Tammy Baldwin slams Donald Trump’s promise to take away health care from millions

Out Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) slammed Donald Trump for promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) if he gets reelected and Republicans take the Senate next year.

Journalist Ben Meiselas played a clip from a recent Trump rally where the likely 2024 GOP presidential nominee said that he would repeal the 2010 healthcare law and mocked the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for voting against his attempt to repeal it when he was president. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 40 million people in the U.S. have insurance in 2023 because of the ACA, and Meiselas asked Baldwin what she thinks of Trump’s “cavalier” promise to take their health care away.

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“You probably would have loved to be on the elevator to see the exchange,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin said.

“There’s no better way to get votes than to rip people’s health care away!” Baldwin said sarcastically. “I mean, my goodness, it’s hard to fathom that they’re returning to this, especially when so many people now can get insurance that couldn’t before.”

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She brought up different groups of people who could lose their insurance if the ACA were repealed, including many of the estimated 135 million people with preexisting conditions, according to a 2019 Center for American Progress study she cited.

Baldwin talked about how many young adults would lose insurance coverage immediately if the ACA were to be repealed.

“Millions would lose insurance right away,” she said. “If we got rid of the provision that allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance. People, sort of between the ages of 18 and 25, that’s the age where before the Affordable Care Act, most didn’t have insurance.”

During the interview, Baldwin explained why this issue is so personal to her. She was raised by her grandparents and was diagnosed with spinal meningitis when she was a child. Since she wasn’t legally her grandparents’ child, they couldn’t get her coverage under their health insurance.

“I was in the hospital for three months,” she explained. “They certainly did not burden me with that realization [that they couldn’t get coverage] when I was struggling to survive.”

She said that her grandparents couldn’t even get her an individual healthcare plan because she now had a preexisting condition.

“Back then, the health insurance industry, they could discriminate! They could simply say ‘no’ to somebody who had a preexisting condition,” she explained. “So I went uninsured throughout my life until I was an adult, until I had insurance offered through my employment. And I felt that was wrong.”