WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump isn’t telling the full story when it comes to executive orders on coronavirus relief payments and health care.
Over the weekend, the president suggested that his move to bypass Congress with executive action calling for up to $400 in weekly unemployment assistance would mean immediate cash in hand for laid-off Americans during the pandemic. There’s no guarantee of that. His own economic adviser acknowledged Sunday that various details remained to be worked out, including contributions from the states.
This claim and others came in a week where truth took a beating.
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
TRUMP, on how quickly laid-off U.S. workers would get up to $400 a week bonus payments under his executive order: “It will be rapidly distributed. … They’re going to see it very soon.” — news conference Saturday.
THE FACTS:
An imminent payment is unlikely, if one comes at all.
It is an open question how many people will receive the $400 weekly benefit, which is one-third less than the $600 previously provided by the federal government, and how long it might take to arrive. Trump’s executive order seems to leave it up to the states to decide whether to participate and also asks them to cover 25%, or $100, of the cost, a major hurdle when their budgets are already under severe strain.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Sunday insisted the first checks could come “in a couple of weeks,” but acknowledged that the administration had yet to fully canvass the states to see if they would be able to afford their payment share.
On Saturday, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., called the theory behind the executive orders “unconstitutional slop.”
The previous supplemental unemployment benefit of $600 per week expired at the end of July.
TRUMP: “Over the next two weeks, I’ll be pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions for all customers. That’s a big thing. … This has never been done before.” — news conference Friday.
THE FACTS: No executive order is needed to protect people with preexisting medical conditions because “Obamacare” already does that and it’s the law of the land. If Trump persuades the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional, it’s unclear what degree of protection an executive order would offer in place of the law.
The Obama health law states that “a group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage.”
Other sections of the law act to bar insurers from charging more to people because of past medical problems and from canceling coverage, except in cases of fraud. In the past, there were horror stories of insurers canceling coverage because a patient had a recurrence of cancer.
It’s dubious that any president could enact such protections through an executive order, or Obama would never have needed to go to Congress to get his health law passed. Likewise, President Bill Clinton could have simply used a presidential decree to enact his health plan, or major parts of it, after it failed to get through Congress.
VETERANS
TRUMP: “Our vets are very special. We passed Choice, as you know — Veterans Choice … And they’ve been trying to get that passed for decades and decades and decades, and no president has ever been able to do it. And we got it done.” — news conference Saturday.
THE FACTS: This is one of Trump’s most frequent falsehoods. He’s incorrect that he achieved Veterans Choice when other presidents couldn’t. President Barack Obama achieved it in 2014. Trump expanded it.
