Some thoughts on JD Vance, Obamacare, and a curious claim about Trump
The VP nominee wants to give Trump credit for helping his family get covered.
Since joining the presidential ticket, Sen. JD Vance has been trying to reframe Donald Trump’ health care story:
That Trump shouldn’t be defined by his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but all the ways that Trump sustained access to health care during his four years in the White House.
It’s unclear if that argument is resonating with swing voters — Trump has been polling nearly 10 points behind Kamala Harris on who voters trust to handle health care costs, per KFF pollsters.
But the VP nominee’s stumping on health care, including some proposals for what Trump could do next year, has helped inject health care policy back into the election debate.
It’s also seemingly fired up the Democrats’ base: Barack Obama riffed on Vance’s claims at a Pennsylvania rally last week.
An overlooked claim
One point in Vance’s health care argument had mostly1 been missed: that Trump should receive credit because Vance’s own family got health coverage while he was president.
Here’s his appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” from about a month ago:
NBC’s KRISTEN WELKER: Why should voters believe that a plan is forthcoming when you've heard Donald Trump say so many times in the past that he's going to be putting forward a plan, that still hasn't happened yet?
SEN. JD VANCE: Well, because Donald Trump actually governed, Kristen, for four years, and he actually protected those 20 million Americans from losing their health coverage. He actually protected a lot more additional Americans from losing their health coverage. And he actually ensured that a lot of people were able to access coverage for the first time. I mean, members of my own family, for example, got health care for the first time under Donald Trump's administration. So we actually have a real record to run on.
Vance elaborated at this month’s VP debate, saying that members of his family specifically transitioned from Medicaid to private health insurance during the Trump administration.
So which Vance family members got covered? And how?
In The Washington Post, we have some of the answer, confirmed by the campaign: Vance was talking about his mother, who battled substance addiction and was covered by Medicaid before getting sober, becoming financially stable, making too much money to stay on Medicaid, and purchasing a plan through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchange in Ohio.
(Vance also had a cousin in Florida who purchased private health insurance for the first time under Trump, the campaign said.)
It’s true that the Trump administration largely executed the Affordable Care Act’s various programs and provisions, even as the president pushed to strike down the law. The administration also did introduce alternatives to the Affordable Care Act health plans that conservatives credit for providing lower-cost, if less expansive options for coverage. To put it another way, their health-care agenda did go well beyond Trump’s pledge to “repeal Obamacare,” as officials pursued initiatives around price-transparency, drug costs, and other measures.2
But it’s also true that Trump and Republicans got very very close — a single Senate vote away — from striking down the Affordable Care Act, reversing its protections, and potentially jeopardizing health care coverage for millions of Americans.
That’s a point Vance himself made in 2017, repeatedly, as he fretted about the effects on the many low-income people covered by Medicaid.
And some of the Americans most at risk from a repeal of the Affordable Care Act? People who were fighting substance addiction and might have had real trouble finding health coverage without that law’s coverage expansion and protections.
Writing at The Washington Post, my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker and I went deeper on Vance’s new claims and revisited his old ones. Read that story here:
JD Vance’s mom got health coverage under Trump — by using Obamacare.
Though not missed by Andrew Sprung at xpostfactoid, who flagged and analyzed Vance’s claim.