Trump Wants Your Employer to Ditch Its Health Care Plan

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

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For years, opponents of Obamacare have been exercised by President Obama’s supposed “Lie of the Year” for 2013: If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. This turned out to be untrue in a specific sense: you could keep your plan if your insurance company continued to offer it. However, many insurance companies decided to cancel their existing plans and replace them with new ones that conformed to Obamacare’s rules. In 2013 the cancellation letters went out and Republicans pretended to be outraged.

Fast forward to 2019. The Trump administration has just issued a final rule governing HRAs and is busily promoting it. An HRA is a Health Reimbursement Account, and what it means is this: your employer can now decide to cancel its group plan and replace it with an HRA that reimburses you for an individual plan that you buy in the open market. There are various rules in place about how much employers have to spend and who can qualify, but the nut of the thing is simple. It’s a new policy that actively appeals to employers to ditch their group plan—most likely for an assortment of individual plans that provide worse coverage.

This will spawn outraged coverage from Fox News and the rest of the conservative noise machine, right?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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