Trump Says He’s Improving Health Care. It Couldn’t Be Further From the Truth.

Trump’s regularly tried to take away health benefits during his time in the White House.

Chris Kleponis/CNP/Zuma

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

In recent days, President Trump has attempted to paint himself as a champion of accessible health care. On Monday, he held a press conference announcing new investments in rural hospitals and expanded telehealth services for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. And on July 24, he signed a spate of executive orders promising to lower prescription drug costs and increase the importation of drugs. All the while, his administration has condemned Democrats as enemies of consumer choice.

“Democrats seek to deny Americans their health care freedom,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday, “but President Trump is working hard to save your health care by guaranteeing protections for people with preexisting conditions, eliminating the highly unpopular individual mandate of Obamacare, stopping surprise medical billing, increasing transparency, and lowering drug prices.”

But Trump’s health care record paints a different picture.

While expanded telehealth services could be a boon for people covered by Medicare and Medicaid, Trump has attempted to cap the federal government’s Medicaid spending by instituting “block grant” waivers that allow states to cut back on care. And Trump’s telehealth services do nothing to aid the roughly 4.7 million Americans who lack insurance because their states have not expanded Medicaid.

His executive orders for curbing drug prices turn out to be more PR than policy, offering minimal relief for a minority of Americans if and when they’re eventually implemented, NPR reports. The measures are also unlikely to reduce prescription drug prices by 50 percent, as Trump has repeatedly claimed. The order allowing the importation of lower-cost drugs from other countries, for example, could take months to implement; another designed to lower Medicare patients’ premiums requires that neither federal spending nor premiums nor patients’ out-of-pocket costs increase, meaning that the order will likely never go into effect.

Trump has also repeatedly and falsely claimed that he protects people with preexisting conditions. Meanwhile, he has tirelessly attempted to undermine Obamacare regulations that do just that. 

One thing is true: Trump helped eliminate the individual mandate—paving the way for a lawsuit that could jeopardize the entirety of the Affordable Care Act and leave the 23 million Americans currently covered by Obamacare uninsured. The Trump administration has supported Texas v. United States, the lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general that argues that the loss of the individual mandate invalidates the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court will likely hear oral arguments on the case in the fall. Trump has failed to release the alleged Obamacare replacement plan he has repeatedly promised.

Meanwhile, nearly 28 million non-elderly Americans were uninsured before the pandemic, and the United States remains dependent on an employment-based health care system that strips people of their coverage during an economic downturn caused by a global pandemic. A study by the nonpartisan Families USA estimates that 5.4 million people lost their employer-based coverage along with their jobs; when the Kaiser Family Foundation took into account the family members of the uninsured, the number who lost coverage jumped to 27 million.

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