Where is Trump’s health care plan?
To the editor:
Obamacare is the last bit of the Obama legacy Trump has been unable to obliterate. He has been telling us for 10 years that he’s going to introduce a health care program that’s way better than Obamacare: Better coverage, more affordable, but after all this time we have yet to see the barest outlines of a Trump health care program.
The current government shutdown is about the healthcare crisis in our country. Democrats aren’t asking for something that’s not already on the books; they just want to keep in place subsidies under Obamacare that are allowing Americans to purchase health care coverage. If these subsidies are allowed to expire, as they soon will, millions will see their premiums skyrocket and health care will be unaffordable. Democrats also want cuts to Medicaid that have left many of our least fortunate citizens with no access to health care rescinded.
The Republican position is, of course, let’s open the government and we’ll talk about health care. But they aren’t willing to talk; if they were willing to negotiate, these cuts wouldn’t be there in the first place. The reason why, after 10 years, we’ve seen no Trump health care program is that he’s not interested in health care; his narrative is the lie that says Democrats want to give free healthcare to undocumented immigrants.
On Saturday, it’s reckoned that 7 million Americans demonstrated against Trump’s fear-based, authoritarian style of government. His reaction was to post a video depicting himself wearing a crown and piloting a jet aircraft over the demonstrators and dropping a payload of excrement upon them. As you well know, I’m not making this up. Have we ever in our history witnessed a president with so much disdain for so many of those he’s supposed to be governing? There’s no doubt he was hoping at least some of the demonstrations would devolve into violence and give him a pretext to send in troops to batter demonstrators.
Nixon was supposed to have had a secret list of enemies; Trump proclaims his list out loud and demands the DOJ find crimes with which to charge them. What we cannot do is allow Trump to normalize his outrages against the rule of law and our Constitution. We need a movement, led by our civic, university and corporate leaders, that will stand up for our democracy and reject authoritarian oligarchy.
Ray Clasen
North Fort Myers