Vance to Newsmax: Administration Can Fix 'Very Broken' Healthcare System

The Trump administration is working to repair a "very broken" healthcare system that it inherited, with ideas to lower costs, expand access, and correct the problems caused by the Affordable Care Act, Vice President JD Vance told Newsmax.

"One of the things that the Obamacare system did is that it really broke the insurance regulations in this country," Vance said on "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" on Thursday.

"I mean, so many people, if you go back to that early implementation period of Obamacare, even people who had really good healthcare, they saw their healthcare bills skyrocket by 100, 200, even 300%," he added.

Former President Barack Obama famously promised that "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," but that hasn't happened, said Vance.

"A lot of people found that because of the Obamacare regulations, they couldn't keep the doctor that they had built a relationship with over the years," Vance said. "We want to fix that program, that process."

The administration's goal is to make care more affordable and restore flexibility for patients to choose plans that work for them, the vice president told Van Susteren.

"We also want to make sure that people can access affordable healthcare, because the great promise of Obamacare is that it would slow the increased costs of healthcare," he said.

The administration has reached out to Democrats and invited them to have a conversation about fixing the healthcare system, and improvements are possible even if a complete overhaul is not, Vance added.

"To pretend that we can fix such a complicated system, that logic is probably what led to the original Obamacare disaster, but I think that we can actually make the regulatory system of the insurance marketplaces work better," he said.

"We can use reinsurance to make it more affordable for people with pre-existing conditions to get access to healthcare."

He said, for example, that a 30-year-old man who is completely healthy would want a different insurance plan than a 65-year-old with pre-existing conditions.

"I think that if we allow people to get the kind of healthcare plan that suits them, it'll actually lower costs, it'll get more people into the insurance system, which lowers cost for everybody, but it also makes it so that people actually access good care," Vance said.

Vance also acknowledged the disparity between Americans who can afford premium care and those who cannot.

"American healthcare, if you can afford it at the high end, is really, really good healthcare," he said.

"But unfortunately, a lot of people at the low end, a lot of people who are in the Medicaid program, they're really suffering because the healthcare isn't very good, and that's one of the things that we would like to fix and we would like to address," he pointed out.

Bipartisan cooperation will be necessary to achieve any major policy changes.

"Unfortunately, as you know, any big health care policy requires Democrats in this town," Vance said.

But Democrats want to keep fighting against President Donald Trump, so when they get the majority, if they ever get the majority, they're going to try to impeach Trump," he told Van Susteren.

"That's their sole focus and their obsession," he added. "We would actually like to work with the Democrats on fixing healthcare for the American people, but unfortunately, we haven't found much willingness across the aisle to do that."

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