NEW YORK �� The Trump administration plans to end the Affordable Care Act's requirement that most people have health insurance, an adviser to the president said.
Kellyanne Conway, in an interview with NBC, appeared to indicate that the law's requirement that most employers offer coverage to their full-time workers would also end. Trump signed an executive order Friday in which he said he intends to repeal the health care law and it wasn't clear if Conway's remarks are a signal of strategy related to that order or if she was referring to legislative goals for the promised repeal and replacement of the law.
"We're doing away with this Obamacare penalty," she said in the interview, which was conducted Thursday. "This tax has been so �� such a burden on many Americans. And it's also been a burden on many small-business owners, many of whom complained to us that that Obamacare penalty, along with so many other draconian regulations, are just a stranglehold."
Trump campaigned on a pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which he called a "disaster." The president, in his executive order, commanded federal agencies to try to waive or delay requirements of the health care law that impose economic or regulatory burdens on states, families, the health care industry and others.
Presidents can't use executive orders to end laws unilaterally, so it's unlikely that Trump's order would entirely end the law's mandates, said Timothy Jost, a professor with expertise in health law at Washington and Lee University School of Law. But the administration could give more flexibility for people to avoid the requirement by saying it poses a hardship.
Undoing the law's requirement that all people have coverage could destabilize the market. That's because healthier people might choose not to buy health insurance, leaving only sick people covered. If the administration doesn't enforce the mandate, that could be enough to push some insurers from the market, California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said.
"This executive order is likely to destabilize health insurance markets across the United States," he said Saturday in a statement.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo provided an early indication of how some states may resist Trump's pledge to undo the Affordable Care Act. Cuomo proposed rules Saturday requiring New York's health insurers to cover birth control and medically necessary abortions, even if the law is repealed.
Ultimately, it'll be up to Congress to repeal the health law and pass a replacement policy. Trump has said his administration will lay out its replacement plan once his nominee for health and human services secretary, Rep. Tom Price, D-Ga., is confirmed. A hearing on Price's nomination is scheduled Tuesday by the Senate Finance Committee, which will then vote on whether to put his nomination before the full Senate.
Republicans have faced questions about whether their policy would result in Americans losing insurance coverage, particularly those who buy plans with subsidies in the new markets created by the Affordable Care act, and those who are covered in the law's expansion of Medicaid. Conway joined Trump in saying that people will keep their insurance, though she qualified her remarks.
"President Trump has said that people will not go without coverage. And he means that," she said in the NBC interview. She later said that "there will be ways for people to access affordable, quality health insurance if they'd like to get it."
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(Anna Edney and Justin Sink contributed to this report.)
