Trump attacks Bloomberg on health care with misleading claim
January 13, 2020
President Donald Trump on Monday complained about Michael Bloomberg’s historic levels of ad spending in the 2020 Democratic primary, accusing the former New York mayor of misrepresenting the administration’s record on health care.
“Mini Mike Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on False Advertising,” Trump wrote in a morning tweet. “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.”
In another post, the president pledged that “if Republicans win in court and take back the House of Represenatives [sic], your healthcare, that I have now brought to the best place in many years, will become the best ever, by far. I will always protect your Pre-Existing Conditions, the Dems will not!”
Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist who is self-financing his White House bid, offered a terse reply online less than a half hour later, encouraging Trump to “@ us next time.”
The Democratic presidential candidate has leveraged his immense wealth in the party’s nominating contest to blanket television airwaves across the country with campaign ads, including some skewering efforts by Trump and congressional Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.
One such segment casts voters’ choice between Bloomberg and Trump as an opportunity to elect “a doer versus a destroyer,” charging that “Trump and the GOP have spent a decade attacking Obamacare while costs skyrocket.”
Although Bloomberg has come under intense criticism from competitors for injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the primary race, NBC News reported Friday that he will direct his vast campaign resources to help whomever the party chooses to challenge Trump in November should he not capture the Democratic nomination.
Trump's claim Monday that he "saved Pre-Existing Conditions" in Americans' health care is a false one — the latest attempt by the president to distort his years-long record of trying to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Backed by then-President Barack Obama and passed by Democrats in Congress in 2010, the landmark health care law included historic protections for millions of Americans with chronic illness and other health conditions.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump vowed to get rid of Obamacare on his first day in office; as president, Trump spent much of 2017 pushing Republicans in Congress to strike down the law, even when party leaders feared they didn't have a suitable replacement.
Under Trump, the Justice Department also dropped its legal defense of Obamacare — a nearly unprecedented move that drove the senior DOJ lawyer on the case to resign in protest — and supported a lawsuit by Republican-governed states to do away with the law. A federal judge in December 2018 agreed with the GOP plaintiffs and ruled that the entire law should be struck down; the Trump administration this month asked the Supreme Court to delay hearing appeals in the case until after the 2020 election.
Source: https://www.politico.com/
