Joe Biden has promised that people won’t lose their health coverage during the pandemic. In other words, “you can keep your doctor.”
Biden’s healthcare plan is to breathe life back into Obamacare, which previously kicked millions of people off of their healthcare plans in its first go-round. During the final presidential debate, Biden either lied or somehow didn’t know that this was the case, given that he claimed that no one lost their private insurance plans under Obamacare.
Given that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” was deemed PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” back in 2013, it seems odd Biden wouldn’t have discovered he was repeating a falsehood over the last seven years.
For being the party that claims healthcare as its signature issue, Democrats somehow always manage to be wrong when talking about it. Biden won the Democratic primary running on a healthcare plan that failed so spectacularly that Americans promptly voted out almost 70 congressional Democrats in 2010, and by 2016, left the party with fewer nationwide officeholders than any time since the 1920s.
The other big healthcare plan in the Democratic primary? Eliminating private health insurance entirely, courtesy of Bernie Sanders.
Democratic fear-mongering on the issue is also frequently detached from reality. Senate Democrats made Obamacare the base of their opposition to Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, reminding the public at every turn of the people whom Barrett’s confirmation would ostensibly harm. Barrett and the conservative majority were supposed to strike down Obamacare, according to them, but that was always unlikely. And oral arguments in the case earlier this week show the chances of that happening are even slimmer.
And then there is the coronavirus — the issue that likely helped boost Biden to the presidency. Biden doesn’t actually have a different plan than what President Trump did, and he has shown that mental health is not something he’s too worried about during the eight months and counting of lockdowns. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been floated for a spot in Biden’s Cabinet, had the worst coronavirus response of any governor in the country.
For all their eagerness to remake the American healthcare system (again), Democrats still have no idea what they are talking about. The Republican Party’s failure to rally around a proposal lets Democrats pretend that they own this issue, but all they really have is confidence in their consistently poor decision making.
