GOP assails soaring price of health care

Clinton says her remedies maintain access, lower costs

Hillary Clinton, campaigning Tuesday at Broward College in Coconut Creek, Fla., made no mention of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Earlier, she repeated her vow to fix the law.
Hillary Clinton, campaigning Tuesday at Broward College in Coconut Creek, Fla., made no mention of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Earlier, she repeated her vow to fix the law.

DORAL, Fla. -- Donald Trump and anxious Republicans across the nation seized on rising health care costs Tuesday in an effort to spark election momentum.


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Donald Trump greets the crowd as he arrives for a rally Tuesday in Sanford, Fla.

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AP/The News & Observer

Former President Bill Clinton poses for a picture Tuesday as he campaigns for Hillary Clinton in Rocky Mount, N.C.

The Republican presidential nominee, trekking across Florida, insisted "Obamacare is just blowing up," after the government projected sharp cost increases for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care law spearheaded by President Barack Obama.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has vowed to preserve insurance for the millions of Americans covered under the law, but her team described the cost surge as a "big concern."

With three stops across Florida, Trump used the government's projections about the health care law as a campaign rallying point.

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"It's killing our businesses. It's killing our small businesses. And it's killing individuals," Trump told supporters at an evening rally in Tallahassee, without presenting evidence to back up his assertions.

While the health care law has provided coverage to millions who were previously uninsured, it has also increased costs and regulatory burdens for businesses, particularly medium and large companies. Small businesses are exempt from its requirement to cover full-time employees.

The renewed emphasis on health care gave battered Republican House and Senate candidates a brief respite from months of questions about their presidential nominee, who has questioned the integrity of the U.S. election system while facing personal allegations of sexual misconduct. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

"My first day in office, I'm going to ask Congress to put a bill on my desk getting rid of this disastrous law," Trump told thousands of voters gathered at an airport along the Interstate 4 corridor.

Trump has struggled to stay focused on the traditional issues throughout his candidacy. He opened Tuesday by promoting one of his Florida golf resorts, highlighting the intersection between his business and political interests. Trump is also scheduled to attend today's opening of his new Washington hotel.

"We're at Trump National Doral. And it's one of the great places on earth," Trump said during a visit to his golf club. He encouraged his employees to praise him at the microphone and said many of them are having "tremendous problems with Obamacare."

Trump later told Fox News: "We don't even use Obamacare. We don't want it."

The Doral general manager later clarified that "over 95 percent" of the club's employees are on company-provided insurance and that "very, very few" of them rely on plans offered through the federal health care law. The Affordable Care Act is designed to provide health coverage for people not insured by their employer.

The Department of Health and Human Services reported late Monday that premiums will go up sharply next year under the federal health care program, and many consumers will have just one choice for their insurer. Before federal subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less.

Republicans have been fighting the president's health care law since 2010 with little political success. But in a campaign dominated by Trump's controversies, vulnerable Republicans across the nation are eager to latch onto a familiar conservative cause.

In Arizona, Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain has repeatedly assailed his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, for having called the health care overhaul her proudest vote. In Indiana, U.S. Rep. Todd Young, a Republican running for the Senate, has sought to keep the focus on former Democratic U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh's vote for the law before leaving the Senate six years ago.

Several Republicans in difficult races leapt on the issue, including U.S. Sens. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and Roy Blunt in Missouri. Fighting a challenge from New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, Ayotte's campaign asked, "Will Hassan continue to stand in lock-step with Hillary Clinton and her party in support of the failing law?"

Tackling cost concerns

During a radio interview Tuesday, Clinton touted the Affordable Care Act as "a major step" forward and vowed, as she has before, to "fix problems" with the law.

"I'm sure you noticed, predominantly working people, African-American, Latino people now have access to insurance, but the costs have gone up too much," Clinton told WHQT-FM in Miami. "So we're going to really tackle that. We're going to get copays and premiums and deductibles down. We're going to tackle prescription drug costs. And we can do that without ripping away the insurance that people now have."

Campaign spokesman Jennifer Palmieri conceded that "cost controls are a big concern for Hillary Clinton."

She said the Democratic presidential nominee has a plan to lower insurance costs, "both through the public option and a Medicare buy-in." She warned that Trump's plan would strip insurance from roughly 20 million Americans who now benefit.

Clinton did not address the cost surges when she held an afternoon rally on the Broward College campus in Coconut Creek, where she urged the audience to take advantage of early voting opportunities.

Noting that her crowd was diverse, she said, "I bet some of you or maybe your parents or grandparents came from places where none of that was true." She said Trump was "attacking everything that has set our country apart for 240 years."

Also Tuesday, Clinton picked up the endorsement of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican.

In a brief interview, Powell said he had made the announcement during an appearance before the Long Island Association in New York.

