On Thursday, the White House released the Trump administration’s new healthcare plan, which will rework how the federal government deals with healthcare management. Like most of these plans, it’s not so much a healthcare policy; it is a healthcare finance policy, that is to say, it’s not so much to do with the delivery of healthcare but rather how we pay for it.
President Donald J. Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan is a broad healthcare initiative that will slash prescription drug prices, reduce insurance premiums, hold big insurance companies accountable, and maximize price transparency in the American healthcare system.
This plan will deliver money directly to the American people, not insurance companies, big pharma and special interest groups—putting patients over industry leaders’ profits, just as he promised. The Great Healthcare Plan also builds on the successes of his first term by promoting competition, eliminating wasteful spending, and putting consumers back in control.
The Trump administration is nothing if not ambitious. Whether Congress will go along with this or not is another matter.
Here are a few highlights from the proposal:
- “Instead of putting the needs of big corporations and special interests first our plan finally puts you first and puts more money in your pocket.”
- “The government is going to pay the money directly to you. It goes to you, and then you take the money and buy your own healthcare… the big insurance companies lose and the people of our country win.”
This section sounds a lot like a voucher program for healthcare, which isn’t the worst idea ever thought of in Washington, as it should – we hope – shave off a layer or two of bureaucracy from the whole mess. Questions: How will these payments be made? Cash, that could possibly be frittered away? Or placed in a government fund, to be spent as needed? It’s not clear how this will work.
- “This proposal locks in the massive discount on prescription drugs that my administration is achieving through our most-favored-nations drug pricing agreement… It’ll bring down drug prices 80, 90% in some cases, just numbers that nobody’s ever heard of before.”
- “Your prescription drugs will come way, way down and, under this policy, the prices of many drugs will be slashed by 300, 400 even 500% starting this month at the Trumprx.gov.”
There are some constitutional issues here; the Constitution in no way gives Washington the power to act as a pharmacy, which seems to be what is proposed here. But that concern has been ignored for 150 years now, and the administration has already made some progress in lowering pharmaceutical prices.
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And finally:
- “Obamacare was designed to make insurance companies rich. I call it the UNAFFORDABLE Care Act, with billions of dollars and taxpayer subsidies that help their stock prices skyrocket over 1,700% as you paid more money for healthcare every single year—more and more the premiums went higher and higher.”
- “I want to end this flagrant scam and put extra money straight into the healthcare savings account in your name, and you go out and buy your own healthcare, and you’ll make a great deal, you’ll get better healthcare for less money—that way you can choose the care that is right for your family.”
That’s a direct shot at Obamacare, which, yes, is a disaster; the Democrats only recently fought bitterly to preserve COVID-era subsidies, which were keeping the whole thing afloat.
There aren’t yet a lot of details given with this announcement, so we don’t really know how it will all work; we can expect those details to be released in coming weeks, and we’ll report them when they do.
You can view the White House article on the new proposed plan here.
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