Trump has no idea how much health insurance costs

Photo by Michael Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images

“I know a lot about health care,” President Donald Trump declared in a Wednesday interview with the New York Times.

But Trump’s answers to other questions betrayed how little he knows about health policy. As Ezra Klein wrote yesterday, this has become a major stumbling block in Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Trump can’t strike a deal on health care when he doesn’t understand health policy.

Trump cited numbers that don’t seem to come from any recent version of the health care debate.

“From the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan,” Trump told the Times.

Of course, anyone who has purchased health coverage, let alone studied the health insurance market, knows that a $12 annual premium is nonexistent — and that premiums are typically paid in months rather than years. The numbers Trump cites seem to come from the universe of life insurance rather than that of health insurance. Life insurance premiums are significantly lower and a completely different benefit program than health coverage.

This isn’t the first time Trump has so dramatically underestimated the costs of health insurance. In a May interview with the Economist, he estimated that health coverage ought to cost $15 per month.

“Insurance is, you’re 20 years old, you just graduated from college, and you start paying $15 a month for the rest of your life and you really need it, you’re still paying the same amount and that’s really insurance,” Trump told the magazine.

The fact that Trump settles on $12 or $15 as the appropriate amount to pay for health insurance betrays a lack of familiarity with the actual cost of coverage. You do not have to be a health policy expert to get this — just someone who has ever purchased a health plan.

Most voters I talk to don’t have this expectation. I often ask Obamacare enrollees what they think would be a fair price for health insurance. Usually I hear something between $50 and $100 seems reasonable. The mental math going on here is that you have to pay something in order to get a plan that will cover doctor visits and hospital trips and prescription drugs. They know, from their experience, that health coverage is not as cheap as $15, and have more realistic assumptions than the one Trump makes in this answer.

White House says diabetics don’t deserve health insurance

Donald Trump's budget chief again revealed the Republicans' callous approach to health care, arguing that some diabetics simply do not deserve health insurance, because of how they may have developed the illness.

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Donald Trump’s budget director specifically called out people suffering from diabetes as a group of Americans who do not deserve the protection of health insurance.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), weighed in on the issue at the Light Forum at Stanford University. He was asked if families should be denied medical care because they can’t afford it, a standard Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) had termed “the Jimmy Kimmel test,” after the late night comedian’s recent emotional call for improved health care.

Mulvaney said he believed in helping to provide “a safety net so that if you get cancer you don’t end up broke,” but separated those situations from others he termed “ordinary healthcare,” what he described as the heart of the debate.

He continued, “That doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes. Is that the same thing as Jimmy Kimmel’s kid? I don’t think that it is.”

As of 2014, 29.1 million Americans suffer from diabetes, which is about 9.3 percent of the population.

Under Mulvaney’s standard, an examination of their eating habits and how their disease was triggered would have to be undertaken before it could be determined whether they are deserving of health insurance or not. In the meantime, people will suffer and possibly die from their illness.

The Affordable Care Act mandates coverage for people with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, without casting about for blame or applying some kind of litmus test to discern if they are deserving of treatment.

The system championed by Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and the Republican Party would upend that safety net and contribute to ill health and death, in order to justify their sanctimonious attitude.