The House of Representatives just passed the "American Health Care Act," a bill that gives President Trump and the Republican party a second chance at repealing Obamacare. While the bill itself doesn't actually get rid of Obamacare, which Trump has aggressively opposed for a long time, it does put a very large dent in the previous options for health care.
Amidst all the celebration over the bill, though, Trump actually took the time to praise the opposite of his party's own bill: single-payer health care. At an event in New York, he told the Australian Prime Minister that Australia has better health care than we do, The Washington Post reports. Australia's health care is a single-payer system, where the government pays for everyone's health care. Universal systems like these make health care available for everyone, and either the government pays for it or everyone pays to one single agency.
And this isn't the first time he has expressed his love for a single-payer system, according to the Post. Long before and even during his campaign, he raved about how well it worked in other countries.
"Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole," he said in his 2000 book The America We Deserve.
"Everybody's got to be covered. This is an Un-Republican thing for me to say...I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not," Trump said in a "60 Minutes" interview in 2015.
However, the new health care bill only puts more power in the states and private insurance companies when it comes to determining the cost of coverage. It also removes a large chunk of funding from Medicaid, which helps the government pay for insurance for the elderly. The Congressional Budget Office even estimated that 24 million more people would be uninsured because of the bill.
So, why did Trump praise Australia's single-payer system the other day? During his campaign, he expressed that he didn't actually support it, he just likes that it works in other countries. He told "Morning Joe" in 2016, "Not here, I don't think it would work as well here."
Clearly, the option is still on his mind, even as he and his party work to take away care from millions of Americans.