The GOP's Obamacare Agenda Just Reemerged From Hiding

Here's how to interpret what Republicans have been saying about the Affordable Care Act and prescription drugs.

By Jonathan Cohn

Sep 18, 2024, 05:09 PM EDT

Updated Sep 18, 2024, 05:40 PM EDT

"SNIP............

This is the way things worked for many Americans before Obamacare, and it's the way things would work once again under Affordable Care Act replacements that conservatives have touted in the past.

Vance was careful to say he and Trump would "make sure everybody is covered," just as Trump has promised before. But the actual plans Republicans put forward during the 2017 repeal fight would have caused the number of Americans without insurance to rise by millions or even tens of millions, partly because they did not protect people with pre-existing conditions, partly because they simultaneously proposed to slash funding for Medicaid, the program the insures low-income Americans.

And that's not surprising. Conservatives don't merely want to reduce the cross-subsidy between healthy and sick. They also want to free up money for tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, something, it so happens, that Trump and the Republicans still want to do.

Of course, cutting health care programs to finance tax cuts isn't especially popular. Neither is undermining protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Republicans know this too well. The 2017 repeal effort was a political catastrophe for them and it's why nowadays they don't go out of their way to talk up the cause.

.............SNIP"

* thanks to JohnSJ for finding this article.