Donald Trump Has a 40-Word Plan to Make Health Care Great Again

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Jordan Weissmann points out that we now have a health care plan from Donald Trump. For starters, Trump has now made clear that he doesn’t like the individual mandate after all—he just misspoke when he said that to Anderson Cooper a few days ago. What’s left are the three mighty pillars of Trump’s plan. First, he’s going to take care of the poor “through maybe concepts of Medicare.” Second, the Trump campaign has previously indicated that it will “provide individual tax relief for health insurance.” Third, after the scourge of Obamacare has finally been eradicated, the rest of us get this:

Amazingly, this is going to produce health care nirvana. “The plans will be much less expensive than Obamacare…you’ll get your doctor, you get everything you want to get, it’ll be unbelievable.”

As Weissmann points out, this is just your bog-standard Republican health care plan with an extra dash of Trumpian crowing. It won’t just work better than Obamacare, it will be unbelievable. In fact, “you get everything you want to get.” How much more can you ask for?

To the extent that it makes any sense to discuss Trump’s policy proposals, there are a couple of takeaways from this:

  • Far from being a populist, Trump is just an ordinary Republican. He sometimes tosses out heterodox ideas in one of his rambling speeches, but they never last. With only a few exceptions, his advisers eventually talk him into adopting Republican orthodoxy in his usual amped-up, dumbed-down way. And the Republican orthodoxy on health care is almost literally a straitjacket: High-risk pools, HSAs, competition across state lines, tort reform, and tax credits for individual insurance. If we assume that “concepts of Medicare” includes high-risk pools, Trump has four of these—and he’s undoubtedly in favor of tort reform too.
  • Trump, like most Republicans, is apparently under the impression that the big problem with American health care is the evil, monopolistic insurance companies. “The insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians,” he said in one of the first debates. Liberals sometimes make this mistake as well, and it’s ridiculous. If I had my druthers, I’d get rid of the insurance companies too, but it wouldn’t do much to reduce the cost of health care. The fundamental cause of high health care costs in America is the high cost of health care itself. Compared to other countries, we pay our doctors more; we pay our nurses more; we pay more for drugs; we pay more for devices; and we pay more for hospitalization. If you don’t tackle that, you’ll never even make a dent.

So that’s that. As usual, Trump is just a standard-issue Republican once the dust has settled, and he has no more idea about how to fix health care than any of the rest of them. He’s just more willing than most to brag about how great his plan will be.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate