President Donald Trump has announced that his administration plans to send out $500 checks to hundreds of thousands of Americans it says were “overcharged” for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. On Thursday, the White House posted a video of Trump announcing the “rebate checks,” which he said would be delivered to “nearly 1 million hardworking Americans who were wrongly overcharged through Obamacare.” A subsequent executive order said that this would go to Americans in 30 states, and would “directly refund the Americans most exposed to the higher costs imposed by the Biden Administration’s gross mismanagement of Obamacare.” The rebates would be funded from a $500 million surplus that the White House says was accumulated from ACA exchange fees wrongly charged to consumers under former President Joe Biden. Axios had reported on the plan ahead of the White House announcement, which has already drawn a negative reaction from some advocates of expanded federal health coverage.
In response to Axios’s report on Wednesday, the left-leaning Protect Our Care called the plan a “gimmick” and “insult to working families grappling with the GOP health care crisis.” The announcement comes one day after Trump revealed a “dividend” payment to voters if Republicans retain control of Congress after November’s elections. "If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them," the president told attendees at the party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Texas on Wednesday, "I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000." This is a developing story.
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