President Donald Trump’s gimmicky $500 Affordable Care Act refund checks have started arriving in the homes of nearly a million Americans. The letters that accompany them act as textbook Trumpian disinformation and underscore how the check campaign is a cheap trick masquerading as populism.
The letters, as reported by USA Today, tell recipients, “For years, the Biden Administration overcharged you to fund the operation of HealthCare.gov. That money belongs to hard-working Americans, not the Government, and now, I am returning it to you!” It notes that the refund is for Americans who do not receive subsidies to help pay for their coverage, and states, “You have paid into this flawed System, and now you are finally getting something back.”
This is classic Trump propaganda: There is a small element of truth to what the letter is saying, but it’s presented in a manner that dramatically misleads.
His $500 checks aren’t a salve, they’re a cynical ploy to bait Americans.
To pay for these checks, Trump tapped into a government fund paid into by health insurance companies for the purposes of running the ACA marketplace’s operations — including marketing, outreach and enrollment assistance. Those fees are passed along, in part, to customers because they cause insurers to push their premiums higher.
The part that’s quasi-true about Trump’s claims is that he did tap into a surplus of funds predating his second term to send out these checks. But there’s no evidence of Trump’s claim that it was a product of “gross mismanagement” by Biden — or even necessarily a product of Biden’s actions at all.
As The Associated Press reported, “Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, said it’s entirely possible that the funds Trump has promised came from fees collected during Trump’s first term. His first administration collected more user fees from insurers than it spent, resulting in an estimated $1 billion in unspent funds, according to KFF analysis.”
So it indeed could be the case that the surplus was accumulated under Trump himself, partially because during his first term he sharply reduced spending on efforts that would make the ACA marketplace more accessible to the public. And, of course, having extra money in a fund is not prima facie evidence of some kind of malfeasance.
Even though there’s no evidence of nefarious action — and it’s possible the money piled up in part because of Trump’s own spending behavior — he wants to frame the checks as his heroic intervention against misbehavior by Biden and a shadowy “System.”
But the most brazen part of Trump’s scheme is the way the checks function as misdirection from his own party’s role in skyrocketing premiums. The GOP’s refusal to extend ACA subsidies last year has caused the subset of people eligible for Trump’s $500 checks to see their premiums increase often by thousands of dollars. For many people who are set to receive Trump’s money, this check won’t even cover the difference in cost for one month of health insurance. Furthermore, as The New York Times noted, the roughly 3 million people who were priced out of using ACA plans together as a result of the lapsed subsidies are not even eligible for these checks.
As I wrote previously, these checks are “waving the idea of free cash for Americans like a parent might dangle a toy in front of an unhappy infant, hoping that for just a brief moment they will be transfixed, with no memory of the past or ability to imagine the future.”
While Trump claims in his letter that he’s “fighting to put the American people FIRST,” he isn’t the hero here, he is the villain. He has increased healthcare costs, boosted profits of health insurance corporations and has never once promoted an effective idea for expanding coverage for Americans. His $500 checks aren’t a salve, they’re a cynical ploy to bait Americans who don’t understand Trump’s real healthcare policy regime into voting for the GOP. Let’s hope they don’t work.
The post The letters accompanying Trump’s gimmicky ACA refund checks makes them even more cynical appeared first on MS NOW.
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