President Donald Trump really, really wants to fool voters into thinking he has a plan to make the health care system great again. But he really, really doesnt.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday, Trump signed executive orders he claims address two of the biggest concerns Americans have about the health care system: coverage for people with preexisting conditions and surprise medical bills.

The orders dont do anything about anything, though. Its just more vaporware from the Trump administration . Slogans, lies and exaggerations arent policies. Trump pitched his phantom plan by saying it rests on three pillars: more choice, lower costs, and better care, and that it would put patients first.

Those focus-group-tested slogans sound great! Except theyre hogwash.

The truth is that, like in so many other areas, Trump doesnt want to do the work. After all, as Trump once said, health care is complicated! Who needs the headache when there are people of color to insult and golf to play ?

Executive orders like these are little more than campaign press releases printed on fancier stationery. Since Trump doesnt have the interest or patience to actually work with Congress to make laws, he tosses off toothless executive orders and farms out his Obamacare repeal efforts to a court system hes packed with his own judges .

Theres no evidence that Trump cares about health care at all beyond his intense desire to undo anything President Barack Obama did in office. Has there been anything about Trumps response to the novel coronavirus pandemic to suggest that the health and well-being of Americans is a priority for him? Two hundred thousand dead say otherwise.

Trump barely engaged in the 2017 legislative fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a GOP plan that would have kicked tens of millions of Americans off their health care. After that failed , he gave up even trying to legislate on health care, and instead, his administration turned its focus to sabotaging the ACAs health insurance marketplaces, imposing onerous new requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries, promoting the sale of junk health insurance policies that, unlike ACA plans, do exclude people with preexisting conditions, and getting the courts to kill the ACA for him.

Empty Promises And Falsehoods

Trump rattled off a litany of policies his administration has implemented or proposed, ranging from relaxing health insurance regulations to attempting to lower drug prices, few of which have amounted to anything.

In fact, some of his supposed accomplishments further give the lie to his claim that he supports protections for preexisting conditions. The Trump administration has expanded access to several kinds of health insurance that arent available to people with preexisting conditions, like short-term health plans .

The term gaslighting gets overused these days, but theres no better way to describe what Trump is perpetrating. His claims about these executive orders are entirely detached from reality and his claims about his own record on health care range between completely made-up to highly exaggerated.

A president whose primary health policy objective is scrapping his predecessors law that brought the uninsured rate to a historic low cant plausibly claim to be fixing the health care system. Obamacare is bad is not a policy, and anyone who expected Trump to finally, at long last , explain to the public how he would replace that law if such a person still exists has been disappointed yet again.

Its worth being extremely clear about why anyone is worried about people with preexisting conditions in the first place. After all, its been a full decade since the Affordable Care Act made it illegal for health insurance companies to deny coverage or charge higher rates to people based on their medical histories.

Well, it turns out that protection might disappear, along with the rest of the ACA, because Trump and the Republican Party want it to.