**** you Mr. President and your "Executive Order."
Double-**** you Rand Paul.
There is no "reform" in your Executive Order; selling insurance across state lines and allowing "skinny" plans does nothing to address cost.
You could, via Executive Order, direct the FTC to go after medical providers of all stripes for refusing to publish prices, declaring such an action to be a deceptive practice and thus in violation of Federal Law and Regulation. Every single business we deal with daily, with the exception of health care, posts prices and thus allows us to shop before we buy. It is only health care that lacks this essential element of a market and in any other line of work such would have long-ago led to enforcement actions and even indictments.
You could, via Executive Order, direct Jeff Sessions to enforce 15 USC Chapter 1 against all medical firms as regard disparate pricing based on one's insurance status, a clearly-extortionate and illegal act under 100+ year old law which forbids any collusive act intended to limit competition and/or fix prices. Said law has been challenged twice by the insurance industry all the way up to the United States Supreme Court with the first such challenge in 1979 (Group Life & Health .v. Royal Drug, 440 US 205) claiming an exemption for health insurance providers under McCarran-Ferguson. THEY LOST. I have repeatedly heard from myriad "lawmakers" that health insurance and medical providers are exempt from anti-trust; this is a bald lie given that there are two cases which went to the United States Supreme Court and were lost after attempting to assert exactly this claim. What's even more outrageous is that after the second loss the State of California wrote a section into their BPR code (similar to the federal CFRs) that explicitly exempts health providers from the effects of that US Supreme Court decision yet it is a fact that no state regulator or legislature can exempt someone from a federal law. That such a claim continues to be made by lawmakers, including Matt Gaetz just recently here in a Town Hall meeting in Florida, is an outrage and a deliberate fraud upon the public in which you are not only complicit you are the chief fraud enabler and promoter.
You, Mr. President, had not one but two items in your platform when running for President that addressed these issues, with one of them requiring the publication of prices. As soon as you were elected that provision disappeared and has never been seen or heard since.
You're a damned liar Mr. President, and watching you at the dias this morning I want to ****ing puke at the crap you are running on the American people with the full support of Rand Paul, who likewise wants to screw Americans by extending anti-trust protection to all medical providers. He has in fact repeatedly tried to pass such a provision which would make legal that which currently is not, and which has been ruled illegal twice at the US Supreme Court but which your Administration, just like the previous ones, refuse to enforce.
The actions of this industry are illegal and between them medical firms steal over $3 trillion a year from Americans, enough for each and every American family to afford the payment on a middle-class house.
**** you Mr. President, **** you Rand Paul, and **** you Congress.