Trump Promises ‘Phenomenal’ Health Care Plan Soon

Plus - Is Trump moving America to the left?

Trump Promises ‘Phenomenal’ Health Care Plan Soon

In part of his extensive, wide-ranging interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, President Trump again called Obamacare a disaster and said he plans to release a new health care plan in the coming weeks:

“If we win back the House, we're going to produce phenomenal health care. And we already have the concept of the plan, but it'll be less expensive than Obamacare by a lot. And it'll be much better health care,” Trump said.

“Don't you have to tell people what the plan is?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“Yeah, well, we'll be announcing that in about two months. Maybe less,” Trump responded. “So, yeah, sure you do. But -- but, again, that's -- that's subject to winning back the House, Senate and the presidency. You need the three. …”

Later in the interview, Trump returned to the point, saying that “people hate Obamacare. It’s too expensive, it’s not good, but if we win the House, we win the Senate, we win the presidency. You’re going have the greatest healthcare that anybody’s ever had.”

A familiar refrain: This isn’t the first time Trump has talked about an exciting new health care plan that is just about ready for release. Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News said Monday that “this is at least the third time in the past few months POTUS has promised a new health plan ‘soon.’” Republicans have been talking about repealing and replacing Obamacare since the day it passed, and Trump touted a new plan that would “take care of everybody” at lower cost during his presidential run. But Republicans have been unable to fulfill either of those promises, despite controlling both Congress and the White House for two years.

Why bring it up again? Trump is looking for a way to neutralize a Democratic advantage ahead of the 2020 election, Peter Baker, Michael Tackett and Linda Qiu of The New York Times reported Sunday. Polls show that voters trust Democrats more on health care, and protections for people with pre-existing conditions have played an important role in the debate over Obamacare repeal, to Democrats’ advantage. Touching on a sore spot from the 2018 midterm elections, Trump told Stephanopoulos that he is “very much for preexisting conditions” and that people with existing health problems will not be charged more for health insurance. “Under my plan, [the costs will] be much lower,” the president said.

But Republicans are leery: The release of a concrete health care plan would carry big risks for Republicans, who have so far been unable to articulate a proposal that provides universal coverage at a lower cost than Obamacare. “The president has repeatedly promised something better than the A.C.A. but has never come up with a plan himself, and the congressional plans he endorsed were definitely not better for everyone,” the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt told the Times. “When it comes to health care, the challenge has been that the president has not only avoided proposing a specific plan, but has made promises that no plan could ever fulfill.”

Given the political risks, many Republican lawmakers would prefer that Trump avoid the issue. At the same time, Democrats would no doubt welcome a renewed focus on health care, which they see as one of the key issues that enabled them to take control of the House in 2018.  

Will there ever be Trump health care plan? Senior administration officials told ABC News that the White House is still far from having a comprehensive plan, and that the focus is currently on drafting a set of “high-level principles” that can provide direction for some future legislative package.

This suggests that the latest presidential promise of a comprehensive new plan is likely “the policy equivalent of vaporware,” as The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman put it Monday. Nevertheless, the president is looking for some kind of health care initiative he can point to during the 2020 election. There’s a good chance, then, that the White House or Republican lawmakers will put forth a set of proposals related to health care in the next few months, though likely one that is limited in scope and ambition, with an emphasis on controlling costs within the existing system.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), a medical doctor and one of three senators reportedly working on a GOP health care bill, told the Daily Beast last week that he has been talking to the White House about surprise medical billing, an issue that could gain bipartisan support – and provide Trump with a health care win, however small. “He wants results,” Barrasso said of the president. “He wants to be able to point to a success.”

Fact Check: Trump Defends Rising Deficit and Debt

In that same interview, Trump — who as a candidate in 2016 said he could eliminate the national debt in eight years or at least reduce it in chunks — also defended its continued rise under his administration.

Asked about his criticism of the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell, Trump brought up the debt and complained that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden “doubled” it during their years in office:

“What I don't like is when you raise the interest rates, there's no inflation  – there's virtually no inflation. When you raise interest rates, that means you're paying more in debt. And I inherited almost $21 trillion in debt. I inherited that. President Obama and Biden, they doubled the debt during their eight years. You know that.”

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that the debt has been rising on Trump’s watch as well, the president said spending more money on the military was necessary:

“Sure. But I have to rebuild the military. They doubled the debt, and they didn't do anything. They doubled the debt on nonsense. I took over a military that was totally depleted. I have to rebuild it. … We have beautiful new F-35s and F-18s and new — rifles, new uniforms. In the case of the Army, we have the new uniforms that everybody's wanted for years. They're an expensive — job. … We have spent a tremendous amount of money on our military. And we did the right thing because we had to rebuild our military.”

Fact-Checking Trump:

1. The debt didn’t quite double under Obama, but it did rise by $9 trillion. The debt held by the public, a more meaningful number, did more than double, rising from $6.3 trillion to $14 trillion. But blaming that all on Obama isn’t fair, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has said. Meanwhile, the debt has risen by more than $2 trillion under Trump so far.

2. While Trump’s didn’t explain his claim that Obama raised the debt for “nonsense,” he has in the past criticized the deficit-raising stimulus passed in 2009 to help lift the country out of the Great Recession. While there’s still some debate among economists about just how much the stimulus helped, fact-checkers have said that Trump’s past criticisms distorted the facts and were “mostly false.”

3. Trump’s comments about military spending ignore other factors that have driven up the debt under his administration, including the 2017 tax cuts he signed, which the Congressional Budget Office has said will add $1.9 trillion to the debt. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said earlier this year that the tax cuts will cost $230 billion this year, accounting for roughly a quarter of the deficit, while spending increases Trump grudgingly signed into law last year, including those for the military, will cost $190 billion, or about a fifth of the deficit.

Poll of the Day: What ‘Medicare for All’ Means

“Medicare for All” still means different things to different people. A new poll from the Democratic pollsters at Navigator Research finds that nearly 75% of Democrats believe the term refers to a health care system “that lets anyone buy Medicare instead of their private insurance, if they want to.” Just over a quarter of Democrats think the term means forcing people to get rid of their private insurance. By contrast, more than half of Republicans say that’s what “Medicare for All” is.

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Chart of the Day: America Moves Left

The Trump presidency has moved America left, The Economist reports. Americans now favor “big government” policies more than they have at any time since 1961, according to political scientist James Stimson of the University of North Carolina, who analyzes opinion polling to get a read on public policy mood. “Public opinion is contradictory: many more Americans describe themselves as conservative than as liberal; yet Americans prefer left-leaning policies to right-leaning ones, even when these are accompanied by the promise of higher taxes,” The Economist notes.

Stimson adds that the leftward shift is more than just a personal reaction to Trump “because its defining items are the issues of American politics of earlier generations, the New Deal and Great Society agenda.” But if Democrats have an advantage on policy, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias explains that, due to the dynamics of modern politics and a problematic Senate election map, their chances of actually enacting a more activist government agenda remain relatively low.

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Explainer of the Day: Lowering Drug Prices

Katie Thomas of The New York Times provides a roundup of six leading policy proposals aimed at bringing down drug prices, from letting the federal government directly negotiate prices in Medicare, a favorite idea of progressives, to requiring drug companies to disclose their list prices in television ads, a Trump administration plan that’s now the subject of a new lawsuit by drugmakers. For anyone looking to get a quick handle on the drug-pricing debates, Thomas’s piece is a useful guide.

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