties having only one insurer offering coverage on their applicable government-run exchange in 2017,” Trump said.
Trump was joined at the EO signing ceremony by Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.), who has been working with Meadows from the beginning of this congressional session to fulfill the promise to change the country’s health care regime in order to lower premiums and deductions.
.@realDonaldTrump w/ @RandPaul and @VP signs an Executive Order to promote healthcare choice and competition. #Healthcare #Obamacare pic.twitter.com/4TxUJuLOzg
— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) October 12, 2017
Meadow said he dismissed the complaints from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D.-N.Y.), who both criticized the president’s executive order expanding health care rights.
“Let’s put the House and Senate minority leaders’ talking points aside and look at what’s really happened with this executive order,” said the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.
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