Throughout his campaign, President Trump promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with something better. "We're going to have insurance for everybody," Trump recently told The Washington Post. "[They] can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much-simplified form. Much less expensive and much better," he said.
Since his election, the Republican party has boasted about repealing the Affordable Care Act but has failed to provide a suitable replacement that wouldn’t leave many uninsured.
Medical ethicist and director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center Art Caplan does not believe the Republicans will ever be able to successfully repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in its entirety.
“I think the republican party and Trump have come up against a rock and a particularly hard place, that is, they don’t have anything. They have no idea how they are going to repeal or replace this program.” Caplan said on Boston Public Radio Wednesday.
Caplan says that since the Affordable Care Act was modeled after a moderate Republican plan from Massachusetts, the Republicans are finding it difficult to avoid keeping many aspects of the healthcare act. "To go in any other direction would take them either toward democratic ideas about single payer… or back to market-oriented approaches which have no chance of continuing the same level of coverage for the same number of people because there are too many sick and at risk and pre-existing folks," said Caplan.
Caplan recognizes that while the Affordable Care Act certainly is not perfect, it is not quite the disaster Trump and other Republicans have claimed it to be. Costs may not be contained, but many people are being covered that would not have been without it, says Caplan. “If you have very sick people.. the only way to move ahead in terms of continuing their coverage and not chopping off benefits is to basically keep something like Obama Care funded. There is no other option.”
In the future, Caplan believes we will see a version of the Affordable Care Act that has been hacked away at, potentially causing the loss of coverage for many. “We will be talking about people dumped at the emergency room or someone who was half dead by the time they got to the emergency room because they don’t have coverage. It will be an issue in the 2018 election,” said Caplan.
