WaPo’s Rampell: Hard Not to Conclude Trump Is Sabotaging Health System and ‘Trying to Screw Up People’s Lives’

On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell argued President Trump is trying to make the healthcare system worse and “screw up people’s lives.”

Rampell said, “I go back and forth between thinking he actually believes he’s making the problem better, he’s making the insurance markets better. You look at what he said during the signing ceremony, it’s, ‘We’re going to give Americans more choice. Health care’s going to be better. Everybody’s going to love it.’ So I — does he actually believe that, or does he believe that he’s sabotaging it and making things worse? I mean, on some level…it doesn’t really matter, bad policy is bad policy. And I tend to err more on the side of, yes, he’s trying to screw things up. Because if you look at everything else that he’s done. And we haven’t talked about the other — the portions of the executive order that basically siphon off all of the healthy people in order to make the regular Obamacare plans much more expensive and loaded with sick people. But if you look at that, if you look at the fact that he’s pulled advertising money for open enrollment, that he’s actually used Obamacare money to run a PR campaign against it, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he’s trying to make health care worse. He’s trying to screw up people’s lives.”

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