In a Nashville speech on Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar took the opportunity to credit the Trump administration with expected decreases in premiums for Affordable Care Act plans in 2019—and also attacked the concept of Medicare for All, which he said is too good to be true.

“When you drill down into the details, it's clear that Medicare for All is a misnomer.” Azar said during a recent speech in Nashville, Tennessee. “What's really being proposed is a single government system for every American that won't resemble Medicare at all.”

Medicare for All has gained substantial popularity with Democrats, and is now favored by many of the party's potential 2020 presidential candidates.

“Advocates of Medicare for All are looking backward,” Azar added, “not just by repeating the flaws of the Affordable Care Act, but also by trying to impose a payment system designed in the 1960s on all of American healthcare.”

The Hill reports that Azar also praised Trump as a “better steward of Obamacare than former President Obama ever was.”

The comments on the ACA fly in the face of both insurance experts and studies that say that premiums are either stable or decreasing this year is due to overpricing last year by insurers, who were trying to compensate in advance for continued Trump threats to the ACA on top of actions like cutting funding to navigators and withholding cost-sharing payments to insurers.

Incidentally, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, further cuts to navigator funding in federal marketplace states are planned; they'll amount to a reduction of 84 percent compared with 2016. In fact, three states will get no funding at all: Iowa, Montana and New Hampshire.

Studies also show, contrary to Azar's comments, that premiums would actually be falling considerably lower were it not for Trump administration policies like the elimination of the individual mandate penalty and expansion of short-term plans, The Hill said in its report.

According to Modern Healthcare, insurers, regulators and other policy experts credit the drop in premiums to the work of the state insurance departments and the implementation of reinsurance programs and other steps to mitigate the actions of the Trump administration.

The Associated Press reports, “Reacting to Azar's claims, Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation said it's likely that premiums for 2019 would have gone down even more but for other administration actions last year that roiled the markets.” Levitt cited Trump's abrupt cancellation of the CSRs, which resulted in major premium increases for 2018. The report says, “Also, Trump and congressional Republicans spent much of last year in a fruitless quest to repeal 'Obamacare,' with the president repeatedly pronouncing it 'dead.'”

Levitt is quoted saying, “The premium stability on tap for 2019 is primarily because insurers overshot with their premium increases for this year, reacting to an environment of tremendous uncertainty.”

Another Hill report says that Trump could find himself with falling poll ratings if the uninsured rate goes up—something that's already happened in states like Arkansas where new work requirements for Medicare have knocked some 4,000-plus people off Medicare rolls.

Brush up on the Medicare for All debate:

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Azar credits Trump with ACA lower premiums, disses Medicare for All

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