Biden targets Trump for ACA repeal pledge
Ex-president expressed desire to ‘terminate’ law
President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is targeting former President Donald Trump’s record on health care: specifically past efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
The Biden-Harris health care focus is part of a $14 million campaign called “Terminate” that launched Wednesday in battleground states. The campaign slams Trump’s prior efforts to “gut and terminate” the Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010 and has expanded health insurance coverage and preventive care across the U.S.
Though Trump has previously denounced the ACA and its health plans, often called Obamacare, the Trump campaign on Wednesday said that the Republican presidential candidate is not trying to eliminate the law.
Rather, he’s running “to make less expensive health care options available for people without eliminating it,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, wrote in an email.
As recently as November, Trump posted “Obamacare sucks” on social media and expressed a desire to replace it.
Criticism of DACA coverage plan
The Trump campaign also criticized Biden for his recent decision to expand eligibility for Obamacare health plans to DACA recipients.
Biden is “destroying Obamacare,” Leavitt wrote.
DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and the group is often referred to as Dreamers. Dreamers comprise about 530,000 people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents or relatives illegally as children and are protected from deportation by an Obama-era program.
Obamacare plans are private health insurance sold on federal or state exchanges with federal subsidies available to people who qualify.
Leavitt wrote that the decision to expand Obamacare plans for DACA recipients means “the border invasion Biden launched will become even larger as the world floods over in search of free government benefits.”
The Trump administration plans to “seal the border, deport the illegals, and cut off all government benefits,” Leavitt wrote.
Since the Affordable Care Act passed, the rate of uninsured Americans has dropped from 16% or 48.6 million Americans in 2010 to about 7.9% or 25.9 million people in 2022, U.S. Census data says.
In Arizona, about 1.2 million people lacked health insurance in 2010, or 17% of the population, compared with 2022 estimates of about 10.3%, or 743,700 people without health insurance, according to KFF, a health policy research organization.
Some of the key accomplishments of the ACA were to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, keeping young people on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26 and creating a list of “essential health benefits” that must be covered by ACA-approved plans, including contraceptives and mental health care.
A “Terminate” campaign ad will air on TV and digital platforms for the month of May as part of the Biden-Harris push to “ramp up investments to bolster its existing, historic efforts to reach the voters that will decide this election,” a campaign statement says.
“Obamacare is a disaster. We want to terminate it,” Trump says in a clip that’s included in the ad.
Republic reporter Rafael Carranza contributed to this story.