Second Presidential Dabate Transcript – ObamaCare Comments

 

Cooper: Ken Karpowitz has a question.

Karpowicz: The Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare, it is not affordable. Premiums have gone up, deductibles have gone up, copays has gone up, prescriptions have gone up and the coverage has gone down. What will you do to bring the cost down and make coverage better?

Cooper: That first one goes to secretary Clinton.

Clinton: He wants to start it, he can start it. No, go ahead, Donald.

Trump: No, I'm a gentlemen, Hillary. Go ahead.

Cooper: Secretary Clinton.

Clinton: I think Donald was about to say he’s gonna solve it by repealing it and getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. And I'm going to fix it because I agree with you. Premiums have gotten too high, copays, deductibles, prescription drug costs and I have laid out a series of actions that we can take to try to get those costs down. But here's what I don't want people to forget when we’re talking about reigning in the cost that has to be the highest priority of the next president. When the affordable care act passed, it wasn't just that 20 million people got insurance who didn't have it before. But that, in and of itself is a good thing. I meet these people all the time and they tell me what a difference having that insurance meant to them and their families. But everybody else, the 170 million of us who get health insurance through our employers got big benefits. Number one, insurance companies can't deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition. Number two, no lifetime limits which is a big deal if you have serious health problems. Number three, women can't be charged more than men for our health insurance, which is the way it used to be before the affordable care act. Number four, if you are under 26 and your parents have a policy, you can be on that policy until the age of 26, something that didn't happen before. So I want very much to save what works and is good about the affordable care act. But we’ve got to get costs down, we’ve got to provide some additional help to small businesses so that they can afford to provide health insurance. But if we repeal it as Donald has proposed and start over again, all of those benefits I mentioned are lost to everybody. Not just people who get health insurance on the exchange. And then we would have to start all over again. Right now we are at 90% health insurance coverage. That's the highest we have ever been, in our country. I want to get to 100% and get cost down and quality up.

Cooper: Secretary Clinton, you are out of time. Mr. Trump, You have two minutes.

Trump: It is such a great question and it’s maybe the question I get almost, more than anything else. Outside of defense. Obamacare is a disaster. You know it, we all know it. It's going up at numbers that nobody’s ever seen, worldwide. It’s-nobody has ever seen numbers like this for health care. It's only getting worse. In 17, it implodes by itself. Their method of fixing it is to go back and ask Congress for more money. More, more money and we have right now almost $20 trillion in debt. Obamacare will never work. It’s very bad, very bad health insurance, far too expensive, and not only expensive for the person that has it, unbelievably expensive for our country. It’s going to be one of the biggest line items very shortly. We have to repeal it and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive. And something that works, where your plan can actually be tailored. We have to get rid of the lines around the state, artificial lines, where we stop insurance companies from coming in and competing because they wanted President Obama and whoever was working on it, they want to leave those lines because that gives the insurance companies, essentially monopolies. We want competition. You will have the finest health care plan there is. She wants to go to a single player plan which would be a disaster. Somewhat similar to Canada. If you ever noticed, the Canadians, when they need a big operation, when something happens, they come into the United States in many cases. Because their system is so slow, it's catastrophic in certain ways. But she wants to go to single payer, which means the government basically rules everything. Hillary Clinton has been after this for years. Obamacare was the first step, Obamacare is a total disaster and not only are your rates going up by numbers that nobody’s ever believed, but your deductibles are going up. So that unless you get hit by a truck, you will never be able to use it. It's a disastrous plan and it has to be repealed and replaced.

Cooper: Secretary Clinton, let me follow-up with you, your husband called Obamacare “the craziest thing in the world”, saying small business owners are getting killed, premiums doubled, coverage is cut in half. Was he mistaken or was his mistake simply telling the truth?

Clinton: No. I mean, he clarified what he meant and it’s very clear. Look, we are in a situation in our country where if we were to start all over again, we might come up with a different system. But we have an employer-based system: that’s where the vast majority of people get their health care. And the affordable care act is meant to try to fill the gap between people who are too poor and couldn’t put together any resources to afford healthcare, namely people on medicaid. Obviously, Medicare which is a single payer system which takes care of our elderly, and does a great job doing it, by the way, and then all the people who were employed, but people who were working but didn't have the money to afford insurance and didn’t have anybody, an employer or anybody else to help them. That was the slot that the Obamacare approach was to take. And like I say, 20 million people now have health insurance. So, if we rip it up and throw it away, what Donald is not telling you is we turn it back to the insurance companies the way it used to be. And that means that insurance companies get to do pretty much whatever they want including saying look, I'm sorry, you have diabetes, you had cancer—

Cooper: --Your time is up—

Clinton: --Your child had asthma, you may not be able to have insurance because you can't afford it. So let's fix what's broken about it, but let’s not throw it away and give it back to the insurance companies. That's not going to work.

Cooper: Mr. Trump, let me just follow-up—

Trump: I want to -- just one thing. Hillary, everything is broken about it. Everything. Number two, Bernie Sanders said Hillary Clinton has very bad judgment. This is a perfect example of it. Trying to save Obamacare—

Cooper: --Mr. Trump, you’ve said you want to end Obamacare, you’ve also said you want to make coverage accessible for people with preexisting conditions. How do you force insurance companies to do that if you are not mandating that everyone has insurance?

Trump: You’re going to have plans.

Cooper: What does that mean?

Trump: Well, I’ll tell you what it means. You’re gonna have plans that are so good because we’re going to have so much competition in the insurance industry, once we break out the lines and allow the competition to come.

Cooper: Are you going to have a mandate that Americans have to have health insurance?

Trump: Excuse me. President Obama by keeping those lines, the boundary lines around each state and it was almost done until just towards the end of the passage of Obamacare. Which by the way was a fraud. You know that. Because Jonathan Grouper, the architect of Obamacare was said, he said it was a great lie, it was a big lie. President Obama said you keep your doctor, keep your plan. The whole thing was a fraud and it doesn't work. But when we get rid of those lines, you have competition and we will be able to keep preexisting, we’ll also be able to help people that can't get, don't have money because we are going to have people protected. And Republicans feel this way. Believe it or not, we’re going to block grant into the states we’re going to block grant into medicaid so we will be able to take care of people without the necessary funds to cake care of themselves.

Cooper: Thank you Mr. Trump.