Trump’s Real Agenda to Rip Away Protections for Pre-Existing Conditions Is a Political Third Rail
Washington, D.C. – Over the weekend, Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance said the quiet part out loud about the MAGA health care agenda. As part of his lies about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said that Trump’s plan would “promote some more choice” by putting people in high-risk pools. Translation: he wants to give insurance companies the power to charge people with pre-existing conditions more for coverage.
No matter how many times Trump and Vance claim they want to make the ACA “better,” the MAGA agenda speaks for itself. Under their plan, insurance companies would be back in charge and be given the power to charge people more for insurance or deny coverage altogether. We would return to the days where people with conditions like asthma, cancer, and diabetes could be left uninsurable and unable to access lifesaving care. Trump knows that this is a third rail in American politics, so he is doing everything in his power to conceal his record on the ACA, but we know the truth.
HEADLINES
HuffPost: JD Vance Just Told Another Big Lie About Donald Trump’s Record. “In reality, Trump spent the first year of his presidency trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, following through on a promise he’d made from the very first days of his 2016 presidential campaign. The law, also known as “Obamacare,” allowed many millions of Americans to get insurance by enrolling in Medicaid or subsidized private insurance ― and by prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. It’s the reason the number of Americans without insurance has plummeted to record lows.” [HuffPost, 09/15/24]
The Hill: Vance Says ‘Of Course’ Trump Has a Plan ‘To Fix American Health Care.’ “Trump sought repeatedly during his time in office to overturn ObamaCare. After failing to come up with a better plan, Trump and congressional Republicans sought to repeal the law in 2017, but it failed by a single vote. The law’s popularity subsequently soared, and Democrats won back control of the House chamber by campaigning on preexisting conditions.” [The Hill, 09/15/24]
SOCIAL MEDIA
Elena Hung, Executive Director of Little Lobbyists. “When @VP says ‘people love the ACA,’ she means people love:
– not being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions
– not being denied coverage because of annual/lifetime limits
– having access to care, including affordable Rx drugs” [X, 9/16/24]
Larry Levitt, Executive Vice President for Health Policy, KFF: “You can’t really say people with pre-existing conditions are protected if they are in a separate insurance risk pool and can be charged exorbitant premiums.” [X, 9/16/24]
Dante Atkins, Atkins Strategies: “JD Vance doesn’t like shared risk pools for health insurance. If you get rid of them, insurance will be a lot cheaper for healthy people and unobtainable for anyone else, which is really a fascist policy if you give it any thought.” [X, 9/16/24]
Brian Beutler, CoHost of Politix.FM. “When Vance here says he wants to put the healthy and sick in different risk pools he’s saying he wants to make pre-existing conditions protections impossible. His claim to want to maintain them is a lie.” [X, 9/16/24]
Ronald Brownstein, Senior CNN Political Analyst: “This is why it’s wrong to say that Republicans have no healthcare plan. The core of every Republican proposal to replace the #ACA has always been to unravel the sharing of risk-raising premiums and diminishing access for older and sicker. That includes many non-college whites.” [X, 9/16/24]
Michael Caley, New Kings Democrats: “He specifically says he wants a deregulation of health care markets which *puts people in different risk pools based on their pre-existing conditions.* At the beginning he lies and says they’ll protect pre-existing but then he lays out a plan that ends these protections.” [X, 9/16/24]
Laura Chapin, Opinion Contributor, US News: “De-regulating the insurance market is how women with positive breast cancer screenings got kicked off their insurance before starting cancer treatment. The choice was whether to go bankrupt or die.” [X, 9/16/24]
John Harwood, Former White House Correspondent, CNN: “Deregulating the insurance markets means that women and older people pay more and that people with pre-existing can’t get affordable coverage at all. Insurance market regulations are the reason the Affordable Care Act has expanded health coverage to millions of Americans.” [X, 9/16/24]
Louise Norris, Journalist: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t cover folks w/ pre-existing conditions while also’deregulating’ insurance markets & putting people in separate risk pools. Trump did nothing to ‘build’ upon ACA in 2017/18. But he did cut navigator funding & eliminate federal CSR funding.” [X, 9/16/24]
Dan Pfeiffer, CoHost, Pod Save America: “The GOP playbook is to pretend they care about people with preexisting conditions when running for office and then try to take away their access to health insurance when elected.” [X, 9/16/24]
Catherine Rampell, Journalist: “On @MeetThePress, Vance claimed Trump helped more people get health insurance coverage, and specifically Obamacare marketplace coverage. This is false. The uninsured rate *rose* under Trump; it has fallen to its lowest level on record under Biden. … Problem with Trump/Vance healthcare positions isn’t only that they have no plan to achieve their promises (i.e., helping Americans get care). It’s also that their record shows them doing *opposite* of these promises (causing people to lose care).” [X, 9/15/24]
Julie Rovner, Chief Washington Correspondent KFF: Trump’s goal in addressing the ACA back in 2017 wasn’t to fix it… https://npr.org/2017/10/14/557832684/trump-ends-health-care-subsidies-who-will-be-affected” [X, 9/16/24]
James Surowiecki, Journalist: “What Vance says here is v. important – he thinks all Americans should not be in the same insurance risk pool. That would mean that older Americans who aren’t yet 65 and Americans with pre-existing conditions would have to pay much more for health insurance than they now do.” [X, 9/16/24]