White House reporter nails Trump for breaking promise to support "insurance for everybody"

On the same day that Sen. Bernie Sanders and more than one dozen Democratic senators announced their plans to sponsor a  “Medicare for All” health insurance bill, a White House reporter asked why Donald Trump isn’t supporting it, given his previous support of “insurance for everybody.”

Trump and Republicans, of course, failed spectacularly to repeal and replace Obamacare this year, despite controlling the White House, the Senate, and the House. (They’re still plotting long-shot attempts.)

But at the outset, in January, Trump boasted to the Washington Post that under the soon-to-be revealed Republican plan, everybody would be covered — for less money.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump told the Post. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” People covered under the law “can expect to have great health care,” he added. “It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

CBS News’ Steven Portnoy on Wednesday connected the dots during the White House press briefing:

PORTNOY: In January, the president gave an interview with the Washington Post where he said he wanted to see a program that would allow for insurance for everybody, and that would leverage Medicare and Medicaid’s ability to control drug prices. Bernie Sanders seems to be offering a plan that would do that. Why does the president not support it?

The Democrats’ Medicare for All Act of 2017, unveiled Wednesday, would replace the current health care system with a public system and would, indeed, provide health care coverage for everybody. As New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker told Shareblue Media in an exclusive interview, “Health care goes to the core of our ideals as a nation,” adding that Democrats’ efforts to guarantee affordable health care access for everyone “is really in line with the emboldening of the idea of what it means to be an American.”

If Trump meant what he said in January, he would support the bill that does exactly that. But instead, he and his party remain focused on undoing our health care system and kicking millions off their insurance to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires.