White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt detailed the “four commonsense pillars” of President Donald Trump’s newly unveiled framework for the “Great Healthcare Plan,” which the White House is calling on Congress to pass.
Leavitt outlined the president’s vision to reporters during Thursday’s White House press briefing. She stated that the first pillar is “permanently lowering prescription drug prices” by codifying Trump’s most-favored-nations deals with pharmaceutical companies.
“Congress can get this done by codifying President Trump’s historic most-favored-nation [MFN] initiatives into law to guarantee Americans the same low prices for prescription drugs that people in other countries around the world pay,” Leavitt said.
Trump has struck MFN deals with 14 major pharmaceutical companies since late September: Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, and Sanofi.
Secondly, the “Great Healthcare Plan” would halt billions in extra taxpayer-funded subsidies for insurance companies, “and instead send that money directly to eligible Americans to allow them to buy the health insurance of their choice,” Leavitt shared.
It would also fund “a cost-sharing reduction program for healthcare plans,” and end “kickbacks from pharmacy benefit managers to large brokerage middlemen,” Leavitt said.
A cost-sharing reduction program would save at least an estimated $36 billion in taxpayer dollars, per the Congressional Budget Office, according to the White House.
The third pillar of the plan will greatly broaden price transparency by requiring “any healthcare provider or insurer who accepts either Medicare or Medicaid to publicly and prominently post their pricing and fees to avoid surprise medical bills,” according to Leavitt, who noted that such a policy has garnered bipartisan support for years.
Fourthly, Leavitt said the framework would help Americans “make the best purchasing decisions for them and their families” by requiring insurance companies “to publish rate and coverage comparisons up front on their websites in plain English.”
“These are commonsense actions that make up President Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan, and they represent the most comprehensive and bold agenda to lower health care costs to have ever been considered by the federal government,” Leavitt told reporters.
She called on Congress to immediately get to work on Trump’s plan. Trump urged House Republicans to focus on healthcare during a House GOP retreat at the Trump-Kennedy Center on January 6.
“You want to turn this thing? You work on Favored Nations, you work on borders, you work on all of the things that we talked about, but now, you take the healthcare issue away from [Democrats], and they want to fight it. You know why? They’re all owned by the insurance companies,” he added.
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