Donald Trump might be a little confused about Obamacare.
The GOP presidential contender on Tuesday launched another one of his attacks on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Trump focused on the Obama administration’s announcement Monday that the premiums for a key type of “benchmark” plan sold through HealthCare.gov would rise an average of 25% in 2017 (although that’s only part of the story). The trouble with Trump’s newest critique, however, is that it doesn’t really make much sense.
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Trump was holding an event at his Doral resort in Miami, where he said, “all of my employees are having tremendous problems with Obamacare.” But there’s a pretty glaring hole in that claim: plans sold on the Obamacare marketplaces are individual insurance plans (and some small group plans) that are meant for people who don’t receive health benefits through their employers or public health programs, like Medicare and Medicaid. The vast majority of Americans are insured through those latter methods, meaning the individual insurance market is a tiny slice of the overall insurance market. And Trump has previously claimed that his businesses provide employer coverage.
“I talk about health care a lot, and I know a lot about health care because I’ve had tens of thousands of people over the years working for me,” Trump said during a February event with Fox News‘ Sean Hannity. “And they don’t have to worry about Obamacare, my people. I treat them really good with health care. It’s a very important thing.”
In fact, Trump appeared on Fox News just an hour after decrying the effect Obamacare is having on his employees and (sort of) backtracked the comments. “Well I don’t use much Obamacare, I must be honest with you, because it is so bad for the people and they can’t afford it,” he said, adding that Trump National Doral Miami resorts “[doesn’t] even use Obamacare.”
Https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/790927473328422914
Trump’s full statement is a bit of a word salad. But his implication that the companies he runs like the Trump Organization, which is a massive employer, choose not to “use much Obamacare” doesn’t make any sense because large employers literally can’t buy plans off of Obamacare’s marketplaces right now.
Large employers can't use Obamacare exchanges until 2017, and then only if the states affirmatively create the option. Https://t.co/DtXOIwUZEG
— Adrianna McIntyre (@adrianna.bsky.social) (@onceuponA) October 25, 2016
It’s possible that Trump is referring to the fraction of his workers who are part time and don’t qualify for the employer benefits, as the Huffington Post‘s Jeffrey Young points out. But these workers, who probably earn little enough to qualify for the federal subsidies that counteract Obamacare plans’ premium hikes for the vast majority of people, seem unlikely to be among the group of people who are actually facing Obamacare sticker shock. Those tend to be Americans outside of the subsidy threshold of four times the federal poverty level, or those who buy individual plans outside of Obamacare’s marketplaces.
Coins2Day has reached out to the Trump campaign to ask for clarification on exactly which of Trump’s employees are using Obamacare, and why, and will update this post if it responds.