After praising former President Donald Trump's 2017 efforts to repeal Obamacare (which would have left 23 million Americans uninsured), Vance attempted to clarify the campaign's position on health care during a September 15 interview on Meet the Press, which he described as “deregulating the insurance markets”:

Think about it: a young American doesn't have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. And we want to make sure everybody is covered.

But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our healthcare system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.

Vance doubled down during a rally in North Carolina, explaining the policy in more detail:

If you only go to the doctor once a year, you're going to need a different health care plan than somebody who goes to the doctor fourteen times a year because they've got chronic pain or they've got some other chronic condition.

That's the biggest and most important thing that we have to change. Now, what that will also do is allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.

As Jonathan Chait explained, “The Trump plan, according to Vance, is to permit insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions.” Which in essence means “Vance is advocating a partial or complete return to the system that existed before Obamacare."

Media Matters reviewed print articles in the A sections of five of the top U.S newspapers for coverage of Vance’s comments and found that only 2 opinion articles in The Washington Post mentioned them. The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal all failed to cover Vance’s comments on the ticket’s health care plan.

In The Washington Post’s coverage, a piece from the editorial board noted the Trump/Vance plan “could explode costs for older Americans or those with preexisting conditions.” The other opinion piece clearly explained the stakes:

Vance is referring to letting insurance companies offer different plans and pricing based on whether patients have preexisting conditions or might need more medical care because of their age, health status, gender, etc., or perhaps even their genetic profile. Rather than spreading the insurance risk around to a larger group of people who to some extent cross-subsidize one another, Vance wants to segment riskier patients into their own “pools.” Sicker, higher-risk, more expensive people can “choose” to go into one pool; healthier, less risky, cheaper-to-insure people can “choose” to land in another.

The Washington Post also had a news article about Vance’s comments in its online edition.

As the health care research organization The Commonwealth Fund explained the last time Trump tried to repeal the ACA:

The reality is that high-risk pool coverage was prohibitively expensive and there is little evidence to suggest that the existence of such pools made coverage less costly for others in the individual insurance market. Without substantially more federal funding than currently proposed, these facts are not likely to change. People with preexisting conditions may have “access” to coverage, but most will not be able to afford it and those who can will face limited benefits and extremely high deductibles and out-of-pocket payments.

With American voters consistently rating health care as a top election issue, these newspapers must do a better job of informing readers about the stakes of the race: If Trump and Vance repealed the ACA, it would be disastrous for those who need care the most.

Methodology

Media Matters searched print news articles in the Factiva database from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for any of the terms “Trump,” “former President,” “Vance,” “nominee,” or “candidate” within roughly the same paragraph as any of the terms “Obama care,” “Obamacare,” “health care,” “healthcare,” “Affordable Care Act,” “ACA,” or “insurance” or any variations of any of the terms “condition,” “pre-existing,” “cover,” “risk,” or “pool” from September 16, 2024, the day after GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance outlined the campaign's health care plan on NBC's Meet the Press, through 3 P.M. EST on September 20, 2024.

We included print news articles, which we defined as instances when Vance's comments were mentioned anywhere in the body of the text in the A section of the paper. We included editorials and op-eds but not letters to the editor.