Veteran health care reporter Jonathan Cohn found himself stunned this week by what he described as Sen. J.D. Vance's (R-OH) "brazen lying" about former President Donald Trump's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Writing in Huffington Post, Cohn argued that Vance's answers about Trump's past health care plan was an inversion of reality, as he claimed that Trump actually worked with Democrats to "save" the ACA from destruction.
"This is pure fantasy, literally the opposite of the truth," Cohn explained. "And it matters, because health care for tens of millions of Americans could depend on the election outcome. Voters have a right to know what Trump would do if he gets back to the White House, which means understanding what he actually did when he was there last."
Cohn then walked through the history of the GOP's failed efforts to repeal the health care law, including passing a plan in the House of Representatives that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have stripped health insurance from tens of millions of Americans.
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Even after the GOP health care plan failed in the Senate, Cohn continued, Trump kept trying to find ways to sabotage the law.
"He cut funding for outreach and enrollment counselors, and had the federal government join a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to declare the entire program unconstitutional," Cohn explained.
Added to this, Cohn argued that some of Vance's more recent comments on the Affordable Care Act show that Republicans have not given up on taking a wrecking ball to the law.
"Vance’s comments were especially telling because he said Republicans were interested in a 'deregulatory agenda' in order to avoid a 'one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools,'" he wrote. "That’s the way Republicans described their plans to loosen the Affordable Care Act’s rules back during the repeal debate ― an episode that Vance on Tuesday night did his best to make the public forget."
