JD Vance Falsely Claims Donald Trump Tried to “Save” Obamacare

Republicans have told many lies about health care over the years.

On Sunday, JD Vance doubled down on its new product.

During an appearance on NBC’s “Meeting with the press”, Vance claimed that Donald Trump, during his presidency, “protected” Americans with insurance through the Affordable Care Act “from losing their health coverage.”

Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio who is now his party’s vice presidential nominee, went on to say that Trump “has actually protected many more Americans from losing their health coverage.”

Trump said something similar during Tuesday’s presidential debate, when he claimed he “saved” the 2010 health care law during his presidency.

In fact, Trump spent the first year of his presidency trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, fulfilling a promise he made in the early days of his 2016 presidential campaign.

The law, also known as the “Obamacare,” made it possible for millions of Americans to obtain insurance by enrolling in Medicaid or subsidized private insurance ― and prohibited insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

This is why the number of uninsured Americans has fallen to historic lows.

As a candidate and then as president, Trump repeatedly assured Americans that he would replace the Affordable Care Act with “something great” – that, “This will be a great health care system for a lot less money“and that”we will have insurance for everyone.”

But Trump never had such a plan.

Instead, once he became president, he pushed Congress to pass Republican bills that would have undermined those new rules on insurers, while sharply reducing funding and eligibility for new insurance offerings.

As a result, according to several independent projections, several million people would have lost their insurance.

One such piece of legislation is the American Health Care Act of 2017, whose passage by the House of Representatives was celebrated by Trump with a rally on the White House lawn.

If this proposal had become law, the Congressional Budget Office The number of uninsured Americans is projected to increase by 19 million in 2020 and 23 million in 2026.

That House bill — and, indeed, any of the many repeal bills Trump supported in 2017 — would have achieved long-standing conservative goals, such as reducing private-sector regulation and federal spending.

Some Americans who bought their own insurance might have found cheaper coverage, Trump and his allies have said, mainly because insurers would no longer have to comply with the Affordable Care Act rules.

Many insurers canceled old plans in response to the new rules, despite promises from then-President Barack Obama that people who liked their current insurance could keep those policies.

But the rules of the Affordable Care Act are what made insurance more comprehensive and more accessible to people with pre-existing conditions.

Without those same rules, the CBO predicts, some Americans “with preexisting or newly acquired conditions” would “ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those provided under current law, if they could purchase it at all.”

The prospect of so many people losing their insurance and seeing the rules on pre-existing conditions disappear has proven deeply unpopular. It has also alarmed a handful of Republican lawmakers, such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted against the repeal in the Senate, preventing the law from becoming law.

The reaction fueled a broader reaction political reprimand to Republicans, allowing Democrats to regain control of Congress and the White House.

It is because of this political backlash that Republicans rarely talk today about repealing the Affordable Care Act—and if they do, they promise (as Trump always does) that they have a better plan.

Trump’s intentions and record on the Affordable Care Act are important because there are many signs that the law’s future depends on what happens in the 2024 presidential election — and, more specifically, whether Trump wins and Republicans take control of Congress.

Two prominent conservative manifestos, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the House Republican Study Committee’s latest budget proposal, call for rolling back significant elements of the law.

Last fall, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the Affordable Care Act “sucks” and that Republicans should “never give up” on their attempts to “end” the law. During Tuesday’s debate, Trump said he remains interested in replacing the law, promising that he has “ideas for a plan” that would leave Americans better off.

As usual, Trump didn’t provide further details on what that might mean. But Vance gave a hint on “Meet the Press” when he said, “We want to make sure that everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to promote more choice in our health care system and not take a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people in the same insurance groups, in the same risk group.”

It’s the same argument Republicans used to justify their proposals when they fought to repeal the law in 2017: By relaxing health insurance rules, insurers could market less generous plans or restrict enrollment based on health status, so that cheaper policies would be available to some.

The tradeoff, as the CBO report noted, would have been higher prices, inadequate benefits, or no coverage at all for people with more serious health problems.

If the latest debate is any indication, this is not a compromise the public wants to make.

Of course, many Americans still struggle to keep up with the costs of their health care. Even the Affordable Care Act’s most ardent supporters acknowledge that it is a complex and imperfect program that still has major flaws. But polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans approve of the law.

Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has pledged to strengthen the law, including by renewing the additional financial aid put in place by President Joe Biden and Democrats.

Those additional subsidies, which have lowered insurance premiums for millions of people, are set to expire after 2025. Renewing them would be costly: Extending the aid for a full decade would require more than $300 billion in new federal spending, according to the CBO.

That money would have to come from somewhere: either new taxes, spending cuts elsewhere, or money added to federal deficits.

Trump has not indicated whether he, too, supports extending the aid. But given how he and Republicans feel about the Affordable Care Act — and government involvement in health care more generally — it’s hard to imagine either of them wanting to see it continue.