Trumpcare

thebullelephant.com

Prior to Trumpcare, several other government healthcare proposals have been mockingly nicknamed after the figure proposing them. In the 1990s, for instance, a healthcare plan Hillary Clinton advocated for was dubbed Hillarycare by its opponents.

In 2007, a writer for Healthcare Financial Management described candidate Barack Obama’s healthcare plan as Obamacare, specifically comparing it to Hillarycare. Other opponents of the plan adopted the name, eventually applying it to its official name, the Affordable Care Act, which became law in 2010. Obamacare, however, stuck as its popular name. Based on healthcare, the -care combining form is also shared with Medicare, signed into law by President Johnson in 1965. Republican opposition and frequent use of Obamacare helped make the -care suffix a negative construction though.

Enter the presidential primary campaign in 2015, when Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal suggested that Donald Trump may pursue a policy of universal healthcare. Jindal referred to the hypothetical plan as TrumpCare, evoking the “specter” of Obamacare. Trump publicly announced his healthcare proposals in March, 2016. Vox called the proposal Trumpcare in an article that month. Around the same time, a pro-Ted Cruz political action committee released an ad called Trumpcare, criticizing Trump’s plan. In January, 2017, a Forbes article asked how Trumpcare would affect the stocks of healthcare companies. That same month, a Time article reported that Obama had suggested Democrats call any Republican healthcare plan Trumpcare. According to the article, Republicans in Congress had accepted that whatever plan they developed would come to bear the label.

In March, 2017, Republicans introduced the American Health Care Act in the House of Representatives. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer began calling the bill Trumpcare immediately. Pundits referred to the bill as Trumpcare in their analyses. The bill went through several iterations, sometimes referred to as versions Trumpcare 3.0 or Trumpcare 5.0 in the press. The American Health Care Act passed in the House, but dramatically failed in the Senate, meaning no Trumpcare came into law. Republicans continued pursuing other plans to achieve their healthcare goals, usually centering on the elimination of the individual mandate (a tax penalty for individuals not carrying health insurance), cuts to Medicaid, and defunding Planned Parenthood. These efforts, as well as efforts to repeal Obamacare since Trump has taken office, have collectively become known as Trumpcare.