HARTFORD, CT — Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who was on MSNBC Friday afternoon as news broke about the decision to repeal the Republican healthcare bill, said he thinks this was a “good day for America.”
The reality is Americans don’t want to see millions of their fellow Americans lose coverage, Malloy said.
U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a televised press conference that Friday was a “disappointing day for us. Doing big things is hard.”
There’s no immediate plans, according to Ryan, to try again with health care.
“We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future,” Ryan said.
But Malloy said Republicans already own the problems going forward because Republican President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling the Internal Revenue Service not to enforce the individual mandate.
Malloy said by signing that order Trump created a “time bomb.” The individual mandate required Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.
“What he in essence has done is ensure that every American’s coverage on the individual side will cost substantially more money,” Malloy said.
Malloy said he failed to understand that a mandate is a way of lowering costs for people, not raising costs for people.
“They didn’t have a vote today, but what we have is not Obamacare anymore — it is Trumpcare,” Malloy said. “And prices are going to go up and deductibles are going to go up and people are not going to be able to afford them.”
Malloy said there was nothing in the American Health Care Act that was going to resolve some of the problems with Obamacare.
He said the Republican healthcare plan would have had “higher deductibles, it was going to cost you more. If you were 64 years old, instead of paying a couple thousand of dollars for insurance, you’d pay $14,000 for insurance.”
He said it was a “gigantic lie” that the American people woke up to.
The plan only had 17 percent support, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.
“They pulled this because they were going to go down by 100 votes, not by five,” Malloy said.
Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, who co-chairs the Access Health CT board of directors, said from the very beginning “Trumpcare was a bad bill.”
At a press conference Friday afternoon, Ryan said at the moment Obamacare remains the law of the land.
That means Access Health CT, Connecticut’s health insurance marketplace, will continue to exist as long as insurance companies agree to participate.
This year, the exchange dropped from four to two insurance providers. And at least one of the remaining two is on the fence.
Anthem Health Plans sent an email to Access Health CT CEO James Wadleigh on March 8 expressing concern about the individual market.
“It is highly probable that we will issue notice of our intent to withdraw because of the uncertainties at this time,” Jill Hummel, president of Anthem, wrote in an email to Wadleigh. “It is too early to say whether we will actually pull out of the individual market place because that is dependent on the outcome of factors that are unknown at this time.”
Insurance companies have until May 1 to submit their rates to Connecticut’s Insurance Department for both on- and off-exchange plans and until July to tell Access Health CT whether they will continue to participate in the exchange.
