Trump Takes Credit For Veterans Affairs Healthcare Bill Signed By Obama At Orlando Rally

At his campaign kickoff event on Tuesday, President Donald Trump claimed that he had passed a veterans health care bill that was actually signed into law by President Barack Obama.

“We passed VA Choice,” the president claimed at his massive, 20,000 person rally in Orlando, Florida. “You go out now, you get a doctor, you fix yourself up, the doctor sends us the bill, we pay for it. And you know what? It doesn’t matter because the life and the veteran is more important, but we also happen to save a lot of money doing that.”

The bill that the president is referring to here is one that allows veterans to seek health options outside of the system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump did, in fact, sign a veteran’s healthcare bill into law, but that piece of legislation, called the VA Mission bill, only allowed vets to have a private doctor if their wait time is 20 days or if their drive is 30 minutes. The bill that widely allows former soldiers to go outside of the VA healthcare system is one that was passed by Obama in 2014. Obama’s bill permitted vets to have private healthcare, as well as providing funding to the VA to hire more medical staff and overhaul the electronic medical records.

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This boast was just one of many false claims that the president made during his 2020 re-election kickoff on Tuesday. He also stated that he “won” the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, that Hillary Clinton should be investigated for her “missing” emails, and that the elites were attempting to rig the system against him.

Article by Daniel Knopf