This is all meaningless, because the ACA hasn’t yet been repealed. Actions are not necessary yet, because the ACA is still in place.
You all are expecting a new plan to be implemented before the ACA is repealed.
Stephanopolous clearly stated that Trump was not going to protect pre-existing conditions, not that his promises were “hollow”.
You can't repeal legislation and then have an Executive Order that does what a law is needed to do. What you are writing is gibberish. If you want to replace the ACA with something better, you write a new law -- you don't repeal the old one, disrupt the insurance market and then hope that you come up with something better. As JasperL stated, providing for preexisting protection costs money and can't be done by signing an EO.
Besides, preexisting protection doesn't exist in a vacuum. It requires the other "legs" of the Obamacare stool. It starts by requiring that insurers offer the same plans, at the same prices, to everyone, regardless of medical history. This deals with the problem of pre-existing conditions. On its own, however, this would lead to a “death spiral”: healthy people would wait until they got sick to sign up, so those who did sign up would be relatively unhealthy, driving up premiums, which would in turn drive out more healthy people, and so on.
So insurance regulation has to be accompanied by the individual mandate, a requirement that people sign up for insurance, even if they’re currently healthy. And the insurance must meet minimum standards: Buying a cheap policy that barely covers anything is functionally the same as not buying insurance at all.
But what if people can’t afford insurance? The third leg of the stool is subsidies that limit the cost for those with lower incomes. For those with the lowest incomes, the subsidy is 100 percent, and takes the form of an expansion of Medicaid.
The key point is that all three legs of this stool are necessary. Take away any one of them, and the program can’t work -- and none of that can be done via EO.
Only people incredibly naive would believe Trump's nonsense.
