President Trump is threatening to shoot hostages in order to start negotiations with parties that don’t have significant power:
The President now openly admits he's willing to crash the exchanges to force Dems to negotiate on ACA. Unacceptable. https://t.co/uVnhPts9mf pic.twitter.com/KemWqMo97p
— Rachel Sachs (@RESachs) April 12, 2017
The Cost Sharing Reduction subsidies are at dispute. They are the Sword of Damocles of administrative action to destroy the exchanges.
Carriers have to offer Silver plans to participate on Exchange. If they yank all of their Silvers, they have to yank everything on Exchange.
And carriers will flee if CSR disappears as they will not eat a 30% revenue loss for a high cost population in a market that they don’t know if it will be around long enough to actually make money on.
President Trump’s musings, I am not going to credit them with the title of thoughts, is that by threatening to shoot the hostages, he will be able to blame the Democrats for the chaos he will unleash and that will give him leverage that he does not have to shaft everyone.
There is are massive moral problems with that logic chain. But there are also pragmatic barriers. The American public firmly believes that the President controls everything, that is the hack that Sen. McConnell exploited ruthlessly in obstructing everything that President Obama tried to do. More importantly, Democrats objectively have almost no power and no responsibility to govern. Everyone knows that President Trump is a Republican and Republicans control the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court. They will also know very quickly that Republicans are responsible for collecting hostages and then pulling the trigger as there is plenty of tape in their own words saying this is what they will do.
Healthcare is currently a high salience issue. People are paying attention. Senator Manchin made a good point that not everyone knows where their health insurance comes from but they WILL know who is taking it away from them. We’ll see 27% of the population blame Democrats and everyone else blame Republicans. And given what marginal members of the Republican majority are feeling today after the new information that KS-04 provided them last night, that is the last thing they can afford to encourage.