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President Trump Meets Obamacare Reality: It's 'Complicated'

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

President Donald Trump's on-the-job training continues. On Monday he revealed to reporters that he had learned a valuable lesson about reforming Obamacare: It's hard.

"It's an unbelievably complex subject," he told reporters Monday in the White House. "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated."

Translation: This president didn't have a clue that health care could be so complicated.

Actually, his ignorance has been pretty obvious all along to anyone who listened to his campaign rhetoric about the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," and compared it to reality.

On the other hand, perhaps you have heard someone say something like this: "I'm glad President Trump is getting rid of that Obamacare. I get my health insurance through the ACA."

Yes, more than a third of Americans, according to one mid-February poll, don't understand that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.

 

In the poll by Morning Consult, 17 percent said they thought Obamacare and the ACA were different policies and another 18 percent said they didn't know if they were the same or different.

I'm not surprised. Let us not forget that the nickname "Obamacare" was created by Republican strategists to politicize and, some believe, racialize the ACA to make it sound about as appealing as an Ebola virus.

The commotion that you hear coming from the White House is the sound of chickens coming home to roost. Throughout his campaign Trump passionately pledged to immediately repeal and replace the ACA, which Trump called "terrible" and other unkind things.

And what would he replace it with? "Something terrific," he responded in speeches, news conferences and debates.

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(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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