Donald Trump could have destroyed the Affordable Care Act, but “he chose to build upon [it].”
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) on “Meet the Press,” Sept. 15
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) on Sept. 15 told viewers of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that former President Donald Trump built up the Affordable Care Act, even though Trump could have chosen to do the opposite.
“Donald Trump had two choices,” Vance, Trump’s running mate, said. “He could have destroyed the program, or he could actually build upon it and make it better so that Americans didn’t lose a lot of health care. He chose to build upon a plan, even though it came from his Democratic predecessor.”
The remarks follow statements the former president made during his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia. Trump said of the ACA, “I saved it.”
The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has grown more popular as Americans have increasingly used it to gain health coverage. More than 20 million people enrolled this year in plans sold through the marketplaces it created. That makes the law a tricky political issue for Republicans, who have largely retreated from their attempts over the past decade to repeal it.
Both Vance’s and Trump’s statements are false. We contacted Vance’s campaign; it provided no additional information. But here’s a review of policies related to Obamacare that Trump pursued as president.
So What Did Trump Do With the ACA?
Most of the Trump administration’s ACA-related actions involved cutting the program, including reducing by millions of dollars funding for marketing and enrollment assistance and backing the many failed efforts in Congress and the courts to overturn the law. In June 2020, for example, the administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the law in a case brought by more than a dozen GOP states. The high court eventually rejected the case.
“The fact the ACA survived the Trump administration is a testament to the strength of the underlying statutory framework, and that the public rallied around it,” said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.
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Most ACA provisions took effect in 2014, during Barack Obama’s presidential administration.
Average premium costs, already rising when Trump took office, jumped for some plans in 2018, before beginning a modest decline for the rest of his term, according to statistics from KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Some of those increases were tied to a 2017 Trump administration decision to stop making payments to insurers, which was intended to reduce deductibles and copayments for people with low to moderate incomes. By law, though, insurers still had to offer the plans.
Two months earlier, the Congressional Budg …