Trump Announces His Obamacare Replacement Plan Is Based on Private Insurance Companies (So Is Obamacare)

President-Elect Reveals He Still Has No Idea What Obamacare Is

Donald Trump for the past 18 months has been on a huge learning curve. He just hasn’t gotten very far. 

Remember for years Trump used President Barack Obama as the target of his hate, lying about where he was born, taunting him, even trying to get Obama to agree to hand over his birth certificate in exchange for a $5 million dollar donation?

“If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications, and if he gives his passport applications and records, I will give, to a charity of his choice — inner city children in Chicago, American Cancer Society, AIDS research, anything he wants — a check, immediately, for $5 million,” Trump said in 2012. “The check will be given within one hour after he released all of the records, so stated.”

And remember when Donald Trump first met President Obama? In the Oval Office, after he won the election? And Trump left the meeting saying how wonderful Barack Obama is? And how much he learned about Obamacare, and how great it is and how he’d try to keep it?

Trump sure has learned a lot since he threw his hat in the ring by attacking people from Mexico (though he still hasn’t learned much about immigrations, actually.)

Well, here’s something Donald Trump hasn’t learned: What Obamacare actually is.

The Affordable Care Act is not just the health exchanges, where people can go online and compare health insurance policies and purchase them. But that’s a major component of it.

The problem is that Donald Trump thinks the federal government is providing those policies. And it’s not.

“President-elect Donald Trump says the program he plans to institute as a replacement for the Affordable Care Act will ‘get private insurance companies to take care of a lot of the people that can afford it,'” Politico reports.

What does he think Obamacare is? Private Insurance companies are Obamacare.

“We’re going to have a plan that’s going to be great for people. And it’s going to be much less expensive. And you will be able to actually have something to say about who your doctor is and your plan,” Trump told Fox News in an interview (above) that aired Wednesday. “We have to cover people that can’t afford it. And that’s what I’m talking about. And we’ll probably have block grants of Medicaid back into the states. … Nobody is going to be dying on the streets with a President Trump.”

“We’re going to get private insurance companies to take care of a lot of the people that can afford it,” Trump went on to say, as if somehow that’s not what happening now. Private insurance companies, again, are Obamacare, and vice versa. “That’s going to take a tremendous burden off and they’re going to be able to have plans that are great plans. So it’s very important.”

As NBC News points out, “private health insurance already forms the basis of the Obamacare exchanges that Republicans have vowed to raze. And a conversation with just about any American covered by private health insurance makes it’s immediately clear that the private health insurance industry is a source of many, if not most, of the frustrations of managing health insurance.”

Yes, after all this time. Yes, after Republicans in the House and Senate are well on their way to repealing Obamacare. Yes, with less than one day to go before he is sworn in to office. Donald Trump still does not know what Obamacare is.