Voters Don’t Trust Trump on Health Care

Plus, Dems propose a huge spending increase

Voters Don’t Trust Trump on Health Care

President Trump surprised his fellow Republicans last week when he promised that their party would soon be known as “the party of health care,” setting off speculation that he would push to replace Obamacare in the coming months. On Monday, however, Trump said that the Republican plan to replace Obamacare would wait until after the 2020 election, and on Wednesday the president further distanced himself from what was quickly becoming political quicksand for GOP lawmakers.

“I was never planning a vote prior to the 2020 Election on the wonderful HealthCare package that some very talented people are now developing for me & the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted. He also denied that he asked Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for an earlier vote, downplaying the Senate majority leader’s reported role in scuttling what some in the GOP saw as an ill-timed health care push that was unlikely to deliver a win for their party.

Trump’s backtracking is just the latest sign that health care is a problematic issue for Republicans. A new Politico/Morning Consult poll, conducted after the Trump administration last week asked a federal court to overturn the Affordable Care Act in full, shows that Democrats continue to have the edge when it comes to voter trust on health care. Fifty-four percent of respondents said that they have a lot or some trust in Democratic lawmakers to protect or improve health care, compared to 41 percent who said the same about Republicans. And a clear majority (59 percent) said they have little or no trust in Trump on health care.

“As health care is pushed to the forefront of the 2020 agenda, our polling suggests President Trump may struggle to attract voters with his promise of a new plan,” said Tyler Sinclair of Morning Consult.

So why is the president focusing on Obamacare? According to Drew Altman and Mollyann Brodie of the Kaiser Family Foundation, Trump is misreading his voter base on the issue. While his hardcore supporters continue to cheer the idea of repealing the Affordable Care Act, they generally support the law’s provisions.

Writing at Axios Wednesday, Altman and Brodie cite a Kaiser poll from November that showed that, despite holding unfavorable views of Obamacare overall, Republican voters approve of many key parts, including  allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26, closing the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap and protecting patients with pre-existing conditions.

Given the polling data, Altman and Brodie say that Trump’s strategy of focusing on health care as the 2020 election heats up probably won’t work, even as “it hands the Democrats a huge political opportunity.”

Trump touched on the problem in remarks made Tuesday night, when he told the National Republican Congressional Committee that Democrats “have health care right now … We have to take that away from them.” The president cited one sore spot in particular — one that may not be easy for Republicans to fix: “We have to protect and cannot run away from a thing called preexisting conditions,” he said, adding that it's the right thing to do and also smart politics. “If you don't support it, you have no chance of winning.”

Democrats Propose a Big Spending Increase

House Democrats on Tuesday formally decided to skip releasing a budget resolution for fiscal 2020, instead releasing a proposal to increase spending by $358 billion over the next two years as an alternative to automatic spending cuts set to take effect next year.

The move highlights deep divisions within the Democratic Party, in particular over defense spending and deficit reduction. The bill is set to be voted on by the House Budget Committee Wednesday evening, and it’s not clear yet whether it has enough support to pass, as progressives object to its increases in military spending.

The measure also sets the stage for another fight with the White House over spending later this year.

The legislation would:

  • Raise the domestic spending limit to $631 billion in fiscal 2020, a 5.7 percent increase, and to $646 billion in fiscal 2021.

     
  • Raise defense spending to $664 billion in 2020, a 2.6 percent increase, and $680 billion in fiscal 2021. Including $69 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations funding that is exempt from spending caps, the overall defense budget for 2020 would be $733 billion, up from $716 billion enacted this year but below the $750 billion total proposed by President Trump. In 2021, total defense spending would come to $749 billion, slightly higher than the $746 billion in Trump’s budget.

Symbolically significant? Budget resolutions are largely symbolic documents that mostly serve to lay out a party’s governing priorities, but the decision to punt on a resolution also carries some symbolism, opening the door to criticism that Democrats, now in control of the House, can’t agree on an agenda and are violating their pledge to govern under regular order.

“We have moderate members who don’t want to vote for revenue increases and on the other side, on the progressive side, there are people who don’t want to vote for a large defense number; they want more spending in nondefense,” Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), chair of the House Budget Committee, acknowledged last week. “So finding the numbers is not easy.”

The politics at play: Those intraparty divisions meant that a budget resolution would have been unlikely to pass on the House floor, a potentially embarrassing failure for the new Democratic majority. And a Democratic budget blueprint would have included calls for new revenues (read: tax hikes), giving Republicans ammunition for attacks.

So party leaders opted to skip the whole thing instead.

Democrats had criticized Republicans for failing to pass their own budget resolution last year, when the GOP controlled both the House and Senate. Republicans were quick to return the favor when it became clear Democrats might opt out of passing a budget, citing a line House Speaker Nancy Pelosi often uses: “Show me your budget, show me your values.”

“They have no budget,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters last week. “Does that mean they have no values?”

A fiscal failure? Fiscal hawks charged that Democrats are failing to carry out a fundamental responsibility of Congress — and that their proposed spending increases would further balloon a deficit already heading toward $1 trillion a year. “A budget resolution typically sets discretionary spending levels for the coming year, but it also includes information about all spending and revenue for at least the next five years, putting decisions about discretionary spending in a larger context,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said Tuesday. “This would be the first non-election year in which the House has not passed a budget.”

The budget watchdog group estimated that the House Democrats’ legislation would expand deficits by about $2 trillion over the next decade.

Democrats say they’re focused on a more pressing issue: Democrats say their approach steers clear of unnecessary fights over a budget that would carry no legal weight and instead seeks to address the more urgent issue of avoiding steep automatic spending cuts from taking effect next year. “We face austerity level budget caps if Congress fails to act,” Yarmuth said Wednesday. “Given the timing and the obstacles ahead of us, the realistic and responsible path is to act on the immediate need to raise the budget caps – not spend time on symbolic gestures that fail to move this process or our country forward.”

The Budget Control Act of 2011 imposes discretionary spending caps for fiscal 2020 that would represent a 10 percent drop from 2019 levels, or a reduction of $126 billion. Congress has reached four bipartisan deals over the past eight years to lift those previously set spending caps. It would have to do so again to avoid cuts in 2020 and 2021.

“I think the caps bill is exactly what’s needed,” Joel Friedman, the vice president for federal fiscal policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told The New York Times. “The Yarmuth solution is a better use of everyone’s time and energy because of the political landscape we’re facing.”

The White House is reportedly looking to wait on a spending deal until the end of the year in a bid to maximize its leverage in negotiations with Democrats.

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