Before the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was enacted in 2010, 50 million Americans didn’t have health insurance.
Obamacare literally halved that – we’re at 25 million now, a key reason for the drop in the uninsured being that 21 million Americans are enrolled in the Health Insurance Marketplace, one of the signature features of the Affordable Care Act.
What does the future in health insurance in the U.S. look like?
Video: Harris, Trump on the Affordable Care Act
Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party presidential nominee, has, in the past, supported the Bernie Sanders Medicare for All proposal that would, in essence, put into place a universal healthcare solution, which is where things ultimately need to go.
In the meantime, given the political reality – Republicans in the Senate will filibuster Medicare for All as long as they have more than 40, and as long as Democrats continue to treat the filibuster like it’s written into the Constitution, which it isn’t – we have the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, which Harris wants to see us build on, while her opponent, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who tried for four years to undermine the ACA in his term in the White House, still very much wants to get rid of it, and get this, he’d get rid of the ACA with nothing in terms of a plan to replace it.
“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump said at the Sept. 10 ABC News debate, to much derision from critics, considering he’s railed against the ACA for nine years, promised that he had something better to put in its place, and yet somehow, nine years into this, he still has “concepts of a plan.
“I’m not president right now, but if we come up with something, I would only change it if we come up with something better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you’ll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future,” Trump said, and again, this was two weeks ago.
Maybe in another nine years, right?
More reality: 25 million Americans without health insurance, while it’s progress, because it’s half what we had back in 2010, is still 25 million too many.
The idea that we’d not only not work to continue to get that number closer to zero, but we’d arbitrarily get rid of the one thing that we’ve found in the past 50 years to get more people into more regular healthcare without having an alternative, is the height of irresponsibility on the part of Trump, who, aside from having “concepts of a plan,” only has broadsides to throw at Democrats.
“Obamacare was lousy healthcare. Always was. It’s not very good today. And what I said, that if we come up with something, we are working on things, we’re going to do it, and we’re going to replace it,” Trump said at the debate, ahead of claiming, which is the nice way of saying that he was lying, about how he had somehow “saved” the ACA, bringing up the question – what did he save it from, his own efforts to kill it?
“What we will do is, we’re looking at different plans,” Trump said. “If we can come up with a plan that’s going to cost our people, our population, less money, and be better healthcare than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it. But until then, I’d run it as good as it can be run.”
It’s unclear what he’s blathering about, that he’d “run it as good as it can be run,” aside from that being some sort of half-hearted promise to not let his stooges do everything within their power to get people out of the Marketplace.
Harris, let’s be honest here, she’s a Medicare for All person, but if you’re going to err in terms of commitment to the future of the ACA, you’d probably want to err on the side of the candidate who wants more people insured, and not less.
“Just look at the history to know where people stand. When Donald Trump was president, 60 times he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Sixty times,” Harris said at the ABC News debate, ahead of recounting the dramatic moment in 2017 when John McCain, having just been diagnosed with the brain cancer that would kill him a year later, offered a literal thumbs-down as he cast the decisive “no” vote on a Trump-led effort to kill Obamacare.
“What the Affordable Care Act has done is eliminate the ability of insurance companies to deny people with pre-existing conditions,” Harris said. “I don’t have to tell the people watching tonight. You remember what that was like. Remember when an insurance company could deny if a child had asthma, if someone was a breast cancer survivor, if a grandparent had diabetes? And thankfully, as I’ve been vice president, and we, over the last four years, have strengthened the Affordable Care Act, we have allowed for the first time Medicare to negotiate drug prices on behalf of you, the American people.
“Donald Trump said he was going to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. He never did. We did. And now we have capped the cost of insulin at $35 a month,” Harris said. “Since I’ve been vice president, we have capped the cost of prescription medication for seniors at $2,000 a year. And when I am president, we will do that for all people, understanding that the value I bring to this is that access to healthcare should be a right and not just a privilege of those who can afford it. And the plan has to be to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, not get rid of it.”
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Chris Graham
