Even though President Trump's executive order from last Thursday was related to health care, the order has no direct impact on Obamacare -- otherwise referred to as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- the current law that President Trump has been wanting to repeal.

Repeated efforts to sabotage ACA

As it stands, the ACA it is still the law of the land for Americans to obtain affordable health care. In Trump's first public effort to sabotage Obamacare during the same week, however, Trump did move against the ACA, finally deciding to withhold monthly subsidy payments that go to insurance providers under the ACA's marketplace.

Trump's announcement resulted in the prediction that insurance companies would sue the administration over the payments.

In fact, there are already pending lawsuits by insurance companies who were initially promised financial support at the end of a year to cover losses through the ACA's risk corridor system. The risk corridor program was undermined by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in 2014, when he passed an amendment that would put caps on how much those providers could get, causing those insurance companies to flee.

Trump sends mixed signals about Obamacare

As it stands, the lawsuits are still pending but its been suggested that they would be the cause of major humiliation against the administration if those companies win their cases.

Its been asserted that the reason behind the president's decision to sign the order last week between the deadline for insurance providers to sign up for the ACA and the beginning of the enrollment period on November 1, was to make a greater impact against those providers.

The Trump administration had already made cuts to funding enrollment for the ACA, advertising, and the enrollment period throughout the year.

Following the executive order with canceling subsidies was, not doubt, also designed to leave a lasting impact.

Despite this, however, the president said on Monday that he would be looking into providing a temporary fix followed by a long-term fix of Obamacare -- suggesting that the long-term fix would be a repeal.

More support from president for bipartisan bill?

Thus far, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Sen. Patty Murray (R-WA) had been working on a bipartisan bill to shore up the ACA for the period of two years. For Democrats, repealing Obamacare is a non-starter for negotiations. It would appear that after repeated repeal failures, President Trump might have submitted to fixing the ACA in the meantime, temporarily.

Both senators Alexander and Murray were blocked by Orrin Hatch when Republicans were hoping they would be able to pass another repeal bill in September. After the failure of the Graham-Cassidy bill, both Alexander and Murray started talks again for their bipartisan bill. Without the president's support, it's likely that they would be prevented from having any success and will likely wait until 2018 to try and repeal again.
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