The ACA Got Some Airtime in Last Night's VP Debate

It wasn’t until the final half hour, but the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a topic in the vice presidential debate last night.

Despite former President Donald Trump’s ardent opposition to the ACA and his legal and legislative attempts to repeal it, his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, said he deserves credit for salvaging ACA.

“When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and healthcare costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care,” Vance said.

“I think Donald Trump has earned the right to put in place better healthcare policies. He has earned it because he did it the first time,” Vance said.

Gov. Tim Walz countered that Trump had run on repealing the ACA and had sought to undo the 2010 healthcare reform law with executive orders, by joining lawsuits that went to the Supreme Court and by backing legislation that failed in 2017 when Arizona Sen. John McCain cast a deciding no vote. During this campaign, Vance has floated ideas about deregulating the insurance market and segmenting the risk pool of the individual market, changes contrary to the community rating and prohibitions against pricing premiums according to people’s preexisting conditions that the ACA put in place.

“What Senator Vance just explained might be worse than a concept because what he explained is pre-Obamacare,” said Walz, referencing Trump’s remark in the Sept. 10 presidential debate that he had “concepts of a plan” for replacing the ACA.

After recounting Trump’s effort to repeal the ACA, Walz said “Fast forward, what this means to you is you lose your preexisting conditions. If you are sitting at home and have asthma, too bad. If you are a woman, probably not. Broke your foot during football, they might kick you out.”

CBS hosted the debate and the network's moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, asked questions about immigration, the economy, climate change, housing and the Middle East and steered cleared of healthcare till O’Donnell asked Vance about Trump’s “concepts of a plan” statement and Vance’s ideas about how chronically ill people would be insured.

In his response, Vance also spoke about price transparency polices that went into effect during the Trump administration and drug costs, which Vance claimed increased by just 1.5 percent during the Trump administration. Vance said Trump allowed state experimentation with health coverage of the chronically ill and that “you could make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along."

In his response, Walz referenced Medicare drug price negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and first 10 drugs for which prices have set. He emphasized the ACA and the common risk pool as protecting people against insurance companies setting high premiums.

“Kamela Harris will protect and enhance the ACA,” Walz said emphatically.