Sherrod Brown blames Trump administration for health insurance problems

Sen. Sherrod Brown said Monday that it’s the Trump administration that’s causing the problem in the insurance marketplace.

“When [health insurance company] Anthem pulled out of Ohio, they pretty much said it’s the uncertainty created by the Trump administration, not the Affordable Care Act,” the Ohio Democrat said on CNN.

“Look what happened at the beginning of the year when President Trump did everything he could to discourage new people from signing up for Medicaid,” he said. “And those new people would overwhelmingly be the youngest, healthiest people. And those are the ones you want in the insurance pool because they stabilize prices and help in some cases to bring costs down cause they health care costs aren’t very much.”

Mr. Brown also blamed the Republicans in Congress for refusing to work with Democrats on minor fixes to Obamacare, similar to what was done for Medicaid or Medicare.

“There were problems before — this Congress ever since the bill passed the Republican leadership in the House, the majority since 2011, every few weeks do another repeal Obamacare [vote], but refuses to work with us to come up with small fixes to make this work better,” he said. “Nobody claims it’s perfect.”