Trump and Vance Should Focus on Harris’s Proposal to Abolish Private Health Insurance

E ven though Donald Trump remains an even bet to win, he would have a much better shot at victory if he more completely defined Kamala Harris’s extreme views. So far, he and J. D. Vance have tried to do that by focusing on issues that either tend to only motivate the base, such as immigration, or those with very limited appeal, such as fracking.

That remains mind-boggling given that Harris once proposed to eliminate all private health insurance. Focusing on that rather than her more peripheral progressive stances could quickly change the race’s trajectory.

We tend to forget that most Americans get their health insurance from their employers rather than through Obamacare, Medicare, or Medicaid. Roughly 165 million people, or about 60 percent of everyone under 65, were on an employer-sponsored plan in 2023, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Abolishing that would upend the entire U.S. health-care system and create chaos for the majority of the nation’s families. Harris nonetheless proposed doing just that when she ran for president in 2019.

This extreme idea was also pushed by extreme progressives such as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren among the first-tier 2020 Democratic candidates. By joining them, Harris showed exactly where she stood.

Replacing it with a government-run “Medicare for All” program, as Sanders proposed, would also be ruinously expensive. Estimates for the total net increase in federal spending ranged from $20.5 trillion to more than $46 trillion over a decade. Advocates say they can raise that enormous sum without raising taxes on ordinary Americans.

But that flies in the face of the examples from other countries. Countries that mostly or entirely rely on government funding for health care all have much higher income, payroll, or sales taxes than America does. It’s simply fanciful to believe that America could do something that no other developed nation in the world has figured out.

Indeed, the Medicare for All bill that Harris co-sponsored in 2019 tried to sidestep this inconvenient truth by including no financing system. Professors from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School estimated that this would nearly double the already unmanageable federal debt by 2060 — and this was before Covid and Biden’s budget busting dramatically increased that total.

Warren’s own, more fiscally honest Medicare for All plan would have raised a host of taxes on employers and individuals. That plan was so poorly received even by Democrats that it caused her to plummet in the primary polls, dooming her candidacy.

Taking away Americans’ right to see the doctors of their choice and raising taxes to do it are pure vote losers. Harris knows it now — which is why her campaign says she’s not for single-payer health insurance anymore — although she didn’t back then. Trump’s job should be to make sure every American knows this by Election Day.

Doing that means making it the primary, if not the sole, focus of his attacks over the next few weeks. Getting even a simple message through to ordinary voters requires simplicity and repetition, and that requires focus and time.

Any time that Trump and Vance spend on attacking other elements of her record detracts from their ability to make undecided voters aware of Harris’s radical agenda. There will always be the temptation to woo base voters with attacks on her immigration record or prior statements on crime. But wooing swing voters — those who may not like Trump but until recently also disliked Harris — is the key to the election.

Talking with them is essential to victory. Forgetting that in pursuit of energizing your own committed voters or chasing the media fascination of the day is simply a fool’s errand.

Moderate independents and weakly attached Democrats may not listen to conservative appeals. But they all need health care, and most of working age rely on private health insurance to get it.

Attacking on this ground also flips on its head Harris’s lame explanation for her flip-flops: Her positions have changed, but her values haven’t. What about her values caused her to think it was a good idea to take away 160 million Americans’ health insurance for an untried government scheme?

The television commercials or digital ads write themselves. It wouldn’t be hard to find union workers who can tout the generous plans their unions have fought for and won over the decades, plans that Harris once wanted to abolish. Women who needed quick access to the doctor of their choice would readily testify to the fear that having to change all of that for a vague government system would inspire.

Trump has squandered nearly two months in a series of indulgent and scattered attacks on Harris. None of them have landed, giving her the opening she needs to outrun her record and her past.

It’s well past time to focus on the issue that Harris can’t avoid or explain away and finally unveil her to be the radical she really is.