—By Kevin Drum
Jordan Weissmann points out that we now have a health care plan from Donald Trump. For starters, Trump has now made clear that he doesn't like the individual mandate after all—he just misspoke when he said that to Anderson Cooper a few days ago. What's left are the three mighty pillars of Trump's plan. First, he's going to take of the poor "through maybe concepts of Medicare." Second, the Trump campaign has previously indicated that it will "provide individual tax relief for health insurance." Third, after the scourge of Obamacare has finally been eradicated, the rest of us get this:
Amazingly, this is going to produce health care nirvana. "The plans will be much less expensive than Obamacare...you'll get your doctor, you get everything you want to get, it'll be unbelievable."
As Weissmann points out, this is just your bog-standard Republican health care plan with an extra dash of Trumpian crowing. It won't just work better than Obamacare, it will be unbelievable. In fact, "you get everything you want to get." How much more can you ask for?
To the extent that it makes any sense to discuss Trump's policy proposals, there are a couple of takeaways from this:
So that's that. As usual, Trump is just a standard-issue Republican once the dust has settled, and he has no more idea about how to fix health care than any of the rest of them. He's just more willing than most to brag about how great his plan will be.