Vance's attempt to rewrite Trump's Obamacare history

Niels Lesniewski and Lia DeGroot, CQ-Roll Call on Oct 2, 2024

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In a brazen attempt at rewriting history, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance claimed during Tuesday night’s debate that former President Donald Trump was working to “salvage” the 2010 health care law while in office.

“He saved the very program from a Democratic administration that was collapsing and would have collapsed absent his leadership,” Vance, an Ohio senator, said. “He did his job which is govern in a bipartisan way and get results.”

Trump’s clear intent, along with Republicans when they controlled both the House and Senate during the first two years of his term, was to repeal and replace the law which is often referred to as Obamacare. The then-president held a preemptive victory celebration at the White House when one version of a bill to repeal the law passed the House, and at one point pushed for repealing now and replacing later if Senate Republicans could not coalesce around an alternative.

Of course, none of the repeal efforts did pass the Senate, with the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., casting a dramatic deciding no vote with a thumbs down on a reconciliation measure that would have provided what came to be known as the “skinny repeal” effort. The Trump administration also sought to undermine the intent of the law through regulatory policy.

Vance was asked about past comments he made about the 2010 health care law — specifically for details on his comments about insurance risk pools. He has suggested changes to the law that would require those with pre-existing conditions to pay higher premiums.

“Donald Trump has said that if we allow states to experiment a little bit on how to cover both the chronically ill but the non chronically ill,” Vance said. “It’s not just a plan. He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States.”

Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was a member of Congress and voted for the original law, rebutted with a recurring criticism of high risk insurance pools.

“What they’re saying is, if you’re healthy, why should you be paying more?” Walz said. “So what they’re going to do is let insurance companies pick who they insure.”

The presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris launched an ad blitz ahead of Tuesday’s debate on the issue of the health care law and Trump’s statement during the only Harris-Trump debate that he had “concepts of a plan” for addressing the health insurance issue. As part of a larger media buy, the campaign said the ad would be in circulation on health and hospital related dramas like Grey’s Anatomy on ABC and Chicago Fire and Chicago Med on NBC.

“I think as Tim Walz knows from 12 years in Congress, you’re not going to propose a 900-page bill standing on a debate stage. It would bore everybody to tears, and it wouldn’t actually mean anything because part of this is the give-and-take of bipartisan negotiation,” Vance said Tuesday.