"I said that I would be voting for her," Powell said. Asked why, he said: "Because I think she's qualified, and the other gentleman is not qualified."

Powell joins a growing list of Republican national security figures who have endorsed Clinton. While Trump claims a long list of military endorsers, no former secretary of state has publicly backed his bid.

Pence off to Utah

Trump appeared at three campaign events Tuesday, his third-straight day in the state. Clinton made one appearance on the first day of a two-day swing.

"I think I'm winning in Florida, which I have to win," Trump told Fox News in a telephone interview after his Doral event.

The GOP nominee also asserted that emails reportedly hacked from the Clinton campaign and released by WikiLeaks show that Obama knew about Clinton's private use of an email server while she was secretary of state.

"President Obama claimed to have no knowledge whatsoever of Clinton's illegal email server," Trump said, later adding, "but newly public emails -- WikiLeaks -- prove otherwise."

He read email exchanges involving Clinton aides that he said implicate the president.

"That means Obama is now into the act," Trump said.

The White House declined to comment on Trump's allegations. Spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters earlier Tuesday that while the president had Clinton's personal email address, he did not know where her server was located.

Trump used one of his rallies to continue his argument that the media have conspired to rig the election in Clinton's favor. He called reporters at the event "a bunch of phony lowlifes" and said coverage of the race that suggested Clinton is ahead amounted to "voter suppression, because people give up."

Trump's campaign announced, meanwhile, that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican vice presidential candidate, will pay a visit today to Utah, where polls show Trump is at risk of losing the once-reliable GOP state as Evan McMullin, a little-known third-party challenger, has found growing support.

McMullin is a former Republican congressional aide who is a Mormon and went to college in Utah. Some projections show he could become the first third-party presidential candidate to win a state since American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won five Southern states in 1968.

Elsewhere, Trump's finance chairman said the GOP nominee has no further high-dollar fundraising events planned for the remainder of the campaign, as the GOP works to expand its get-out-the-vote operation before Election Day.

Steven Mnuchin, Trump's national finance chairman, said in an interview Tuesday that Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee between the party and the campaign, had its last formal fundraiser Oct. 19. The luncheon was in Las Vegas on the day of the final presidential debate.

Mnuchin said the Trump campaign decided to keep the candidate's final weeks focused on taking his message to the voters in person rather than on raising money.

While Clinton headlined her last fundraiser Tuesday night in Miami, her campaign has scheduled 41 other events between now and Nov. 3.

While the candidates sparred, hundreds of thousands of Floridians were voting. Tuesday marked the second day of early in-person voting.

Trump: No TV show

Separately, Trump, in a radio interview, said Tuesday that he has no interest in a "Trump TV" media venture should he lose the election, a notion that has persisted this week after a televisionlike alternative to nightly news programs began streaming on his Facebook page.

The inaugural Trump Tower Live, an online program hosted by Trump campaign surrogates Boris Epshteyn and Cliff Sims, directly competed Monday with the ABC, CBS and NBC national newscasts.

The program is a collaboration between the campaign and a fledgling company that has been streaming Trump's campaign rallies online for more than a year. Some see it as a precursor to a future Trump media company, although the candidate threw cold water on the idea in an interview with Cincinnati WLW radio's Scott Sloan.

"I have no interest in Trump TV," Trump said. "I hear it all over the place. You know, I have a tremendous fan base. We have the most incredible people. But I just don't have any interest in that. I have one interest, that's on Nov. 8."

The Trump TV possibility was fueled earlier this month by a report in The Financial Times that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had a conversation about it with a friend at an investment bank that specializes in media deals.

On a small scale, there already is a Trump TV: the Alabama-based Right Side Broadcasting Network that has streamed the Trump rallies and appearances on a YouTube channel since summer 2015.

Right Side was asked by the campaign to help produce a Facebook Live telecast from the spin room after the third presidential debate. The Trump campaign pronounced it a success, saying it generated $9 million in campaign contributions. A few days later, Right Side was asked to help with a nightly show, Joe Seales, the company's founder, said in an email.

Trump Tower Live is set to run through Thursday for 30 minutes at a time, he said. Timing is fluid; it is expected to immediately precede or follow Trump campaign rallies, he said.

During the show, Trump's team sat at a table in what they said was a campaign "war room," with flat-screen televisions, an American flag and a giant poster of Trump's face on the walls behind them. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and GOP strategist Sean Spicer were interviewed.

Their only break was for Trump campaign commercials.

By Tuesday afternoon, Facebook said, there were some 1.4 million clicks on the video, live and after-the-fact.

Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples, Jonathan Lemire, Erica Werner, Gary Fineout, Ken Thomas and David Bauder of The Associated Press and by Sean Sullivan, Matea Gold, John Wagner, Anne Gearan, Ed O'Keefe, Karen DeYoung and Susan Levine of The Washington Post.

A Section on 10/26/2016

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