The GOP plan is about health care instead of just coverage, says budget director Mick Mulvaney


Reiterating a point he made last week on Fox and CBS, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney argued Sunday in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos that the focus of Republicans' health-care reform is care rather than coverage.
"The original idea of ObamaCare was supposed to be that people could afford to go to the doctor," Mulvaney said. "They can't. They can afford to have coverage. They can afford to have a little plastic piece of paper that says they have an insurance policy, but they can't afford to go to the doctor."
Stephanopoulos pushed back, highlighting campaign-trail comments from President Trump promising "insurance for everybody," a pitch the ABC host said flies in the face of Mulvaney's care vs. coverage distinction.
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"I was on ObamaCare when I was in the House," Mulvaney replied. "My family's deductibles were over $15,000 a year. Other folks who don't make as much money as I did were on the exact same plan. Do you think they could afford to go to the doctor? That's what we're trying to fix. Not coverage for people, not coverage they can afford, but care they can afford." Watch Mulvaney make his case below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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