Republicans will never stop trying to destroy the legacy of our first Black president. Despite a decade of failure in repealing the Affordable Care Act, and the fact that the law is stronger than ever, gutting it still looms large in their aspirations. And this week, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is banging the repeal-and-replace drum.
“Well, I think we’re definitely gonna have to fix the health care problem in this country,” Vance told the news outlet NOTUS this week. “The problem with Obamacare is that for a lot of people, it just doesn’t provide high-quality health care, right? So you have a lot of people paying out the ass, paying very high prices for health care that isn’t high quality.”
As a matter of fact, premium costs for people with subsidized ACA plans have decreased 44%, or $705 per year, according to a recent analysis by KFF, a nonpartisan organization focused on health policy. That’s 21.4 million people with Obamacare plans who have enjoyed those lower costs thanks to President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress that increased those subsidies.
So much for that argument from Vance.
Vance also claimed that “repeal and replace efforts” during Trump’s presidency were “fundamentally focused around the idea of fixing what was broken, not about stripping people’s health care away. So yeah, I think you’re certainly gonna see efforts to reform the system.”
That’s not true, either. While Trump kept up the fiction that he was working on a plan to replace the ACA, that plan never materialized. On top of that, his Department of Justice was arguing before the Supreme Court, trying to get them to overturn the law—and yes, that included ripping coverage away from people with preexisting conditions.
In this election cycle, Trump has regularly talked about getting rid of Obamacare, even though Republican lawmakers want him to stop talking about it. (Again, the law is popular.) While he might not find much congressional support to repeal the law, that doesn’t mean the ACA would be safe in Trump’s hands if he wins this November.
When he couldn’t repeal it during his administration, he did everything he could to sabotage it through executive actions. Biden had to undo that damage, and it worked—there are more people enrolled in its plans than ever before. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.
In a second administration, Trump would have the Project 2025 playbook, the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian agenda to, among other things, replace civil servants in the Department of Health and Human Services with a raft of Trumpists who could do a great deal more damage. None of the plans for health care in the Trump team’s blueprint would be good for consumers.
There are still necessary improvements to the ACA, and to the health care system in general, but who would you trust to oversee that?
Please donate now to support Kamala Harris and keep convicted felon Donald Trump and his lackey JD Vance out of the White House!
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