As reported by The Inquisitr yesterday, President Donald Trump wrote an op-ed for USA Today that was published on Wednesday in which Trump attacked Democrats proposing a single-payer health care system as socialists looking to destroy Medicare. On Thursday, USA Today issued a fact-checked debunking of many of the claims that Trump made in his piece.
The first response that USA Today’s editorial staff made to Trump’s piece included embedded hyperlinks to alternate sites that allowed readers to fact-check the article, but later published a full debunking of Trump’s claims by FactCheck.org.
The evaluation by Fact Check suggested five serious deceptions within the Trump piece.
The first issue was with Trump’s claim that a single-payer healthcare system would cost taxpayers “an astonishing $32.6 trillion during it’s first ten years”. Trump’s analysis was misleading due to the fact that it failed to consider how individual health-care costs would be offset by that figure. John Holahan, author of the Urban Institute analysis that President Trump drew his claim from, said “Yes, there would be an increase in federal government spending, and an increase in taxes to pay for that, but private spending on health care would be nearly eliminated.”
President Trump’s claim that the single-payer system would “take away benefits” from senior citizens is categorically false, according to Fact Check. In fact, the converse is true as it specifically calls for adding more benefits, including hearing aids, vision and dental coverage, while also eliminating deductibles.
The third contested claim from Trump is that “we have seen Democrats across the country uniting around” the Medicare For All Act. This statement is reductionist and greatly overstates the Democratic consensus for the bill. In fact, there are competing bills in play that would expand insurance coverage by increasing access to Medicare or Medicaid.
In his piece, the President also boasted that he has kept his campaign promise to “protect patients with pre-existing conditions.” However, Trump wrote this even as his administration is supporting a lawsuit that would lead to the elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s protections for pre-existing conditions.
Finally, President Trump claimed that he has kept his promise to “create new health insurance options” to lower premiums, “and we are now seeing health insurance premiums coming down.” While it is true that premiums appear to be stabilizing, this is in large part because insurers spiked their premiums last year in anticipation of the current changes.
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