It’s well established that Trump’s health care policies literally killed people. On Trump’s watch, deaths from Covid were 40 percent higher in the United States than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, according to a commission assembled by the British medical journal The Lancet. Not all of this was Trump’s fault, the commission said, but Trump policies such as eliminating the National Security Council’s global health security team and leaving 700 jobs unfilled at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accounted for “tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.” Beyond the pandemic, Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments allowed the high court to overturn Roe v. Wade. By encouraging doctors to end potentially dangerous pregnancies, Roe had reduced maternal deaths by 30 to 40 percent. After Dobbs, a 64 percent majority of ob-gyns surveyed by KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) said the decision increased maternal deaths. As recently as November 2023, Trump said on Truth Social that Republicans “should never give up” trying to repeal Obamacare, about which 62 percent of all adults hold a favorable view, according to a May 2024 poll by KFF. Nine years after Trump pledged to replace the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, with “something terrific,” the ex-president has yet to propose any serious alternative. To create some illusion of activity, Trump near the end of his presidency signed an executive order guaranteeing health insurance for patients with preexisting conditions—even though the Affordable Care Act had done that already. The 2024 Republican platform describes the party’s health care position in a grand total of 46 words, all of them extremely vague (“transparency,” “choice,” “affordable,” etc.).
Trump is so clueless about health care that he never even touts his sole meaningful accomplishment in this area. That was to sign into law the 2017 Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act, which ended the prescription monopoly on hearing aids. Hearing aids are not covered by Medicare, and allowing over-the-counter versions made them available at a fraction of the price—an enormous benefit to the highly prized elderly vote. I find no evidence that Trump has ever sought credit for this. Maybe he’s queasy that the bill was sponsored by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Maybe he signed it only because it was tucked into a larger reauthorization for the Food and Drug Administration. Possibly he just doesn’t know cheap over-the-counter hearing aids came onto the market, or that he played a role in making it happen. (Biden, by contrast, signed an executive order that required the FDA to move swiftly in issuing a regulation necessary to get over-the-counter hearing aids into pharmacies and issued a written White House statement when the rule came out in August 2022.)
Republicans know this isn’t their issue. A survey by the Wesleyan Media Project of TV ads for House and Senate candidates during the first five months of 2024 found health care mentioned in only 4 percent of all Republican ads, ranking it dead last among the seven topics surveyed—lower even than abortion, mentioned in 6 percent of Republican ads. (The other topics surveyed were energy/environment, guns, immigration, inflation, and public safety.) Democrats, by contrast, mentioned health care in 20 percent of all ads, ranking the topic second after abortion (mentioned in 23 percent of Democratic ads). Democrats should be touting their health care policies in 100 percent of their ads.
