Former President Donald Trump is promising to replace the Affordable Care Act with his own makeover of the health care system if he returns to the Oval Office.
“Obamacare is too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will come up with a much better, and less expensive, alternative! People will be happy, not sad!”
Mr. Trump has bashed former President Barack Obama’s health care law for years. Last month, he said that getting a health care system “much better” than Obamacare will be a “priority of the Trump Administration.”
“It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH,” he wrote on Truth Social last month. “America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!”
“I don’t want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!,” he said.
He made a similar promise in 2016 and endorsed a bill to undo part of the bill in 2017, but it didn’t make it through Congress.
Republicans have long championed replacing Obamacare. Sen. Bill Cassidy, Louisiana Republican, told the Hill in November that a replacement is “unlikely to happen [in this] narrowly divided Congress.”
“I’m for lowering costs and making our health care system more efficient, but I’m not sure,” Senate Republican Whip John Thune of South Dakota said to the outlet in response to the former president’s promise. “I’d want to know what the proposal is.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, told NBC News last month that he would be open to revisiting the issue.
“I would love to see us revisit it,” Mr. Cruz said. “Lowering premiums is critically important to Texans.”
Biden-Harris campaign Seth Schuster called Mr. Trump‘s post an “erratic Christmas Day rant.”
“If Donald Trump has his way, 40 million Americans would have their health care coverage endangered, protections for 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions would be at risk, and more than 2 million young people would be kicked off their parents’ plans,” Mr. Schuster said in a statement Tuesday.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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