The new direction of American health care should be fully consumer driven, empowering individuals to be the surveyors and purchasers of their care. If President-elect Trump and Rep. Tom Price, Trump’s HHS pick, want to make the most of this short window, they should keep four central reforms in mind: 1) Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans. 2) Accommodate people with pre-existing health conditions. 3) Allow broad access to health-savings accounts. 4) Deregulate the market for medical services.
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Any Republican attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act must address Medicaid, which has literally become the 800-pound gorilla in the health-care policy room. Simply rolling back the ACA’s Medicaid expansion would spike the number of uninsured Americans and expose Congress and the Trump administration to withering criticism. On the other hand, leaving Medicaid unchanged exposes the federal budget to the program’s unsustainable cost trajectory: Federal Medicaid spending has doubled over the past decade.
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President-elect Donald Trump has selected Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a leading critic of the Affordable Care Act, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed by the Senate, he would play a central role repealing and replacing the ACA. Price, an orthopedic surgeon, has for years been refining his own detailed plan for health reform, the Empowering Patients First Act. It would repeal the law, but, among many other changes, would provide support for those not eligible for employer-based coverage or public programs through age-adjusted refundable tax credits. (Price also played a key role this year in developing the House Better Way proposal unveiled by Speaker Paul Ryan in June that takes the legislative process a step further.)
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President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will nominate Georgia Rep. Tom Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Cabinet-level pick, which requires Senate confirmation, inserts one of Obamacare’s most outspoken critics into the key position to dismantle it and help Republicans implement their own blueprint for health care reform.
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Thanks to all of the issues with our vast and complicated healthcare system, any attempts at reform will require massive amounts of effort, political capital, cooperation from various public and private entities and, likely, luck. So while Donald Trump ran on a platform of “repealing and replacing Obamacare”, it might be wise to start with some small changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that could still have large benefits.
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Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are vowing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the signature health care overhaul of President Obama.
Trump has offered a few ideas of where he’d like to see a health care overhaul go, such as a greater reliance on health savings accounts, but he hasn’t provided a detailed proposal.
The absence of specifics on health care from the president-elect makes the 37-page plan that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has released the fullest outline of what Republicans would like to replace Obamacare.
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The Affordable Care Act transformed the medical system, expanding coverage to millions, injecting billions in tax revenue, changing insurance rules and launching ambitious experiments in quality and efficiency.
Less of that might disappear under President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to “repeal and replace Obamacare” than many believe, say policy analysts. Republicans promising change might not quickly admit it, but in some respects Obamacare’s replacement may look something like the original.
“It gets into a questions of semantics,” said Mark Rouck, an insurance analyst for Fitch Ratings. “Are they really repealing the act if they replace it with new legislation that has some of the same characteristics?”
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The chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee said a GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act must be mindful of those who currently have coverage through the law.
“Clearly we don’t want to do any harm to people in the system now,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said at a Wednesday news conference at the Republican National Committee. “We want to be mindful.”
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Health care experts on both sides of the aisle projected the next Congress may tie reforms to Obamacare to other legislative efforts, speaking Tuesday at a National Coalition on Health Care forum. Conservatives on the panel suggested any negotiations would be tied to how willing both parties are to compromise. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, suggested GOP priorities such as tax reform or adjusting how the federal government addresses poverty could address health care in some way if the next administration and Senate are willing to acknowledge them and make trades. Joseph Antos, a health analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed, saying adjustments would be possible based on how much the incoming administration is willing to negotiate with Congress.
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Clinton says she wants to save the best of Obamacare while reducing costs. Trump says it is an expensive “disaster” that is on track to implode in 2017. He wants to replace it with something cheaper.
Trump has proposed getting rid of the exchanges and setting up tax-free health savings accounts for people with high-deductible insurance plans. He has also said he would set up state-based high-risk pools for people with medical conditions that make it hard to get coverage on their own. He also wants to allow companies to sell insurance across state lines to boost competition and drive down prices.
Whoever wins the presidency on Nov. 8 will likely face pressure to move quickly to reshape a healthcare initiative that affects millions of Americans.
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