HHS Secretary Makes Obamacare Announcement That Has Trump Crying Betrayal

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The months that Donald Trump has been in office have been marked by repeated disregards of the law on the part of both him and his associates. He has acted however he sees fit, no matter what the cost, including through such means as maintaining his financial connections to his businesses while in office.

He has also sought to, when given the opportunity, change the law to be more beneficial to his aims. He successfully did this in the case of the nation’s tax code, but he failed when it came to health care. Although he led a major push to repeal the Affordable Care Act last year, that push failed and, for the time being, the majority of the Affordable Care Act remains in effect.

Even though the GOP failed in its efforts to overturn the entire Obama health care law last year, there have still been efforts to undercut it in other ways in the months since.

One of those efforts came in the form of a recent executive order signed by Republican Idaho Governor Butch Otter allowing insurers to sell health plans in his state that do not meet ObamaCare requirements.

On Wednesday, when pressed by members of Congress, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar insisted that he would uphold the law of the land — the Affordable Care Act — in the face of Otter’s incendiary executive order.

He commented:

‘I’m not aware that our opinions or views have been solicited. There are rules, and there’s a rule of law that we need to enforce.’

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It shouldn’t be that we need to laud administration officials for taking the simple, required step of upholding the law, and yet here we are anyway.

Azar has faced questioning like this in the past, having also pledged to uphold the ACA as long as it was the law of the land during his confirmation hearings. He was confirmed to his position last month, having replaced Tom Price, who resigned after it came out that he had cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars in charter plane flights.

Azar himself is a somewhat unsurprisingly controversial HHS secretary, having come from a past as a drug company executive and having already attracted scrutiny during his comparatively short time in office for being overly cagey when it comes to interacting with the press.

Besides the issue over Idaho Governor Otter’s new executive order, he’s also facing pressure to relax government restrictions on family planning.

On Wednesday, the first insurer to take advantage of the new regulatory environment in Idaho was Blue Cross of Idaho, whose CEO, Charlene Maher, cast the organization’s efforts as a way to “bring more choices and lower prices to consumers.”

The worry, of course, is that if insurance companies are allowed to prioritize cost efficiency above, say, the actual quality of care, that Americans — especially the underprivileged — could suffer.

Even still, the Trump administration has already taken steps, no matter what Azar says or not, to undercut the health care law, including through the repeal of the “individual mandate.” The repeal of that mandate was included in the tax reform law Trump signed into law late last year, making it so that Americans will no longer be compelled to pay into the health care market.

Featured Image via Win McNamee/Getty Images