Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers

The claim, which he has made before on Twitter, has been judged untrue by numerous fact-checkers. The new president’s willingness to bring it up at a White House reception in the State Dining Room is an indication that he continues to dwell on the implications of his popular vote loss even after assuming power.

.. As part of that conversation, Mr. Trump asserted that between three million and five million unauthorized immigrants voted for Mrs. Clinton.

.. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California ..

.. “We talked about the Affordable Care Act and said what the Affordable Care Act has been successful in doing is improving quality, expanding access and lowering costs,” she told reporters. “And any proposal that they might have that does that, we’d be interested in hearing about.”

.. A “beautiful, beautiful relationship,” Mr. Trump told reporters.

Why Trump’s Obamacare Promise Will Be So Hard to Keep

Mr. Trump accurately describes problems with the current health care system for Americans under 65: “You have deductibles that are so high, that after people go broke paying their premiums which are going through the roof, the health care can’t even be used by them because their deductibles bills are so high.”

.. The real reason health care premiums and deductibles are so high is that medical care is very expensive in the United States — far more costly than it is anywhere else in the world. The United States pays very high prices to doctors and hospitals and drug and device makers, and Americans use a lot of that expensive medical care.

.. Most of the G.O.P. plans manage to be less expensive for the federal government — by offering stingier federal payments in helping people buy insurance and allowing the coverage people buy to be skimpier. But those proposals will tend to increase, not decrease, the amount many Americans spend on their health care.

.. If the bill eliminates requirements to pay for maternity care or prescription drugs, for example, that could lower the sticker price of a health plan, but will make health care much more expensive for anyone who has a baby or takes medication.

.. There will be people who will be better off under a Republican plan. Higher-income, healthy people who buy their own insurance have been the most disadvantaged group under Obamacare, and their fortunes would improve.

.. The consensus Democratic approach to making Obamacare “far better” has been to make it more expensive for the federal government, but less expensive for individuals. Proposals circulated by President Obama and Hillary Clinton would involve more federal spending on subsidies to help make insurance more affordable for more people, but at the expense of higher taxes.

So far, the Republican plans have tended to engage in the same trade-offs, but tilt in the opposite direction, emphasizing government savings over program generosity.