Seth Meyers: How Trump Squandered Obamacare ‘Gift’
Any other Republican presidential candidate would be surging right now thanks to bad news about Obamacare. But not Donald Trump.
Donald Trump “predictably misplayed” his best political hand yet this week, according to Late Night host Seth Meyers. News that Affordable Care Act premiums are set to rise significantly in 2017 should be helping the Republican presidential candidate in these final days of the campaign.
If only he could figure out how to focus.
As Trump tries to “appeal to voters beyond his base,” Meyers said the bad Obamacare news should be the perfect tool to do so. “But the Trump campaign never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” he added, saying it shows just how “incompetent” Team Trump is that they have managed to squander this type of “political gift.”
“Obviously, Obamacare is a nuanced, complicated issue that requires sober analysis and discussion,” he said. But the best argument Trump could come up with is that the law is “killing” both small businesses and people. And when Trump wasn’t advertising his Florida resort during a campaign rally Tuesday, he was telling the crowd, “All of my employees are having a tremendous problem with Obamacare.”
“What are you talking about?” Meyers asked incredulously. “Obamacare is for people who don’t have health insurance, but your employees do get health insurance through you.” After the event Tuesday, the general manager of Trump’s resort told reporters that 99 percent of workers there are insured through the company.
In the end, Meyers described Obamacare as a “huge improvement” to the nation’s health-care system, but admittedly an “imperfect” law. “It has problems and we need serious ideas about how to make it better,” he said. “But the reason Republicans haven’t proposed any real plans to fix or replace Obamacare is because they don’t have any.”
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“And the guy they nominated for president doesn’t even seem to know what it is,” he continued. “Unfortunately for the Republican Party, it’s too late to repeal or replace him with something better.”
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