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We’re entering a year of unknowns

January 5, 2017   ·   0 Comments

SO HERE WE ARE in a new year that seems to bring with it an unusual number of unknowns.

Perhaps leading them all is the conduct of Donald Trump in the White House, home of by far the world’s most powerful politician. Will he keep his promise to do more than simply “make America great again” and actually try to reunite a country that’s divided as never before?

The extent of the division was perfectly illustrated by a year-end poll that asked Americans what were the greatest achievements and worst failures of President Barack Obama.

The USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll rated the Affordable Care Act as President Obama’s greatest achievement in the White House, and also as his biggest failure.

In yet another sign of how polarized Americans are, the legislation commonly known as Obamacare drew the strongest praise from his supporters and the sharpest rebuke from his critics.

On one thing there was agreement across partisan lines: Six in 10 predict Mr. Trump will significantly dismantle the Obama legacy. But while three-fourths of Democrats called that a bad thing; three-fourths of Republicans called it a good one.

In the circumstances, it will be interesting to see just how different Trumpcare will be from Obamacare, since the two main features of the Affordable Care Act were its universal availability and a ban on exclusing anyone with existing health problems, and Mr. Trump says he wants both preserved.

It will be interesting to see whether the new administration opts to use a former Repub-lican’s ideas for the transportation sector as a model for health care.

It was the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower that produced the Interstate highways system that today blankets the U.S. Unlike its predecessor, which was little  more than a numbering system that had US 1 on the east coast and US 99 on the west coast, with even-numbered highways going from 2 on the north to 98 down south, the Interstate routes all were built with heavy subsidies from Washington, with the heaviest in states with sparse populations and rugged terrain.

Applying the same principles to health care would see the U.S. federal government acting much the same way, with states responsible for administering health insurance programs while being required to include universal access and affordable premiums. It could then be left up to individual states to decide whether to have a single insurer (private or public) or leave the current situation, which sees doctors and hospitals having to deal with multiple insurers.

Although such an approach would seem to fit well with Replublicans’advocacy of state rights  (versus centralization), it would also mean having a health care system that looked a bit like Canada’s.

Perhaps the biggest unknown as the Trump era approaches is how the new administration will perform on the world scene.

As matters stand, there’s little doubt that Mr. Trump will try to improve relations with Russia, thanks to support he got fron Russian President Vladimir Putin and his dismissal of expert confirmation of Russia’s hacking of U.S. emails.

However, there’s also little doubt that the hacking is being treated seriously by some powerful Republicans.

Arizona Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Commission, has described Russia’s hacking during the U.S. presidential election campaign as “an act of war,” and scheduled a hearing this week on foreign cyberthreats.

The former Republican presidential candidate has criticized sanctions and expulsions announced by the Obama administration as insufficient and belated. He says Americans “have to make sure that there is a price to pay so that we can perhaps persuade Russians to stop this kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy.”


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