On Twitter, President Donald Trump said he would be “using the power of the pen to give great HealthCare to many people — FAST.” He isn’t bluffing. His White House has been working on a series of executive actions on health insurance and dismantling Obamacare.

But his tweet is misleading. The most far-reaching action under consideration would not give anyone health care. Rather, it would dramatically reduce enforcement of Obamacare’s fines on people without insurance.

If he takes this action, Trump will be following in Barack Obama’s footsteps. In December 2013, President Obama had a problem. The regulations imposed by his health-care law were causing some insurance plans to be canceled. But the new Obamacare website was not working well, and people with canceled plans were having trouble buying new ones. Without insurance, they could be fined.

So the Obama administration granted a “hardship exemption” under the law to anyone with a canceled plan. As liberal commentator Ezra Klein put it at the time, it decided that “Obamacare itself is the hardship.” The Trump administration may decide to grant hardship exemptions even more liberally.

Read the source article at aei.org