Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — contradicting history — that his running mate, former President Donald Trump, had saved “Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump tried to kill.
During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump’s own recent revisionism. But the claim also reminded voters that Democrats ultimately won the years-long political battle over expanding access to health insurance: The Republican ticket no longer wants to repeal the 2010 law.
Trump “actually implemented some of these rules when he was president of the United States,” Vance said Tuesday evening. “And I think you can make a very good argument that it saved Obamacare, which it was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump.
“When Obamacare collapsed under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance added. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan manner to ensure Americans had access to affordable care.”
But when Trump was president, repeal was a key part of his agenda. In a dramatic Senate vote in 2017, Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected his plan to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., cast the deciding vote by turning his thumb down in a theatrical gesture. McCain, a critic of Obamacare, nevertheless concluded that the “skinny repeal measure” would leave people worse off than if Obamacare were left in place.
Walz noticed that episode Tuesday night.
Trump “would have withdrawn [Obamacare] if it were not for the courage of John McCain,” Walz said.
It was Trump who first began trying to play his own role in pushing for a repeal. In an ABC News debate this month, Trump said he was “saving” Obamacare.
“Obamacare was crappy health care. Always has been. It’s not so good today,” he said last month. “I had to make a choice when I was president: Do I keep it and make it as good as it can be? Will never be great. Or do I let it rot? And I felt I had an obligation, even though it would have been politically right to just let it rot and disappear.”
But after six years of calls from the Republican Party to repeal the law, Trump promised during his 2016 campaign that he would repeal the law “very, very quickly.” When he won the White House, he tried and failed.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
