The DNC Hack Reminds Us That Donald Trump Is Clueless On Health Care

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Russian hackers infiltrated the Democratic National Committee's opposition research database. One day later, what appears to be the stolen documents were posted on the internet, giving us a look at what the Democratic party complied on presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

While these leaked documents don't contain anything truly confidential, such as financial, donor or personal information, they are a neatly packaged record of Trump's conflicting public policy ideas -- and, in particular, his thoroughly baffling health care plan.

Here's the trail of one of the most contradictory tidbits:

1. July 2015: Trump supports universal health care.

Just last summer, when Washington Post reporters boarded Trump's Boeing 757 for an interview with the then-dark horse candidate, Trump opined about the moral obligation Americans have to support the poor.

"I’m also a moralist," he said. "We can’t let people down when they can’t get any medical care, when they’re sick and don’t have money to go to a doctor. You help them."

Trump's moralist days were short-lived.

2. September 2015: Oh, wait. Now he wants private insurance plans.

"Obamacare is going to be repealed and replaced," Trump told "60 Minutes" in September. "Obamacare is a disaster."

And yet, Trump continued to insist that everyone -- even the poor and uninsured -- should and would be covered under "TrumpCare." When Scott Pelley pushed the real estate mogul to explain how he'd pay for this coverage, Trump turned vague.

"I'm going to take care of everybody," he said. "I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. The government is going to pay for it but we're going to save so much money on the other side.

"But for the most part it's going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition, with lots of competitors, with great companies, and they can have their doctors, they can have their plans, they can have everything."

Hmm.

3. March 2016: TrumpCare would nearly double the number of uninsured Americans

This point wasn't included in the leaked DNC documents, but when Trump finally did release specifics about his health care plan in March, the details were troubling.

According to rough estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that assessed the impact of repealing Obamacare and replacing it with Trump's health care plan, the plan is an outright disaster. The group estimates that TrumpCare could potentially increase the deficit by between $270 billion and $490 billion over 10 years and drive up the number of uninsured American by approximately 21 million people.

The effect, according to experts, wouldn't just be devastating to groups that have been aided by Obamacare, such as children, pregnant women, and those who are disabled, elderly, unemployed or poor. It's completely uniformed.

Trump’s health care plan “resembles the efforts of a foreign student trying to learn health policy as a second language,” Thomas Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute and a critic of Obamacare, told The New York Times in April.

“It took a herculean political effort to put in place the Affordable Care Act,” James Capretta, a senior fellow at the conservative nonprofit Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Times. "To move in a different direction, even incrementally, would take an equally herculean effort, with clear direction and a clear vision of what would come next. I just don’t see that in Trump’s vague plans to repeal the law and replace it with something beautiful and great.”

Editor's note: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.