President Donald Trump’s gimmicky $500 Affordable Care Act refund checks have started arriving in the homes of nearly a million Americans. The letters that accompany them act as textbook Trumpian disinformation and underscore how the check campaign is a cheap trick masquerading as populism.
The letters, as reported by USA Today, tell recipients, “For years, the Biden Administration overcharged you to fund the operation of HealthCare.gov. That money belongs to hard-working Americans, not the Government, and now, I am returning it to you!” It notes that the refund is for Americans who do not receive subsidies to help pay for their coverage, and states, “You have paid into this flawed System, and now you are finally getting something back.”
This is classic Trump propaganda: There is a small element of truth to what the letter is saying, but it’s presented in a manner that dramatically misleads.
His $500 checks aren’t a salve, they’re a cynical ploy to bait Americans.
To pay for these checks, Trump tapped into a government fund paid into by health insurance companies for the purposes of running the ACA marketplace’s operations — including marketing, outreach and enrollment assistance. Those fees are passed along, in part, to customers because they cause insurers to push their premiums higher.
The part that’s quasi-true about Trump’s claims is that he did tap into a surplus of funds predating his second term to send out these checks. But there’s no evidence of Trump’s claim that it was a product of “gross mismanagement” by Biden — or even necessarily a product of Biden’s actions at all.
As The Associated Press reported, “Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, said it’s entirely possible that the funds Trump has promised came from fees collected during Trump’s first term. His first administration collected more user fees from insurers than it spent, resulting in an estimated $1 billion in unspent funds, according to KFF analysis.”
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Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
