Washington.- Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, quickly made the Affordable Care Act the central issue of their campaign, raising the specter of another Republican effort to repeal it next year if former President Donald J. Trump wins the White House.
“If Donald Trump gets the chance, he will end the Affordable Care Act and take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny protection to people with pre-existing conditions,” Harris said at a Philadelphia rally last week, as she introduced Walz as her running mate.
“Do you remember what that was like?”
The next day, Walz at a rally in Detroit said Trump would continue to try to undermine the 2010 health care law because “he doesn’t care about that.”
Trump threatened to make another attempt to repeal it in November, though he changed his mind this spring, saying without giving specifics that he would “improve” the health care law.
His running mate, JD Vance, echoed Trump’s stance when he recently told the news site NOTUS that previous efforts to repeal the law were “primarily focused on the idea of fixing what was wrong but not taking away people’s health care.”
This year’s official Republican Party platform, unveiled at the party convention in Milwaukee last month, made no mention of the Affordable Care Act and few references to other health care reforms.
The absence of a Republican plan underscores how dramatically Obamacare policy has changed since the law was enacted, and since the Biden administration nearly doubled enrollment in the marketplace through the use of subsidies that lowered the costs of insurance plans.
Trump and Republican lawmakers have responded with what health policy experts call an ambiguous strategy.
After years of trying to overturn the law, they abandoned that idea but have been widely critical of the costs and quality of Obamacare plans.
If Trump wins a second term, his administration would reduce advertising and spending on workers that helps people sign up for Obamacare, shortening the enrollment period and expanding the availability of cheap, short-term plans that skirt regulations under the Affordable Care Act.
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