Trump threatens health subsidies to poor to force negotiations

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump might withhold payments under Obamacare that are used to help poor people afford medical services in order to force Democrats to negotiate changes to the health law, he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview.
Those payments to lower-income people, called cost-sharing-reduction subsidies, have been at the center of an almost three-year legal battle between Republicans and Democrats. The payments are used to help poorer people in Obamacare afford copays and other cost sharing for medical services. Without them, they might not be able to afford to get care. Trump’s administration has threatened to stop making the payments. “I don’t want people to get hurt,” Trump told the Journal published Wednesday. “What I think should happen — and will happen — is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are trying to find a way forward with efforts to repeal and replace large parts of Affordable Care Act, after a GOP-crafted bill in the House was pulled from a floor vote last month, lacking support. Afterward, Trump threatened to let Obamacare collapse on his watch, as a way to force Democrats to come to him with offers to make changes to the law. Despite the failure of the House GOP effort, and no clear signs of Republican consensus on how to revive it, Trump said in a separate interview with Fox Business that his efforts on health care are “doing very well” and that he still wants a bill passed before tackling tax reform. “We have to do health care first to pick up additional money so that we get great tax reform. So we’re going to have a phenomenal tax reform, but I have to do health care first,” Trump said.
Trump wouldn’t put a deadline on when a health-care bill would be passed, saying it would happen “at some point.” He added that if it didn’t happen “fast enough” he would eventually move on to tax reform.