Donald Trump refuses to give up on his push to bring an end to Obamacare, voicing his continued support to have the Supreme Court throw out the Affordable Care Act, and even ignoring a request from Attorney General William Barr to soften the administration’s stance, CNN reports.
“Obamacare is a disaster, but we’ve run it very well, and we’ve made it barely acceptable,” Trump said on Wednesday. “It was a disaster under President Obama, and it’s very bad health care. What we want to do is terminate it and give health care. We’ll have great health care, including preexisting conditions.”
“We want to terminate health care under Obamacare because it’s bad, and we’re replacing it with a great health care at far less money and it includes preexisting conditions,” Trump added, even though the administration has yet to produce anything that could replace the landmark legislation.
On Tuesday, CNN reported that Barr was encouraging the administration to soften its position on Obamacare, urging Trump to work to keep some parts of the existing law, rather than to fully strike it down.
However, Trump clearly has no intention of doing so and when asked about Barr’s suggestion said he didn’t know anything about it.
“I think I’ve spoken a lot about this to Bill Barr, and we’re totally in lock step with all of the many states that want to see much better health care.” Trump said.
That means that the Trump administration is signaling its full support of the lawsuit against the health care law, which was filed by a group of Republican states and is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in October.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the Democratic-led House of Representatives have been working to defend the law, telling the Supreme Court that this is a “life-or-death matter for millions of Americans.”
According to CNN, lawyers pointed to the current pandemic with the coronavirus as a reason why broad access to health care is necessary.
“Although Congress may not have enacted the ACA with the specific purpose of combating a pandemic, the nation’s current public health emergency has made it impossible to deny that broad access to affordable health care is not just a life-or-death matter for millions of Americans, but an indispensable precondition to the social intercourse on which our security, welfare and liberty ultimately depend,” briefs filed on Wednesday noted.