Trump’s Abdication on Health Care

If you want to make God laugh,” Woody Allen once famously said, paraphrasing a Yiddish proverb, “tell him about your plans.”

That’s not an issue for President Donald Trump, at least not on health care.

He’s been promising a health care plan since he started running for president, often with superlative adjectives attached, and yet never produced one. His lack of a proposal was a stumbling block in Tuesday’s debate and plays into a broader, long-standing Republican vulnerability on health care.

Polling tends to show that, far and away, the three most important issues to voters are the economy, COVID-19, and health care. Trump leads on the economy and trails on the other two. To the extent that issues play a role in a Trump defeat in November, health care will have had some hand in it. He has done little to inoculate himself and, in fact, has further exposed himself.

His administration backs a lawsuit that seeks to strike down Obamacare, including its popular protections for people with preexisting conditions. This allows Democrats to say — and they say it all the time — that he wants to destroy Obamacare.

Never mind that the suit is very unlikely to succeed. The background is that in a previous case, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate in Obamacare as a tax. Then, Congress zeroed out the tax. The current case argues that the individual mandate therefore can no longer be upheld as a tax and further — this is the real stretch — that if this now toothless mandate is thrown out, the rest of the law has to go as well. There’s no reason to believe that the conservative justices would undertake this legal adventure.