Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and the Trump administration were quick to bring up future “phases” of the American Health Care Act that are supposedly planned following the passage of what has been referred to as “ObamaCare 2.0.”
Republican leaders have been ambiguous about the details of the next phases of the plans, with one member of Congress even laughably referring to “Phase 7 and Phase 8.”
However while appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News last night, Donald Trump first admitted that the new bill is not a “repeal,” and then went on to honestly explain that Phase 2 “is really not a phase.”
Phase 3, as explained by the President relates mainly to the cost of medicine and that it contains “a lot of goodies” and even respected non-establishment Republicans admit it will never happen.
With Phase 2 not being a legislative solution means that it will be regulated by Health and Human Services as part of the rule making process that is dominated by corporate influence.
Congress will have nothing to do with it.
Here’s how that works: A government department issues a proposed rule, buried with about 130 new rules each day.
The public has 30 days to submit comments related to the new rule that most people outside of the related industry can make little sense of.
From there, the agency weighs the comments and after a few steps, moves the rule forward to a “final rule” and then implements it.
Historically, only corporations and industries have money to spend on getting people to write in on a proposed rule.
For full disclosure, I own a marketing agency that has been paid millions of dollars to collect comments from the public on specific issues to influence the direction of proposed rules.
My company is actually THE agency that dominates this type of advocacy and holds the record for submitting the most comments in the history of the IRS, EPA, FCC, BLM, etc.