Trump: Why Don’t We Just Give Money to Americans and Make Them Buy Their Health Insurance?

reporter: “Are you negotiating with lawmakers on health care ahead of a vote next month?”
Trump: “I am. We’re negotiating with lawmakers. And I’ve had personal talks with some Democrats, I can’t tell you who they are, I just don’t want to do that, it’s not fair to them, about paying large amounts of dollars back to the people. You know, this was my idea. It came up during that — you know, often times in — under times of stress like the shutdown, we come up with great ideas that you would not have thought of before. The insurance companies are making a fortune. Stock is up over 1000% over a short period of time. They are taking in hundreds of billions of dollars and they’re not really putting it back, certainly not like they should. So when I see this, and when I’ve seen this over the last short period of time, I said, ‘Why Don’t We just pay this money directly to the people of our country and let them buy their own health insurance?’ And, you know, I made that statement, and I made it a little bit cavalierly but it sounded good, and everybody has picked up, including Democrats. I am talking to some Democrats right now about doing that. People love it. We’ll take the money, if it gets approved, were going to take the money, we’ll pay it back to the people of our country to go out and buy health insurance so they can put into a health account. We can do it a lot of different ways. But they buy their own health insurance. They can negotiate price. And it’s going to be locked so they can’t go out and buy a Cadillac. They can go out and buy health insurance.”