Our Real Opportunity to Restore Health Freedom

President-Elect Donald Trump has said he will repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Twila Brase, co-founder of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, a national patient-centered health freedom organization in St. Paul, Minnesota, and of a patient-focused initiative called The Wedge of Health Freedom, believes this is a real opportunity to restore health freedom.

Health care, she believes, is not within the realm of Congress — all authority over health care should be returned to the states.

Related: 8 Ways Obama Bends the Truth About Obamacare

“The lack of a filibuster-proof Senate makes full repeal unlikely, but reconciliation could be used to send a partial repeal bill to the president after Trump’s inauguration,” Brase told LifeZette. “As supporters of Obamacare come out of the woodwork to save the law, Republicans in the House and Senate must set their faces like flint and put a bill in the president’s hands as soon as possible. Congress must not wobble on repeal, or it will likely never happen. Failure to stop Obamacare keeps us on the path to single-payer and would be a defeat for all the Americans who voted for Mr. Trump and his promise to repeal Obamacare.”

She believes there are many executive and administrative actions Trump and his new administration could take to bring Obamacare to its knees — without any help from Congress — starting on Day 1 of his presidency. Among them:

Allow the current ACA law to be honored until a repeal bill is signed.
Until the ACA is repealed, the administration should enforce the law as written, which could include shutting down any “risk corridor” bailouts for insurance companies; return ACA “reinsurance” dollars to the U.S. Treasury, as the law requires; end all cost-sharing reductions, which have already been ruled unlawful because they were never appropriated by Congress; and require all members of Congress and their staff to enroll in Obamacare as the law requires.

Issue an important ‘Inauguration Day’ order.
Trump should rescind the little-known federal regulation that forces Americans to enroll in Medicare Part A (hospitalization) or lose their Social Security payments. This could be done by an executive order. It’s not a law.

Related: 5 Things to Do As Obamacare Collapses

The freedom to leave Medicare without losing one’s Social Security benefits is the first health freedom President-Elect Donald Trump should return to all Americans. The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the lawsuit on this issue in 2013 was a miscarriage of justice. Disconnecting Medicare from Social Security would open up new insurance markets for senior citizens, allow Americans to keep their private insurance for a lifetime, improve the financial outlook for those left in Medicare — and protect seniors from budget-based rationing laws coming out of Congress.

Consider these other important ACA changes to consider if Congress resists repeal:

• Put all 20,000+ pages of Obamacare regulations on hold, and begin to rescind them.
• Issue an executive order allowing all states to open or reopen their shuttered high-risk pools for people with pre-existing conditions.
• Issue a rule or executive order under the ACA’s 1332 waiver, opening the market back up to indemnity policies, the affordable catastrophic coverage that Obamacare outlawed for people age 30 and over.
• Issue an executive order prohibiting the administration from using any power authorized by the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).
• Halt the more than 70 pilot projects underway at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center (CMMI), forcing 500 government workers to look for other jobs.
• Require the Department of Health and Human Services to automatically accept every hardship waiver request, allowing Americans to escape the individual mandate.
• Shut down Healthcare.gov for its longstanding privacy and security issues.
• Dismantle the federal Health Insurance Exchange Program database, which gathers information on every Obamacare enrollee and stores it permanently for research and other uses.
• Rescind the newly issued MACRA rule that requires doctors to accept alternative payment systems, which force doctors to report confidential data and practice medicine according to federal directives.

[lz_ndn video=31627850]