After setting the stage for the long-threatened dismantling of ‘Obamacare’, US President-elect Donald Trump has begun touting his own brand of healthcare with the promise of “insurance for everybody”.
Without spelling out details of his plan that is reportedly nearing completion, Trump said in an interview to The Washington Post: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”
Trump held out the new promise even as the Republican-controlled US Congress has kicked off the legislative process for the repeal of Obamacare, regarded as President Barack Obama’s most important domestic policy initiative but one that has lately been plagued by rising deductibles and escalating premiums.
Moves by the incoming Trump administration and the Republican leadership in Congress come even as Democrats are spearheading nationwide rallies to somehow save Obamacare that extended coverage to 20 million uninsured Americans and thwart what they portray as Trump’s plan to “make America sick again” – a takeoff on his “Make America Great Again” campaign theme.
In his interview to The Post, Trump claimed that his healthcare plan would come “in a much simplified form — much less expensive and much better”, commenting: “It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon.”
Saying the plan would be unveiled once the Senate confirms his nominee Congressman Tom Price for the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump declined to dwell on how he proposed to bring his own party’s lawmakers around. “I won’t tell you how, but we will get approval,” he claimed.
Trump’s comments on his alternative to Obamacare came in the midst of his continuing faceoff with the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers on other matters. On Sunday, he took his feud with the intelligence community to a new level by suggesting that outgoing CIA chief John Brennan, an Obama appointee, may have been the one to leak the recent instalment of “fake news” concerning him.
Reacting to Brennan’s comments on Sunday talk shows that he does not have a “full understanding” on Russia’s power and threat to the world, Trump took pot shots at the CIA chief, tweeting: “Oh really, couldn’t do much worse – just look at Syria (red line), Crimea, Ukrained and the build-up of Russian nukes. Not good! Was this the leaker of Fake NewsIJ”
After BuzzFeed, the online media outlet, published last week an unverified dossier over his alleged Russian ties that also included some salacious claims, Trump had attacked the US intelligence agencies for allowing the fake news to leak and quizzed: “Are we living in Nazi GermanyIJ”