A top Obama administration health official issued advice to the Trump administration Thursday in an op-ed about how to begin gaining broad support from centrists and Democrats on healthcare: Toss out a Republican plan to slash Medicaid funding.
Andy Slavitt, former acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote that the funding was integral to combating the opioid crisis, a drug-fueled epidemic that resulted in 33,000 overdose deaths in 2015.
“This was always House Speaker Paul Ryan’s idea, anyway,” he wrote about Medicaid cuts. “It was never Trump’s and it was never popular with his base, so it shouldn’t be hard for him to abandon.”
The Republican bill being negotiated in the House, called the American Health Care Act, would cut Medicaid by $880 billion and cause 14 million fewer people to be enrolled in the program, according to government projections. Obamacare was initially written to mandate that all states expand the program to cover low-income people, but a Supreme Court decision made the provision optional for states.
Republicans have vowed to undo Obamacare but have been unable to coalesce around the details of a repeal bill, and centrists have expressed concern over planned cuts to Medicaid, a program that they say their constituents rely on.
Slavitt, who has been working to defend Obamacare, warned that President Trump’s current strategy on healthcare would not allow him to make a deal on how to improve it, saying, “the further he goes to the right, the more likely he will come up empty-handed.”
He appealed to Trump’s shifting positions on military intervention in Syria to urge the administration to reconsider its stance on healthcare.
“The president’s reaction to events in Syria shows he’s not moored to ideological positions and can pivot when he wants to,” Slavitt wrote. “Trump’s choice is between sabotaging the Affordable Care Act and helping his voters. Fortunately for him, choosing his voters is also the path to a deal that can put a health care victory on the board.”
