Trump went on to insist that Clinton is pushing a single-payer plan, which is demonstrably wrong, and that Canadians love the U.S. health care system, which is also untrue.But putting that aside, it’s clear that Trump had no idea what he was talking about. President Obama doesn’t want insurance “monopolies”; he wants the opposite, with exchange marketplaces where insurers compete for consumers’ business.But what about these “lines” Trump seemed so excited about? The Republican nominee was trying and failing to explain a bad idea. Let’s take a minute to explain what the GOP candidate couldn’t.Regular readers may recall that we’ve discussed the basic outline of this before – Trump clearly doesn’t read MaddowBlog often enough – and it’s easily one of the Republican Party’s favorite health care ideas: we don’t need real reform, the argument goes, we just need to let consumers buy across state lines.“Obamacare” already allows this, but the law set minimum standards that states must abide by. Trump’s vision – or at least the vision his aides told him to talk about when the issue comes up – is to remove, or at least severely weaken, those standards.This is generally called the “race to the bottom” for a reason. Under the Republican approach, state policymakers would tell insurers that if they were to set up shop in their state, the rules would be written in the industry’s favor. The industry would go with the state that offered the sweetest deal – which is to say, the most lax oversight with the fewest restrictions – and before long, consumers’ choices would be limited. Why? Because every insurer would move to that state, leaving Americans with no other coverage to buy.That’s exactly what happened with the credit card industry, and it’s a model to be avoided, not followed.So what’s wrong with Obama’s approach of minimum standards to prevent this? For consumers and families, nothing. For Trump, to the extent that he understands what he was trying to say, it means burdensome federal regulations intended to protect consumers, which is a problem.The Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of the idea in 2005, when there was a Republican Congress and Republican White House.