If JD Vance Is Wealthy, Why Did He Let His Own Mother Scrape by on Medicaid?

Assuming they haven’t been vacationing on Mars for the last decade or so, every American must be aware that it has been the relentless ambition of Republican politicians to repeal, roll back, or weaken the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.

ACA is a major government safety-net project alongside Social Security and Medicare. As of February 2024, 20.8 million persons were enrolled in the program, the highest number at any one time, and since Obamacare’s passage, almost 50 million people have received coverage at some point. The health care program has literally been a lifesaver for countless Americans.

Up until the culmination of their repeal efforts in mid-2017 (at a time the GOP controlled both houses and the presidency), when the program only survived because Sen. John McCain left treatment for terminal cancer to vote “no,” Newsweek “found at least 70 Republican-led attempts to repeal, modify or otherwise curb the Affordable Care Act since its inception as law on March 23, 2010.”

GOP attempts to wreck the program, although more sporadic since, have continued. This year, House Republicans reported a budget that would have defunded ACA as well as Medicaid expansion while hiking Medicare premiums and prescription drug prices. They “balanced” these cuts with giveaways to Big Pharma and allowing insurers to sell “junk” policies with minimal-to-no coverage.

His ostentatious religiosity is largely phony and used as a vehicle for his ambition to rise in the Republican Party.

With that history in mind, picture the surreal moment in the vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, when the latter said “Members of my family actually got private health insurance, at least, for the first time . . . under Donald Trump’s leadership.” Vance said that his family members switched from Medicaid to Obamacare between 2017 and 2021.

The Ohio senator has frequently tried to characterize Trump’s actions while president as having preserved or stabilized ACA, when in fact he did no such thing. Enrollments in the ACA exchange in Ohio, where Vance’s family lived, fell during Trump’s presidency, while the uninsured rate increased. Obamacare survived simply because congressional Republicans couldn’t quite muster the votes to kill it, but not for want of trying. Candidate Trump is still angling to get rid of it, although he only has “concepts of a plan” to replace it.

How does Vance get away with such lies? Undoubtedly for the same reason Republicans get away with all their lies. “All politicians lie” is the cynical American’s appraisal of the officials he or she elects, and this is of course true to the extent that all human beings lie, or at least shade the facts to place themselves in a favorable light. But Republicans have catapulted the lie to another category altogether.

They lie because they dare not reveal their actual agenda. They cannot very well tell the general public, “We intend to kick you off your health care and provide a huge payday to the drug companies who give us campaign donations.” Neither could they characterize Trump’s intended revenue policy as “We plan to get rid of income taxes for our rich contributors and use tariffs to shift the entire tax burden onto consumers in an extremely regressive fashion.”

Instead, they concoct a lie that foreign countries exporting to the United States will somehow pay the tariff that the U.S. government under Trump’s policy would levy on the product, rather than tell the truth that the consumer would pay it as the end user of the product. As a lie, it isn’t even plausible, but Republicans count on the fact that the general public doesn’t bother to fact check in real time.

As for the narrower Republican base (the only people Republican politicians take trouble to appeal to, aside from billionaires), they are confident they could tell them the moon is made of green cheese and they’d believe it. All the politicians have to do is season the concoction with a few choice culture wars clichés and the base will swallow it like a swarm of barracudas. They are either too uneducated, too intellectually incurious, or too ideologically rigid to apply “critical thinking skills” (a heuristic method which has not coincidentally been condemned by the Texas Republican Party).

The irony in this regard is that millions of Republican voters are covered by ACA, including in Ohio, where Vance’s family lives. Hence, the Ohio Republican has to perform his little rhetorical dance to anesthetize the base and puzzle the rest of us. That said, there is still little doubt that if Vance were to become part of a Trump administration presiding over a Republican-controlled House and Senate, the GOP would take another run at repealing Obamacare.

There is another sordid lie laid bare by Vance’s revelation about his family’s enrollment in ACA. The entire focus of Republicans’ culture wars obsessions over many decades has ostensibly been the family. The family is sacred; the basic, indivisible unit without which civilization collapses.

Big government is reviled for allegedly usurping the responsibility of the family to look out for one another’s needs; since the 1960s Republicans have shed crocodile tears over welfare programs because, supposedly, they cruelly destroyed the black family. Children are the rationale for heaving books out of libraries; families have a right to protect their children from becoming less ignorant and bigoted than their parents. Vance himself has mused that no-fault divorce should be abolished for the sake of keeping the precious family together, and his ranting about childless cat ladies shows a similar familial obsession.

As it turns out, it’s all another lie. Vance told us on national TV that his own mother, and presumably other family members, too (since he used the plural) were subsisting on Medicaid until they met the qualifications to enroll in ACA. But all that time, JD, the erstwhile hillbilly, had pulled himself up by the bootstraps of his buddy, Silicon Valley oligarch Peter Thiel, and made quite a handsome pile of money. It didn’t hurt that he married an attorney. His recent federal financial disclosure reveals assets between $4 million and $11 million.

Isn’t it the Christian thing to do to help those in need, especially as they are your own family, and even more so when they are bedeviled by addiction and other problems?

Why did someone a good deal wealthier than most of us abandon his own mother as a public charge on Medicaid? And even when she got off Medicaid, couldn’t he have bought her a health insurance policy, rather than relying on Obamacare? In his autohagiography, Vance made sure the reader got the message that his was a difficult, dysfunction-ridden family. But there is an answer to that.

Vance has also made sure everyone knows he is a pious Catholic of a very strict, antimodernist type, holding that theological precepts should guide secular government (his professed belief is responsible for his frankly idiotic opinions about cat ladies and childless people not deserving the same voting rights as people with children). This should of course make us wary of anyone holding such views getting his hands on executive power; these people have already wrecked the Supreme Court. It also suggests his ostentatious religiosity is largely phony and used as a vehicle for his ambition to rise in the Republican Party.

Isn’t it the Christian thing to do to help those in need, especially as they are your own family, and even more so when they are bedeviled by addiction and other problems? Jesus did not scorn the beggar and the lepers. And don’t the Ten Commandments (which Republican state governments want to make a mandatory part of the public school curriculum) tell us to “honor thy father and thy mother?”

Vance is a 24-karat fraud, the eternal rogue in the human poker deck. How appropriate that he is now the consort, as it were, of Donald Trump, the pathological liar. How fitting that he rose so quickly, after a mere two years, to the very top of the morally bankrupt party I left, more than a dozen years ago, in disgust.