WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris is launching a seven-figure ad blitz about health care targeting Donald Trump’s calls to replace the Affordable Care Act with a mystery plan he hasn’t yet released.
The ad campaign, first reported by NBC News, is aimed at elevating the issue and capitalizing on what polling says is a weakness for Trump. The new 60-second spot features Trump saying during his face-to-face debate with Harris that he has “concepts of a plan” to remake the U.S. health care system.
“You have no plan,” Harris tells Trump in the ad while touting her calls for protecting the ACA (or “Obamacare”) and extending the Biden-Harris policies that expanded subsidies to buy coverage and capped the cost of insulin for seniors at $35 per month.
Her team has argued that Trump would simply eliminate the ACA, which would threaten coverage for the estimated 50 million people covered under the 2010 law by rescinding the subsidies to buy coverage, dismantling the marketplaces for Obamacare plans and undoing rules barring insurers from charging sick people more.
The ad, called “Concepts of a Plan,” will air in battleground states on broadcast and cable shows, the campaign said, targeting diverse audiences during “programs like 9-1-1, Brilliant Minds, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, and Grey’s Anatomy, as well as networks like the Hallmark Channel and TLC during medicine and health-related movies and shows Dr. Pimple Popper and Untold Stories of the ER.”
It will also air on “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” nationally ahead of the vice presidential debate Tuesday evening. And the Harris campaign said it plans to follow it up with more health care-focused ads in the future.
The Harris campaign cited a new Gallup Poll showing that health care remains a top issue for voters — and that two-thirds of U.S. adults believe it hasn’t gotten enough attention in the presidential campaign, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents. The poll found that independents are likelier to trust Harris on improving access to health care, increasing quality, lowering costs and protecting Medicare.
Notably, about 1 in 3 independents said they don’t trust either of the candidates on those issues. That’s what Harris hopes to change.
“Being president is about who you fight for. Every time Donald Trump opens his mouth and says ‘health care,’ he makes clear that he’s only out there for himself and his wealthy friends — not the tens of millions of seniors, Medicaid recipients, and Americans with preexisting health conditions that know the Affordable Care Act is a lifeline,” Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said by email, while promising that Harris would be for “lowering costs, and protecting every American’s access to health care” if she is elected.
Trump modifies his ACA rhetoric
Trump has continued to criticize the ACA, but he has softened some of his rhetoric lately, vowing that he would undo the law only if he came up with a better and cheaper replacement. He said in the Sept. 10 debate that he’ll specify what that means “in the not-too-distant future.”
Trump has also misrepresented and downplayed his fight to repeal the ACA during his four years as president.
Asked when he will release his health care plan, the Trump campaign didn’t say. It sent NBC News a broad set of goals, vowing that Trump would “eliminate waste, fraud and abuse throughout the health care system,” ensure “that Americans get quality medicines at the best price” and “always put patients first.”
Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, “share the underlying principles of using more choice in the marketplace and efficiency as tools for better, more affordable health care,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement.
Vance recently fueled the health care debate by floating high-risk pools for some people, an idea that some conservatives have supported as a way to tackle high costs. Past proposals for high-risk pools would separate healthier and sicker people into separate buckets, lowering costs for the former and raising them for the latter, unless the government spends heavily to cover higher-risk people. Democrats say the ACA is necessary to enroll healthier people and spread risk, easing the burden on insurers so they don’t have to charge the neediest patients exorbitant costs.
Vance spokesperson William Martin said of his remarks: “Senator Vance was simply talking about the significant improvements President Trump made to the Affordable Care Act through his deregulatory approach, which aimed to bring down the cost of premiums while ensuring coverage for pre-existing conditions.”
Trump won the 2016 election while promising to repeal the ACA, but he has struggled on the issue ever since. He pushed for a repeal-and-replace bill in 2017 that was projected to cost millions of people their coverage and weaken regulations that protected people with pre-existing conditions. It passed the GOP-controlled House that year and died in the Senate. But Trump persisted, using executive actions to try to weaken the law and asking the Supreme Court to wipe it out entirely in 2020.
Along the way, the ACA, signed by President Barack Obama, overcame its disapproval and became popular with the public. Health care was a major boon to Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections, according to exit polls, which said many voters prioritized health care and preferred Democrats over the GOP by wide margins.
A recent Associated Press national survey found that voters trust Harris to handle health care over Trump by 50% to 30%. The survey found that Trump led on other major issues, like handling the economy and dealing with immigration.
It’s a tricky issue for Trump as he seeks to attract working-class and low-income voters of all backgrounds — including Americans who may have soured on Democrats on other issues but are more likely to lean on a health care safety net — to assemble a winning coalition.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said his “policies would bring down costs by focusing on patients instead of corporations and increasing the quality of care in the marketplace.”
