The first and only debate between the vice presidential nominees, Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, threw the 2010 health care law back into the spotlight.
Vance, R-Ohio, who was elected to the Senate in 2022, tried to distance his running mate, former President Donald Trump, from partisan efforts to repeal or weaken the law, also known as the Affordable Care Act. His remarks, however, ignore the fact that 2017 was dominated by Republican efforts to overhaul former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law — an effort led by Trump himself. CQ Roll Call fact-checked three of Vance’s boldest claims on the 2010 law.
Claim: Executive action on ACA and dividing risk pools On the debate stage, Vance told Americans that Trump implemented regulations to allow states to experiment with how they cover risk pools, allowing them to divide plans between the sick and the healthy. This never happened under the Trump administration. “And we talked about, you know, the reinsurance regulations is what I was talking about.
Look, Donald Trump has said that if we allow states to experiment a little bit on how to cover both the chronically ill, but the non chronically ill. It’s not just a plan. He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States.
And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along.” Fact check: Vance was likely referring to Secti.