Fact check: Trump falsely claims he never wanted to end the Affordable Care Act

In January 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at rolling back the Affordable Care Act.
Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images

CNN — 

Calling Vice President Kamala Harris “a liar,” former President Donald Trump claimed that he never wanted to terminate the Affordable Care Act – an accusation Harris has repeatedly levied against him on the campaign trail.

“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act. I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing,” the former president posted on X Thursday.

Facts First: Trump is trying to rewrite history. Repealing and replacing the landmark health reform law, popularly known as Obamacare, was among his top campaign promises when he first ran for president in 2016, and he spent the initial months of his term pushing Congress to pass legislation to do just that. Trump revived the idea early in the current campaign before backtracking. At September’s presidential debate with Harris, he called the Affordable Care Act “lousy” and said “we” are working on “things” to replace it.

Even before he ran for office, Trump was crusading on Twitter, now known as X, to repeal the law signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

During his 2016 campaign, he promised supporters that he would quickly dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Within hours of taking office in January 2017, he issued an executive order aimed at rolling back the law.

After the GOP-led House of Representatives passed a repeal bill in May 2017, Trump called them to the White House for a celebratory appearance and said Obamacare was “essentially dead.”

“This is a great plan. I actually think it will get even better. This is a repeal and replace of Obamacare. Make no mistake about it,” Trump said.

However, even though Republicans controlled Congress and the White House that year, they failed to unite behind a plan to do so, ending any serious attempts to completely jettison the Affordable Care Act. Trump spent the rest of his term chipping away at the law.

The former president revived the debate over the law’s fate in November 2023, when he wrote on his Truth Social platform that he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” and that the failure to terminate it “was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”

Trump has recently tried to change his tack – promising to come up with a health care plan that’s better.

“What we will do is we’re looking at different plans,” Trump said at September’s debate, noting that he had “concepts of a plan.”

“If we can come up with a plan that’s going to cost our people, our population, less money and be better health care than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it. But until then, I’d run it as good as it can be run,” he said.