Watch: Mike Johnson Scrambles to Deny His Comments on Health Care
The House speaker was caught on camera promising to abolish the Affordable Care Act.
House Speaker Mike Johnson promised to take away your health care. Now he’s trying to pretend that he didn’t say just that.
“They took a clip out of context and said that I said we were promising to repeal Obamacare,” Johnson told Fox Business on Thursday morning. “That’s just not what I said, it’s actually the opposite of that.”
But on Monday, Johnson shared his message clearly to a crowd in Pennsylvania: “No Obamacare.”
Johnson was speaking about health care reform on the campaign trail on behalf of Donald Trump. The House speaker promised that if Trump is elected, the Republicans will undertake a “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act in their first 100 days.
“No Obamacare?” asked a voter. Johnson confirmed the request, laughing, and followed up by declaring that “the ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how to do that.
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said, threatening to strip health care for nearly 50 million Americans currently covered by the ACA and suggesting that “health care is just one of [the] sectors” that needs major cuts, echoing Trump’s and Elon Musk’s calls to slash $2 trillion from the government’s budget—no matter the impact on everyday Americans.
Now Johnson is accusing Democrats of putting words in his mouth. “They’re twisting our words,” he told Fox on Thursday.
Trump famously said he only had “concepts of a plan” when it came to replacing Obamacare. But even those concepts are frightening: His running mate, JD Vance, has said the current plan coming out of a potential second Republican administration would allow health insurance companies to charge more for preexisting conditions.
“Speaker Mike Johnson is making it clear—if Donald Trump wins, he and his Project 2025 allies in Congress will make sure there is ‘no Obamacare,’” a spokeswoman for Kamala Harris’s campaign told The New York Times. “That means higher health care costs for millions of families and ripping away protections from Americans with preexisting conditions like diabetes, asthma, or cancer.”