A fraudulent Rx: Trump’s executive order on preexisting conditions is bogus

New York Daily News, The (NY)

On Thursday, President Trump touted his supposed health-care vision -- including a long-promised executive order “protecting” Americans from insurance companies discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions.

What’s that, you say? You thought that was already the law?

Well, yes, you would be correct. That protection is not only already afforded by the Affordable Care Act, it is arguably that legislation’s core guarantee, and its most popular. Prior to Obamacare, insurance companies had the power to either block consumers with a pre-existing condition, which could be interpreted as almost anything depending on the company, from buying health insurance, or to charge them outrageous premiums that priced them out right of the market.

The most charitable interpretation of Trump’s eleventh-hour scramble is that it’s a political version of what Silicon Valley professionals call “vaporware”: pre-announcing a product that a company has no real plans to actually deliver to market. The announcement aims only to upend a better-positioned rival that might actually be working on something real.

In this case, Trump’s executive order does nothing but make it look like Trump is taking action to fix a non-existent problem.

Obscenely, the problem the president claims to want to fix, with no concrete plans to do so, will only exist if the Supreme Court strikes down the ACA -- which is precisely what the Trump administration urges, having failed to “repeal and replace” (there was never any viable replacement) in Congress in 2017. Indeed, the likelihood of that dire outcome becomes far more likely if Trump is successful in getting his Ruth Bader Ginsburg replacement confirmed to the high court by Nov. 10, when the case is scheduled to be heard.