We had to try to burn down your healthcare in order to save it

It is not exactly news that the Republican Party’s position on healthcare — many fewer people should have it, and the quality of insurance for those who do have it should be worse — is staggeringly unpopular in the US and not shared by any other major party in the Western World. Which explains why their alternatives to Democratic comprehensive reform initiatives are always concepts of plans that spontaneously combust if there was ever a chance to enact them.

For Donald Trump and his lickspittles, there is the inconvenient fact that the centerpiece of Trump’s domestic agenda was to take health insurance away from tens of millions of people to pay for an upper-class tax cut, an effort that failed only because a dying Senator decided to vote against it although Trump was literally begging him on the phone to vote yes right before the vote. JD Vance has climbed the not-very-greasy Federalist Society career pole, and that is pretty much the best training in shameless, dead-eyed lying that you can receive:

In the presidential debate three weeks ago, GOP nominee Donald Trump made a breathtaking claim about his record on health care: He said that he had tried to “save” the Affordable Care Act when he was president.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, JD Vance repeated that claim and then took it one step further: that Trump had not only tried to save the health care law, but did so with help from Democrats.

“Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance said. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

This is pure fantasy, literally the opposite of the truth.

And it matters, because health care for tens of millions of Americans could depend on the election outcome. Voters have a right to know what Trump would do if he gets back to the White House, which means understanding what he actually did when he was there last.

The real story goes like this:

Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. And it was not some incidental, throwaway line.

He mentioned it constantly, frequently at the beginning of his rallies. His campaign website said: “On day one of the Trump Administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare.”

And Trump followed through on that promise. He spent most of his first year in office working with Republican leaders to pass repeal legislation.

But while Trump had repeatedly said he’d offer “great health care for much less money” and vowed that “we’re going to have insurance for everybody,” GOP legislation he backed would have dramatically reduced government spending on health care and weakened protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Many millions were bound to lose coverage, as multiple independent projections showed.

You can see why “no fact-checking” was Trump and Vance’s one non-negotiable ask. Vance was definitely following the Mitt Romney model from the first 2012 debate last night — i.e. create a false impression of moderation by lyng your ass off by 90 minutes, with this being the most brazen example. Romney, however, did not undermine the pretense by endorsing Donald Trump sending a violent mob to overturn the election.

In fairness, maybe Vance just reads Jacobin.