President Obama on June 6, 2013, during a visit to California to deliver a statement about the Affordable Care Act. (DoD photo by Senior Airman John D. Pharr III, U.S. Air National Guard/Released)
President Obama, with the passing of his legacy ACA, understood that insurance companies, without reimbursement, would a) flee the Exchanges or b) raise prices prohibitively. “To prevent that, he violated the law,” writes Andrew McCarthy in.
In 2014, his administration unilaterally began making non-appropriated cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. Those payments have continued, even through the first nine months of the Trump administration.
The mainstream Democratic media, in a spasm over President Trump’s cutting off insurance company subsidies, claims Trump is “flouting the rule of law.” But the narrative is backwards, explains Mr. McCarthy. “Trump is enforcing the ACA as written, consistent with his constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully.”
It was President Obama who usurped Congress’s power of the purse by directing the payment of taxpayer funds that lawmakers had not appropriated.
The ACA did not appropriate subsidy payments and no legislation appropriates them. “They are and have always been illegal. It is not whether the president should take this action; it is why he failed to take it before now.”
Read more from Andrew McCarthy here.
