Before the prime-time GOP showcase started, President Donald Trump took to the rostrum Monday afternoon and delivered an roughly one-hour campaign-style speech to delegates after he was formally renominated by the Republican Party as its candidate for president.
His feedback have been wide-ranging, and our companions at PolitiFact discovered many to be both mistaken, deceptive, untimely or in want of clarification. Here is the whole rundown from that speech and a wrap-up story detailing the remainder of the night. (PolitiFact additionally fact-checked former Vice President Joe Biden’s acceptance speech throughout the Democratic National Convention.)
Monday’s night broadcast was filled with platitudes. Amy Ford, a West Virginia nurse, applauded Trump’s steps throughout the pandemic to broaden telemedicine, saying these insurance policies are “essential” and will “continue to aid many that are unable to find transportation or a way to the doctor for regular checkups. This is especially true in rural America.” Dr. G.E. Ghali, a Louisiana oral surgeon and chancellor of a medical analysis heart, spoke as each a clinician and a affected person about how the administration’s efforts to offer emergency-use authorization for rising therapies saved lives.
Video vignettes heralded Trump’s management throughout the coronavirus, specializing in issues like Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s initiative to hurry vaccine improvement, relatively than the statistics: practically 6 million Americans who’ve contracted COVID-19 or the greater than 177,000 who’ve died. Trump additionally spoke with a gaggle of first responders — together with nurses, postal staff and a police officer from Colorado who stated she had contracted COVID-19 in late March and has since recovered. “That means we don’t have to be afraid of you at all, right?” Trump stated to her. “Once you’re recovered, we have the whole thing with plasma happening. That means your blood is very valuable, you know that, right?”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that President Barack Obama left him with an empty nationwide stockpile of emergency provides. But this is an exaggeration.
The stockpile had a scarcity of N95 masks, which have been depleted on account of the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 and not substantially replenished throughout the Obama or Trump administrations.
ProPublica found that the finances battles throughout Obama’s tenure after the Republicans gained the 2010 election additionally damage the stockpile’s finances.
Budget figures going again to 2009 present total funding for the stockpile dropped to its lowest stage in 2013, to about $477 million. Allocations have grown steadily since then to a 2020 finances of $705 million.
“We eliminated Obamacare’s horrible and very unfair individual mandate, which basically knocked out Obamacare. We knocked out Obamacare.”
Saying Republicans “knocked out Obamacare” is a stretch. Trump did signal laws to get rid of the requirement that Americans have medical insurance or pay a tax penalty, however eliminating this requirement didn’t eliminate Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, as it’s formally recognized.
The administration helps a lawsuit by a gaggle of Republican state attorneys basic that argues that the ACA ought to be dominated unconstitutional. The lawsuit’s argument focuses on the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling that the ACA was constitutional as a result of it was based mostly on a tax, which Congress has the authority to levy. With the tax penalty now eradicated, the lawsuit argues, the legislation ought to be scrapped completely. The Supreme Court has agreed to listen to the case.
In the meantime, a lot of the well being legislation’s key provisions stay in drive. In 2020, at the very least 11.four million Americans have purchased insurance via the web marketplaces created beneath the act. More than 10 million others have signed up for Medicaid beneath the expanded eligibility necessities handed as a part of the legislation. And individuals who have personal insurance coverage have benefited from new guidelines enacted by the legislation, from the power to maintain younger adults on a dad or mum’s coverage to an finish to out-of-pocket funds for sure preventive measures.
“So we protected your preexisting conditions, very strongly protected.”
We rated an analogous declare as Pants on Fire. Protections for preexisting circumstances beneath Obamacare stay on the books, but it surely’s not for lack of making an attempt by the Trump administration.
For starters, the administration backs the lawsuit that will get rid of protections for preexisting circumstances by eliminating Obamacare.
In addition, the administration has not put forth any plan which may preserve these ensures in place. Every alternative well being invoice the administration has endorsed has supplied protections much less beneficiant than these supplied by the ACA.
Finally, the administration has issued a rule loosening restrictions on the size of so-called short-term well being plans. While such plans might be extra inexpensive for people out there for insurance coverage, they aren’t required to offer preexisting situation protections.
PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson, Amy Sherman, Samantha Putterman and Miriam Valverde contributed to this story.