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The terrain darkened as I drove the rural back roads of Georgia, red clay lining the sandy soil, deep-green kudzu choking trees and climbing telephone poles; the highway transformed into bumpy roads wearing worn-out street signs. It was summer 1985, and I was driving to see Mamie, a part-time nanny who’d helped raise me as a child. I barely knew about her own life back then, only that she lived across town, a single mom with a teenage son. I hadn’t seen her for decades.

I was now a 30-something TV reporter in Atlanta.

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The Trump administration’s project to undermine the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges is now complete. Its latest rule will allow employers to funnel tax-exempt cash to employees to buy health plans.

Workers could use the cash—comparable to the vouchers once proposed for Medicare—to buy plans that meet ACA standards. Or, they could use a separate account to buy short-term or limited-benefit plans, which include ones that discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

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The slide deck from the June 21 CHA member forum on the draft co-location guidance issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is posted below.

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My first job after residency was in a small mill town in central Maine. I joined two fifty something family doctors, one of whom was the son of the former town doctor. I felt like I was Dr. Kiley on “Marcus Welby, MD.” I didn’t have a motorcycle, but I did have a snazzy SAAB 900.

Will was a John Deere man, wore a flannel shirt and listened to A Prairie Home Companion. He was kind and methodical. Joe didn’t seem quite as rural, moved quicker and wore more formal clothes. I never could read his handwriting.

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Donald Trump just lied again. Monday night he tweeted that the United States is going to “begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.” The United States doesn’t have the capability to round up millions of illegal immigrants and deport them, leaving reporters to scurry around trying to figure out exactly what he means.

Trump’s whoppers rarely get serious competition from the other side of the aisle. Nobody is as big as he is and nobody twists reality the way he does. But with the Democratic primary heating up and front-runner Joe Biden trading barbs with the president, last week there was finally some competition.

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A decade ago, I publicly relinquished my membership in the American Medical Association when it came out in support of the Affordable Care Act. I felt my colleagues were blindly favoring an insurance expansion that would jeopardize quality of care and add to a physician’s growing bureaucratic burden, while not guaranteeing access to actual health care amid prohibitive deductibles and narrow care network. I was right.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many things about Obamacare that I now like, including the Medicaid expansion, the funding and expansion of federally qualified health centers in undeserved areas, and a team approach to health care delivery (Accountable Care Organizations). In fact, these parts of the law have worked out better than I anticipated.