Joe Biden says he looks forward to ending President Trump's 'senseless crusade against health coverage'
Raw video: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden makes remarks at campaign event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday launched a new health care push to protect the Affordable Care Act while stumping in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
The presumptive Democratic nominee -- in a speech after meeting in Lancaster, Penn., with families who’ve benefited because of the national health care law -- slammed President Trump’s “heartless crusade” to scrap the measure best known as ObamaCare.
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Biden’s trip came on the same day the Trump administration was expected to urge the Supreme Court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, which was the signature domestic achievement during his eight years as President Obama’s vice president.
And it also came just days after the president’s controversial comments urging his own administration to “slow the testing down” amid the coronavirus pandemic (though some White House aides say the comments were made in jest).
Thursday’s stop is Biden’s tenth since Memorial Day, as he’s slowly started venturing from his home in Wilmington, Del., where he hunkered down for over two months during the height of the coronavirus outbreak. Half of those visits have been short trips to neighboring Pennsylvania, where Biden was born and which is a crucial battleground state in November’s general election.
Biden – noting that some people who’ve contracted the COVID-19 disease caused by the coronavirus may experience lasting health conditions such as lung scarring and heart damage – argued that if the president has his way, complications from COVID-19 could become a new pre-existing condition adding that "if Donald Trump prevails in court, insurers would be allowed to strip away coverage or jack up premiums — simply because of their battle with the coronavirus.”
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Biden charged that some coronavirus patients will “live their lives caught in a vise between Donald Trump’s twin legacies: his failure to protect the American people from the coronavirus, and his heartless crusade to take health care protections away from American families.”
Biden once again urged the president to "drop the lawsuit. Stop trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Stop taking away peoples’ health care and their peace of mind."
"I think it’s cruel, it’s heartless, it’s callous,” Biden said of Trump’s attempts to dismantle Obamacare. "It’s all because in my view he can’t abide the thought of letting stand one of President Obama’s great achievements."
And he vowed that “if Donald Trump refuses to end his senseless crusade against health coverage, I look forward to ending it for him."
The former vice president also spotlighted the president's theory that fewer tests will mean fewer cases of the coronavirus, which puts the president at odds with public health experts, who are pushing for an increase in testing to contain the virus.
Biden noted that the president's “called testing ‘a double-edged sword.’ Let’s be crystal clear about what he means by that.”
“Testing unequivocally saves lives, and widespread testing is the key to opening up our economy again — so that’s one edge of the sword,” Biden said “The other edge: that he thinks finding out that more Americans are sick will make him look bad. And that’s what he’s worried about. He’s worried about looking bad.”
Biden, who wore a black mask as he met with the families and as he began his speech, urged that "we're going to have to wear masks... I wear it everywhere I go... I know as Americans, it's not something that we're used to, but it matters."
The president, notably, has repeatedly refused to wear a mask in public.
Responding to Biden’s speech, Trump campaign deputy press secretary Ken Farnaso charged that “Biden is notorious for not making sense, so we shouldn’t be surprised that he chose Pennsylvania to tout his failed record on healthcare that increased taxes on every day Pennsylvanians, and continues to tout the endorsement of anti-energy groups who support eliminating more than 600,000 Pennsylvania jobs.”
Health care and specifically protecting Obamacare proved to be a winning issue for Democrats in 2018, as the party regained the House majority for the first time in eight years. Health care was a leading issue in the Democratic presidential primaries the past year, and the Biden campaign believes it’s a winning issue in the general election showdown against the president.
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