Mini Mike Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on False Advertising. I was the person who saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare, you have it now, while at the same time winning the fight to rid you of the expensive, unfair and very unpopular Individual Mandate.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2020

Fergawdsakes.

He is actually telling the cult that he’s responsible for their protection for pre-existing conditions in Obamacare when, in fact, he is, as we speak, trying to overturn the ACA in its entirety, which is the law that provides that protection.

I’m sure you all remember what it was like before the ACA. Insurance companies could deny insurance to anyone with a medical condition. If they did decide to insure you, they could charge outlandish premiums making it impossible to buy insurance in any case. That is what will happen if the law is repealed and the Republicans pass some garbage law that tells insurance companies they have to cover pre-existing conditions. They’ll say fine. And then they’ll charge people who have them 485,000 a year and say they’ve complied.

Mother Jones explains:

A 2019 Kaiser Health News fact check found Trump’s repeated claims to protect patients with preexisting conditions false.

Instead, the Obamacare repeal bills Trump has supported, including 2017’s “skinny repeal” bill, would have gutted coverage for preexisting conditions to varying degrees. Trump has also extended the duration of short-term “junk insurance” plans that do not have to comply with the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions.

And while Trump did have a hand in getting rid of the individual mandate, the end result was not to improve health care. In 2017, Congress used a tax cut law to set the financial penalty for going uninsured to $0. Because the Supreme Court upheld the ACA in 2012 on the grounds that the individual mandate counted as a tax, the $0 penalty is now at the center of a Trump-backed lawsuit that aims to strike down Obamacare in its entirety.

I wish I understood why Republicans want people to die from lack of affordable health care but after all this time I just have to accept that they do and judge them accordingly. They know very well what they re doing and they don’t care.

Trump is too ignorant to know what he’s talking about. He says whatever he thinks will make his cult happy and I think he probably even convinces himself that it’s true.

Published with permission of Digby's Hullabaloo