Vance’s confusing health insurance remarks give Democrats a new attack line

GOP vice presidential-hopeful JD Vance made some confusing comments over the weekend about deregulating health insurance. Democrats are using that to their advantage by characterizing the Trump-Vance ticket as being against a popular insurance protection.

During the presidential debate with Vice President Harris, former President Trump said he has “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act, but offered no details. During a Sept. 15 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker asked Vance for some of those details. 

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The Ohio senator obliged. In describing Trump’s health care plan, he started off by saying “you want to make sure that pre-existing coverage — conditions — are covered.” Then he said people should be sorted into risk pools, instead of a “one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools.”

It’s not clear what kind of health insurance system Vance described, and Trump’s platform doesn’t mention the Affordable Care Act at all. So Democrats are offering an explanation.

“Here’s what it means,” said Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) during a hearing on Tuesday designed to tout the drug pricing provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

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“The concepts proposed by JD Vance are a prescription for discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions,” he said.

During the Sunday NBC interview Vance said “I’ve learned my lesson” about speaking for Trump. But he may have gotten ahead of Trump again, giving Democrats a fresh line of attack.

The first lesson came before the presidential debate, when Vance said Trump would veto a national abortion ban if it landed on his desk. Days later, Trump himself avoided the question on the presidential debate stage and distanced himself from his running mate, saying he “didn’t discuss it with JD.”

The Harris campaign seized on Trump’s noncommittal answer and Vance’s seeming misstep to argue, once again, that the former president cannot be trusted on abortion because his stance keeps shifting. Vance attempted cleanup this weekend, insisting Trump would not sign a national ban — because it’d never make it to the Oval Office. 

It’s a “ridiculous hypothetical,” Vance said on NBC.