- President Donald Trump announced "The Great Healthcare Plan."
- It promises lower drug prices by enforcing price parity with other countries' rates.
- The plan would offer direct subsidies to Americans instead of payments to insurers.
As the Senate ponders whether to extend enhanced subsidies to help people pay for Affordable Care Act insurance, President Donald Trump on Thursday announced “The Great Healthcare Plan,” with a promise to put money in the pockets of Americans.
In the White House fact sheet, the plan promises to lower prescription drug prices and insurance premiums and “hold big insurance companies accountable,” while maximizing price transparency.
What it doesn’t do — at least yet — is provide many details. The fact sheet is a near-verbatim rendering of the announcement itself. The Hill referred to the plan as a “framework.” Per The Hill, “The White House in a fact sheet called the plan ‘comprehensive,’ though it was delivered as a broad outline without key details on how to implement it or pay for it.”
There is no cost estimate or explanation of which groups of people would benefit or if it would or would not apply to those who do not have government-sponsored health insurance, though presumably everyone could benefit from greater price transparency and other plan features.
The plan promises much of what the Trump administration has already announced, including his “most-favored nation” expectation that Americans will pay the same price for prescription drugs as those in other countries. The plan says it will “slash” prescription drug prices by codifying those deals and that “voluntarily negotiated deals” with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be “grandfathered in.”
More “verified-safe” prescription drugs would also be available for over-the-counter purchase so people could spend less time on doctor visits.
Of lowering prescription prices, Trump said, “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.”
He also referred to the Affordable Care Act, which is often called Obamacare, as a “flagrant scam.”
Lower insurance premiums
To lower insurance premiums, the new plan would “stop sending big insurance companies billions in extra taxpayer-funded subsidy payments and instead send the money directly to eligible Americans to allow them to buy the health insurance of their choice.”
The federal government would fund a “cost-sharing reduction program” for health care plans that would reduce common Obamacare plan premiums by at least 10%.
And the proposal promises to end “kickbacks from pharmacy benefit managers to the large brokerage middlemen that deceptively raise the cost of health insurance.”
Make insurance companies accountable
Plain English is at the heart of this section, which said health insurance companies would have to publish rate and coverage comparisons on their websites in an understandable, non-jargon form so consumers could figure out what they’re purchasing.
The proposal would make insurance companies publish how much of the money they take in goes to overhead and profits and how much is paid out to claims.
They would also have to publish claim denial rates.
Price transparency
Those who accept Medicare or Medicaid would be required to “publicly and prominently” post their pricing and fees to eliminate the risk of surprise medical bills.