President Donald Trump's economic advisor, Stephen Moore, and Don Lemon got into a polite battle Friday night after Moore claimed the Affordable Care Act was collapsing. While Moore has made the claim throughout the night during CNN appearances, Lemon was quick to fact check him.
"Steve you know that's not true," Lemon corrected. "You guys keep repeating that. It's not true. The facts don't bear that out."
"Well, what isn't true?" Moore asked.
"That Obamacare is collapsing, it's not," Lemon retorted.
"It sure is!" Moore said, smiling. "But let me put it like this, Don --"
Lemon cut in to say, "it isn't collapsing under it's own weight. It's collapsing because the president is forcing it to -- Republicans are forcing it to."
Moore consistently maintained that Lemon was wrong but the CNN host encouraged him to "go read the fact check."
"Well, let's do that because this law is seven years old, it's not as if it started to collapse under Donald Trump, it started to collapse four or five years ago," Moore claimed, before going off on a tangent about premium increases.
Obamacare was passed in 2009 but it didn't take effect until Jan. 1, 2014, just a little under four years ago. The executive order signed by Trump to effectively push Obamacare off of a cliff, defunds the subsidies that make healthcare affordable for lower-income wage earners. In a 2016 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Trump explained that the poor were hurting because they couldn’t afford their healthcare. Without the subsidies costs will skyrocket.
Watch the full discussion below:
