Vice Presidential candidate, JD Vance makes his closing remarks in front of a crowd of about 1300 people at the Liberty Arena in downtown Williamsport. An enthusiastic crowd listed to several speakers including Vance make the case for the Republican ticket Wednesday afternoon. DAVE KENNEDY/Sun-Gazette

Questions on health care, trade schools and tariffs were posed to Republican vice president candidate JD Vance earlier this week at a rally in Williamsport with Vance appreciative of the subject matter and giving a quite lengthy analysis.

Vance fielded journalists’ questions covering the event at Liberty Arena, among them editorial staff with the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. Reporter Mark Maroney asked Vance about health care, and photojournalist Dave Kennedy asked questions related to what the administration would do more for those wanting to enter trade schools and about its proposal to apply tariffs to producers of imports made in foreign countries.

Vance answered both areas of inquiry by squarely placing blame on the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the Democratic presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election.

One question noted that most families are just one major medical incident away from a really big bill.

In response, Vance said first that,

“Donald Trump has your back.”

“President Trump inherited private healthcare exchanges that were in a bit of a death spiral,” Vance said. “People would not sign up until they got very sick and that is a terrible way to actually run a health insurance program.”

President Trump, he said, was not given a lot of credit for implementing a number of “reforms,’ making health care “more stable in this country.”

Vance acknowledged there was more work to be done.

“I’m not saying we fixed everything,” he said.

He then laid out three main ideas moving ahead that the Trump-Vance administration would focus on regarding healthcare improvements.

The first was that “People must be able to choose a health care plan that makes sense for them and their family,” Vance said.

Second, the “health care plan must allow them to be able to choose a doctor and keep that doctor – not have the healthcare plan strip the doctor from them,” he said.

Third, he said, “We want transparency,” adding, “there is nowhere else in the world where you have no idea what you’re buying or how much you’re buying it for,” he said. “We think that is the main reason why healthcare is broken.”

Vance then offered an example of a couple going to the hospital and the woman having a baby and needing pain medication but using an out-of-network provider and receiving a $20,000 medical bill.

“We need to stop that,” he said, offering another example: “Europe pays lower prices for drugs that were invented in this country than Americans do. That is ridiculous and that’s unfair and Donald Trump is going to change it. In fact, he fought to change it his first four years and then Biden and Harris undid all of his important work. People don’t give Trump enough credit for this but towards the end of his administration he really took on Big Pharma for us so that Americans would pay lower costs for prescription drugs. He wants Europeans, in the same way Europeans have to pay more for their own defense, they also ought to pay a little more for their health care, and stop freeloading off the United States of America and that will lower costs for Pennsylvanias and that is an important thing we have got to do.”

Kennedy asked Vance a question pertaining to education and specifically trade-schools: “What would you like to do specifically to get young people the opportunity to go to trade school. I’m not against four year academics but we need welders – those kinds of folks as well.”

Vance answered: “I was raised by a union welder in Armco Steel in Middletown, Ohio, and trust me he was a hell of a lot smarter than almost any person I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s tough work. It’s not just work with the hands it’s also work with the mind. I think one thing is leaders have got to do a better job of talking about this stuff. … We have had a generation of young people, and I was taught this message, I am almost 40 years old. When I was going to high school in the 90s, there was this idea that there was work with your hands and there was work with your head and they were somehow totally different. Talk to a union pipefitter, who can do trigonometry better than a mathematics professor, work with your hands and work with your head is often the same kind of work.”

He continued: “We have got to get more people in the trades, but to be honest the financial support for people who want to go into the trades is just not there the same as for those who want to get a four-year degree. And I happen to think that if you want to go and become an electrician or a pipefitter, or a welder or you want to work in carpentry you ought to be able to get the same benefits as somebody who goes to a four-year college. We’ve got to be equal across everybody.”

“You can’t get Pell grants if you want to go to trade school,” Vance said. “You can’t really use those for trade school. We’ve got to just give everybody the opportunity to choose the life that they want and at the same time leaders have got to talk a lot more about the fact that there is honorable, great, smart work in the trades and we’ve got to do a better job of communicating that message as leaders of this country.”

Kennedy followed up his question with one about concerns of tariffs being costs passed along to U.S. consumers.

Trump has said if a foreign importer charges a 10 % tariff, we are going to charge that amount, according to U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Dallas.

Kennedy noted tariffs are paid at the U.S. ports, not by countries, but by companies, when there are products brought into the U.S., and asked how a Trump administration plans to address that.

Vance replied by saying he understood the question but disagreed with the premise.

“The assumption that tariffs always lead to price increases for consumers ignores that companies only pay the tariffs if they decide to manufacture overseas in the first place. Trump’s answer is they are not going to pay tariffs as long as they make the product in America.

“And that is the whole point of a tariff in the first place, is to make more things in America,” Vance said. “I think we really ignore the costs, the long-term and sometimes the short-term costs of letting other countries make all of our critical stuff.”

Sometimes, he said, it is easy to put a dollar value on it, and other times, it is not.

He referenced the height of the COVID pandemic, when the country was trying to get hospital gowns and masks.

“I’m not talking about masks for three-year-olds, I’m talking about masks for doctors to use when they are doing surgery, and we could not get that stuff because the Chinese and other countries made it. … So everybody said if you let the Chinese make everything it is going to make it cheaper and cheaper goods. Well, the Chinese are making more of our stuff today than they ever have and, frankly, things are more expensive than they should be. That is a fault of Kamala Harris’ leadership and a generation of failed leadership in the country. Donald Trump is going to change it and we are going to make more of our own stuff and we are going to get better prices for consumers in the process.”