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Biden’s Health Care Promises: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

During the last presidential debate, former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that no Americans lost their health insurance under ObamaCare—a gaffe at best, and a downright lie at worst. It’s common knowledge, an objective fact, that millions of Americans lost their health plans once ObamaCare took effect and millions more have seen their premiums continue to skyrocket by up to triple digit percentages.

It certainly wasn’t hard to fact-check Biden’s claim during the debate, given that PolitiFact had already named President Obama’s repeated promise of “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” the “Lie of the Year” in 2013 after nearly five million people that year alone lost their private insurance. But what is puzzling is how the Democrat candidate for president could possibly have made that mistake. Joe Biden has touted his role in securing votes to pass ObamaCare into law and even presided over the final vote in the U.S. Senate. Biden was in the thick of it when Americans were receiving cancellation notices from their insurers, and he has continued to hear the calls for help as premiums have more than doubled just since 2013.

In fact, Biden’s gaffe about ObamaCare was made while discussing a new plan of his own: BidenCare. The name is certainly not original, and neither are his tactics for pitching it to the American voter. Promising not to get rid of private insurance but, instead, to add a “public option,” Biden, once again, made the infamous promise that “not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan.” Now, do politicians really think that voters’ memories are so short they’d believe that promise another time?

On the other hand, President Trump has already been working hard to expand patient choice and affordable access to care. His expansion of association health plans, which allow small businesses and entrepreneurs to band together to purchase affordable coverage, has given many families access to more affordable health plans. And his support of short-term plans is allowing more individuals to secure the kind of coverage they need at 50-80 percent of the cost. His recently unveiled “America First Health Care Plan” promises to use these same principles of more patient choice and control over health care to lower costs and increase access.

Many of us remember Joe Biden’s first gaffe in relation to ObamaCare, when he whispered before a live mic that the signing of the ObamaCare law was a “big [censored] deal.” Apparently, he has a hard time recalling for himself just how big a deal it was for millions of Americans to lose their health plans, their doctors, and the ability to afford insurance. They aren’t going to be quick to go down that road again. And when President Trump is already paving the way to better and more affordable care, why should they?

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