WASHINGTON—After President Barack Obama’s administration announced Monday that Obamacare health insurance prices would spike in 2017, Donald Trump crowed that his prediction had been proven right.

“I think it’s a disaster, and I’ve been saying it from the time before they even voted for it. I said this is a plan can’t work, it’s going to be a disaster,” he told Fox News on Tuesday.

“Obamacare is a disaster. And you remember, I called that from before it was approved,” he told Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday. “I said, ‘This can’t work, because it’s just … the plan is no good. The concept is no good.’”

He was lying.

In fact, Trump issued no such scathing criticism. He had positive things to say about Obamacare, along with some warnings about costs to corporations, even on the 2010 day it was approved by Congress. His views on that day can best be described as ambivalent.

His false insistence that he was opposed to the law back then, in the face of contrary evidence from an interview at the time, is similar to his false insistence that he had opposed the Iraq invasion, which an interview from the time shows he had at least tentatively supported.

Trump, now the Republican presidential candidate, was interviewed about Obamacare on March 22, 2010, the day the House of Representatives voted to approve Obama’s sweeping transformation of the American health care system. HLN host Joy Behar asked him if he was “happy.”

Trump’s response: “I’m really torn.”

“Number one, as a human being, I like to see people — it’s inconceivable that, you know, people are sick, like you get sick, or I get sick, or the kids get sick, and you bring ‘em to a doctor, inconceivable that, you know, 31 or 33 million people can’t do that. So on one level, I think something had to be done,” he began.

He then offered criticism, saying “it’s really going to cost a lot of money in terms of competitiveness with this country” and would cost a friend’s company “over $200 million a year.”

“Again, you go back to the humanitarian side, Joy, but at the same time this company may not be around any longer because of the cost,” he said.

His noncommittal conclusion: “So it is a very, very tough situation.”

When Behar asked Trump if Obama had gotten his “mojo” back, Trump sounded skeptical, and he offered a caution that conservatives may now consider prescient. He said he had seen corporate leaders lauded for making big deals that eventually failed.

“Somebody totally overpays for a company and everybody says ‘great, great, what a hero,’ and he’s really a hero until four or five years later when everything implodes, the company goes down and he gets thrown out … I’ve seen it 100 different times,” he said.

But even after saying this, Trump was not willing to declare that Obamacare would fail, that premiums would eventually spike, or that it was a bad idea on the whole. His final sentence: “It’s a pretty tough thing, but yeah, right now, he’s certainly looking like a hero.”

Trump soon began criticizing the law more directly. Days later, according to Twitter posts at the time, he complained of its cost on Fox. His words that week, after the law’s passage, surprised one conservative tweeter who currently identifies as a Trump supporter: “NOW Donald Trump is speaking out more firmly against health care bill? Where has he been? I keep asking,” the person, who tweets under @Kansaspider, wrote on March 27, 2010.

Before he became a vehement opponent of Obamacare, Trump was a vehement supporter of Canada’s single-payer health system, which he now deems a failure. In 2000, he advocated even greater government involvement in health care than the Democrats eventually approved in 2010.

“We must have universal health care,” he wrote in a 2000 book. “I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one.”

By 2011, he had clearly turned against Obamacare. In February of that year, he said it was unconstitutional and should be repealed. He told right-wing radio host Michael Savage that “health care is destroying many, many companies, I know for a fact; I have friends that are literally closing up their companies.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

He still sounded different than most Republican critics of Obamacare. When Fox’s Bill O’Reilly asked him, “Obamacare: do you believe the federal government has an obligation, a moral obligation, to provide people who can’t afford health insurance with health insurance,” Trump responded, “When people are in trouble, I like to help them out. We have a moral obligation to help people. I really believe that.”

O’Reilly asked, “So there would be Trumpcare, then?”

Trump responded, “Well, it would be a form of much better.” He eventually added, “I believe in the private.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Read more about: