Sabotaging the ACA

[stpioc]

Another perspective on Trump's Tweets:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon! 1:27 PM - Jul 29, 2017 39,139 39,139 Replies 27,129 27,129 Retweets 98,028 98,028 likes Twitter

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump Unless the Republican Senators are total quitters, Repeal & Replace is not dead! Demand another vote before voting on any other bill! 5:36 PM - Jul 29, 2017 36,444 36,444 Replies 20,784 20,784 Retweets 84,346 84,346 likes  

These two tweets contain three distinct threats, each more potentially destabilizing than the preceding one.

• First: Trump is threatening to abrogate a federal obligation under the Affordable Care Act to subsidize insurance companies that cover low income beneficiaries—a step that would approximate the impact of the most recent failed Obamacare repeal bill. He is promising, in other words, to sabotage insurance markets, exploding premiums and driving issuers out of the market, unless the Senate passes legislation to uninsure millions of people in its own way. 
  
• Second: Trump is threatening to withdraw an Obama administration rule that allowed members of Congress and their aides to port their federal premium contributions into the D.C. insurance exchange, so that, like most employees of large organizations, they aren’t forced to bear the full cost of their health benefits. On a first-order level, this is obviously less harmful than the threat to millions of unsuspecting private citizens, but the worst potential second-order effects—massive brain drain on Capitol Hill, the paralyzing impairment of an understaffed legislature—would be catastrophic. 
  
• Third, Trump is hinting at a new standard, under which he will veto all legislation Congress passes until the Senate passes a health care repeal bill. On Sunday his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, clarified that it is the “official White House position” that Congress should not move on to any other issue until the health care process gets underway again.
  

It is against the backdrop of his reflexive need to avenge his humiliations with mindless vandalism that Trump has fired his chief of staff and replaced him with a retired military general who has authoritarian tendencies of his own.

The Presidency in Exile | New Republic

Extraordinary..