ACTION: Trump Begins Repealing Obamacare From the Oval Office

With a series of major executive orders on Thursday, President Donald Trump took serious action to begin repealing the unconstitutional, freedom-killing aspects of the Affordable Care Act, compelling Congress to either get its act together or watch the marketplace implode under the weight of its own bad regulations.

In the most significant of the actions, Trump put a halt to the insurance subsidies currently being dispersed by the executive branch, a move that not only restores Congress’s proper role as the keeper of the purse but will stop billions in taxpayer money going to prop up the insurance industry.

“The Democrats’ ObamaCare is imploding,” the president tweeted Friday. “Massive subsidy payments to their pet insurance companies has stopped. Dems should call me to fix!”

In an official statement, the White House that the Department of Health and Human Services could no longer justify the subsidy payments currently being generated by the federal government.

“We will discontinue these payments immediately,” HHS announced.

Make no mistake, Trump’s executive orders, which also expand insurance choices for small business owners and other small-group associations and allow insurance companies to sell short-term plans that do not meet Obamacare’s rigorous requirements, will grind the ACA marketplace to its swift death. Without action by Congress, the Obamacare system will collapse in on itself, because it depends on both subsidies and an influx of young, healthy customers to maintain “affordability” for seniors and the ill. Trump’s executive orders all but guarantee that the “healthy” end of that balance will disappear, meaning insurance companies will almost certainly stop providing plans on the official exchange.

From a purely political standpoint, Trump’s bold action proves that, unlike the RINOs in the Congress, he is willing to put his money where his mouth is. By opening up the insurance regulations to allow companies to sell across state lines, he is bringing the kind of extraordinary free market reform that he promised on the campaign trail. By allowing groups of individuals to come together and form associations, he is putting power back in the hands of the CONSUMER while easing the federal government’s iron grip on the healthcare industry. Even if Republicans HAD been able to pass repeal-and-replace this year, it’s unlikely that any of the legislation would have gone this far.

Despite inaction on Capitol Hill, these executive orders show that President Trump is not walking away from one of the biggest promises of his administration: To reform and improve American healthcare. It’s hard to imagine any other Republican presidential candidate would have had the guts to make these moves; this is why Americans trusted Trump and this is why 2016 was one of the most remarkable years in the history of conservatism. The winning has begun.