Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, speaks against repealing Obamacare at a protest rally outside the U.S. Capitol on July 25, 2017: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

President Donald J. Trump didn’t waste any time in showing his true priorities just a day after he and the country learned of his apparent exoneration in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of his involvement in conspiring with Russia to win the 2016 election. Trump and his Department of Justice reversed course and decided to once again try to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act, eliminating health care coverage for millions of Americans.

Now in Rome, Italy, trying to stir up white nationalist, populist movements across Europe, Trump adviser Steve Bannon said now that Trump is no longer under the shadow of Mueller’s investigation, he “is going to go full animal.” Trump will “come off the chains,” he said, and use the Mueller findings to browbeat the opposition and ignore House requests for more documents: “He will use it to bludgeon them.”

Bannon: With Mueller probe over, Trump ‘is going to go full animal’

In a filing with a federal court of appeals, Trump’s Justice Department said it agreed with the ruling of a federal judge in Texas invalidated the Obama-era health care law. In a letter released Monday night, the administration said “it is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed.”

“The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal,” said Kerri Kupec, spokesperson for the Justice Department.

This is a major shift for the department from when Jeff Sessions of Alabama was attorney general, when the administration argued that the community rating rule and the guaranteed issue requirement — protections for people with pre-existing conditions — could not be defended but the rest of the law could stand.

After the Justice Department took that position, federal District Judge Reed O’Connor struck down the entire law. The case is now before a federal appeals court.

Trump and the administration repeatedly promised — particularly leading up to the midterm election — to protect people with less-than-perfect medical histories. But this shift in the Justice Department’s stance doubles down on stripping away all the protections that were a hallmark of the landmark heath reform law.

The administration’s move didn’t only startle supporters of the law. One former official who worked under Sessions told CNN Monday night that he, too, was surprised by the new position.

Because the case is before one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, it almost guarantees that the issue will return to the newly solidified conservative Supreme Court at some point. President Barack Obama’s former solicitor general, Donald Verrilli — who once defended the law before the Supreme Court — is now defending the law on behalf of the Democratic-led House.

Overturning the law would have far-reaching consequences — way beyond disrupting coverage for the millions of people who get their health insurance on the exchanges or through Medicaid expansion.

Obamacare saves senior citizens money on their Medicare coverage and prescription drugs. It lets many Americans obtain free birth control, mammograms and cholesterol tests. And it allows children to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until they turn 26. Even the Trump administration is using the landmark health reform law to try to lower prescription drug prices.

The Trump administration would not defend the law in court so a coalition of 21 Democratic states led by California stepped in.

“This lawsuit is as dangerous as it is reckless. It threatens the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans across the country — from California to Kentucky and all the way to Maine,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “The Affordable Care Act is an integral part of our healthcare system. … Because no American should fear losing healthcare, we will defend the ACA every step of the way.”

After November’s midterm elections, the Democratic-led House of Representatives also joined in. In briefs filed with the appellate court, House lawyers said that if O’Connor’s ruling were upheld “the consequences will be devastating.”

“Millions of Americans will be denied affordable health care,” the House lawyers wrote. They added that “insurance costs will skyrocket” and “Medicare recipients will face steep increases in the price of drugs and other services.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the administration’s stance amounted to “all-out war on the health care of the American people.”

“On the very first day that the Democratic Majority held the gavel, the House of Representatives voted to intervene against Republicans’ monstrous health care lawsuit to defend people with pre-existing conditions and the health care of all Americans,” Pelosi said in a statement. “While the Trump Administration broadens its monstrous ambitions from destroying protections for pre-existing conditions to tearing down every last benefit and protection the Affordable Care Act provides, Democrats are fiercely defending the law of the land and protecting all Americans’ health care.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, became the first 2020 candidate to weigh in on the filing with her criticism Monday night. During Attorney General William Barr’s confirmation hearing in January, Harris asked him whether he was open to reconsidering the department’s position.

He replied: “Yes.”

“Trump and his administration are trying to take health care away from tens of millions of Americans — again,” Harris wrote in a tweet. “We must fight back again with everything we’ve got. And in 2020, we need to elect a president who will make health care a right.”

Much to Lose for Alabama

U.S. Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat from Alabama, denounced the move on Tuesday. As a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he said Alabama would be one of the hardest-hit states if President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law is reversed by federal courts.

“If the courts dismantle this law, Alabama is one of the states with the most to lose,” Senator Jones said. “The administration is playing politics with health care and we have to stand up to protect folks from losing their coverage and the vital protections that the federal health law guarantees.”

He has been a vocal advocate to maintain protections in the federal health law.

“It’s already a challenge for many Alabamians to access the health care they need, particularly in our rural communities. Instead of making that even more difficult, we need to be focusing on making some much-needed improvements to our current system, like lowering the cost of prescription drugs, combating the opioid epidemic, increasing access to rural health care and finally expanding Medicaid in the state of Alabama,” Jones said.

If the law is struck down, more than 166,000 Alabamians could lose their health insurance, he said, and more than 942,000 Alabamian residents who have a pre-existing condition could be denied coverage or charged more for health care, which represents one-third of people under the age of 65 in Alabama.

Insurers could reinstate annual and lifetime limits on coverage, and women could again be charged more than men for the same care, he said. Young adults would no longer be able to stay on their parents’ health care plans until the age of 26, which would cause the approximately 35,000 young adults in Alabama who gained coverage under this provision to lose their health insurance.

Earlier this year, Senator Jones introduced legislation to provide incentives for the state government to expand Medicaid by offering states the same deal from the federal government to expand Medicaid that was originally offered in 2010. He also recently re-introduced a bill that would quantify the impact of Medicaid expansion for the states that expanded and those that did not.

U.S. Senator Doug Jones Once Again Urges Medicaid Expansion in Alabama

Medicaid expansion was a key provision of the 2010 health reform law and is vital in the effort to sustain rural hospitals, he said. Since 2011, thirteen hospitals have closed in Alabama, seven of which were in rural areas.