Fake Obamacare repeal and screwing over home owners

Trump made sure the media was present at the Oval Office the evening of January 20, 2017, to see him sign an executive order against President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Legally, Trump can't stop the law. Only Congress can repeal it or change it. And although both houses of Congress passed a budget bill defunding the ACA a few days before, it had not been signed into law yet.

So in order to create the image that Trump was repealing Obamacare "from day one", he signed an executive order telling all federal agencies to provide "relief" from the ACA in the form of suspending all provisions of the ACA that collected fees, taxes and regulated the health care system.

This would be dine, according to the executive order, by telling the federal agencies to "exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay" parts of the ACA for the collection of fees and taxes to individuals, health care providers and states.

According to FiveThirtyEight.com (see: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-executive-order-on-obamacare-means-everything-and-does-nothing/), that order could be used by a new Secretary of Health and Human Services to grant a "hardship" exemption to people without health insurance so they don't have to pay the tax penalty for not having it.

It may also mean health care providers and rich people would not have to pay the fees and taxes required by the law.

At best, the executive order was vague. It only suggested fees and taxes established in the ACA would not be collected. But most of the fees and taxes in the ACA were for rich people and health care companies, not for average, middle class people, since the enrollment period for the ACA was nearly over. It ended on January 31 because of an extension by the Obama administration in response to the increase in signups for health plans from people who feared Trump would take away their only chance of having an affordable health plan.

The only part of the ACA that could affect some middle class Americans would be the tax penalty for people not signing up. But that only applied to people who didn't sign up in 2015. And according to a study, fewer people didn't sign up in 2015 than in 2014.

So the executive order didn't really do anything. It didn't reduce premiums, it didn't suspend the Affordable Care Act, and it didn't benefit the average American.

What the executive order did was to suspend the penalties for health care providers, insurers and rich people who didn't pay them. If the rich and the health industry decided not to pay them, the immediate result would be a massive lack of funds for the Affordable Care Act. Those funds were needed in order to pay for subsidies for the middle class and for people with pre-existing conditions.

And without those subsidies, the only possible outcome would be an increase in premiums for everybody, as insurance companies would no longer be able to pay for the medical costs of people with pre-existing conditions.

So at best, Trump's first executive order was just for show, without any actual tangible effects on average Americans. At worst, it would trigger insurance premium hikes for those same average Americans.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, WHY NOT SCREW OVER PEOPLE WITH MORTGAGES?

Another executive order signed by Trump on January 20 repealed a premium cut Barack Obama ordered for people with mortgages.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/20/trumps-first-executive-action-cancel-obamas-mortgage-premium-cuts/96853446/

Obama's cut wuld've reduced 0.25% of the mortgage payments for homeowners, for a rebate of $29 per month for mortgages of $200,000. The rebate was scheduled to start on January 27, 2017, one week after Trump took office.

But instead of letting the cut take place, Trump repealed it, meaning homeowners would no longer be able to reduce their mortgage payments.

Which makes one wonder: Wasn't the executive order against Obamacare supposed to provide relief? Why was he eliminating a premium cut on mortgages then?

Because he was lying about giving relief to Americans.