Cooper tried to help ACA customers

President Trump and Republicans in Congress may be unconcerned about people who rely on the Affordable Care Act for health insurance, but Gov. Roy Cooper still is going to keep helping them no matter how steep the hill Republicans have put before them.

GOP congressional leaders and Trump have cut advertising money for ACA enrollment, shortened the enrollment period and are planning to undercut President Obama’s signature legislative achievement in any way they can.

But Cooper stood up and asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to grant North Carolinians in need of the ACA an extension on the sign-up deadline.

“In the past,” the governor said at a press conference, “the sign-up times were twice as long. In the past, there have been extensions — because in the end, a lot of people procrastinate.”

It’s beyond reason for the federal government to essentially play some kind of card trick with Americans dependent on the ACA. And it’s an affront, frankly, to the law of the land.

That is what the ACA is, whether Republicans like it or not. And they should view themselves as charged with carrying out that law, not undermining it. Their attitude is pure politics, and they’re being led down the path by Donald Trump, a man who has identified with people dependent upon health insurance and government help for not one second. The silver spooner in the White House couldn’t care less if families don’t get health care, as long as he gets to focus on what seems to be his singular mission in office: the eradication of any achievements by his predecessor, with whom he remains obsessed.

For North Carolina, as Gov. Cooper recognizes, the ACA is mightily important. The state has the nation’s third-highest enrollment in the ACA, after Florida and Texas, among the 39 states that use the federal exchange for enrollment. Republican lawmakers stubbornly refused to set up a state exchange, purely to make signing up more difficult. But so many people in the state were in need that the ACA became very popular anyway.

But as of Dec. 9, only 271,000 people had signed up for next year, around half the number of people who were enrolled this year. There is no question that the shortened deadline the Trump administration set is the major reason for that, which is absolutely a disgrace and something that will literally hurt many hundreds of thousands of families.

And sadly, it truly will. The deadline for open enrollment passed without the federal DHHS responding to the governor.

But Cooper was right, and so were other elected officials in different parts of the country who were trying to get the same done for their states. This is about basic humanity, about common sense as well – absent insurance, more people become indigent or rely on expensive emergency room care for their treatment, and that in turns hurts everyone who has insurance, because all premiums must increase to cover hospitals’ costs.

But Republicans and their disinterested president simply don’t care, any more than they care that polls show the ACA has attained a level of popularity among a majority of Americans. It doesn’t matter, as GOP leaders just want to erase Obama’s achievements, period.

This story was originally published December 19, 2017 at 9:59 AM with the headline "Cooper tried to help ACA customers."