Trump’s vision for health care remains secret
WASHINGTON — When Donald Trump first ran for the White House, he promised to “come up with a great health plan,” one that would repeal the Affordable Care Act but replace it with something better, something that would maintain its biggest selling point: protecting people with preexisting medical conditions.
Once elected, he swore he had a “wonderful plan” and would be “putting it in fairly soon.”
On Tuesday night, Trump was at it again, during a townhallstyle meeting broadcast on ABC, where he was schooled by Ellesia Blaque, an assistant professor of Africana and ethnic literatures at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. She told him she had a congenital illness, demanded to known what he would do to keep “people like me who work hard” insured — and cut him off when he tried to interrupt her.
“We’re going to be doing a health care plan very strongly, and protect people with preexisting conditions,” Trump told her, adding, “I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you, and it’s a much better plan.”
After four years, during the worst health crisis in a century, the unkept promise may be catching up to Trump. There still does not seem to be any plan, because other than abolishing the Affordable Care Act — which requires insurers to cover preexisting conditions and which the White House is asking the Supreme Court to overturn — the Republican Party cannot agree on one.
And with tens of thousands of Americans losing their health insurance to a coronavirusinduced recession, fears of inadequate or nonexistent health care coverage have never been greater.
“What the public wants to know is, ‘Where am I going to get health insurance and how much is it going to cost me,’ and that plan didn’t really provide any kind of direction for getting answers to that,” said James Capretta, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who advised President George W. Bush on health policy, referring to a 2018 report on health care overhaul by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump’s health care positions in 2016 separated him from the Republican pack. Yes, he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, he said, but its replacement would be even more generous. He would not cut Medicare, and he would allow the federal government to negotiate for much lower prescription drug costs, a key plank of the Democrats.
But his claim Tuesday that his administration finally has a secret health care plan “all ready” may be feeling shopworn to a weary electorate. He is running for reelection in the thick of a pandemic, when an estimated 5.4 million American workers had already lost their health insurance from February to May, according to the nonpartisan advocacy group Families USA.
And voters may hold him accountable for his failure to produce.
“The truth is he has no plan and he never will,” Douglas Emhoff, the husband of the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, quipped at an event Wednesday.