President Barack Obama shakes hands as he meets with President-elect Donald Trump on transition planning in the Oval Office at the White House on Nov., 2016 in Washington.
Hold the phone! The quick repeal of the Affordable Care Act that President-elect Donald Trump has promised likely will not be a complete undoing of the law after all.
Congressional leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) may have something to say about that. Both are more conservative than Trump, and there has been ill will between Ryan and the president-elect throughout election season.
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After nearly two years of campaigning, the transition to a new administration has to happen in just 10 weeks, and Trump’s team already has a .gov website up that plays on his “Make America Great Again” campaign theme.
Thursday on the new greatagain.gov site, Team Trump posted a policy page on healthcare that was far more diplomatic than anything the New York billionaire said publicly during the brutal campaign.
So far, Trump’s prescription for healthcare reform is short on details, though it makes clear he is against the Affordable Care Act. It also, thankfully, goes beyond health insurance coverage to discuss actual care, as well as research and development, innovation and patient-centeredness, whatever that has come to mean.
Trump does continue to put the blame for recent price spikes in health insurance squarely on the ACA. (Democrats certainly will disagree, but Republicans hold the majority in both houses of Congress.)
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It is clear to any objective observer that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has resulted in rapidly rising premiums and deductibles, narrow networks, and health insurance, has not been a success. A Trump Administration will work with Congress to repeal the ACA and replace it with a solution that includes Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and returns the historic role in regulating health insurance to the States. The Administration’s goal will be to create a patient-centered healthcare system that promotes choice, quality and affordability with health insurance and healthcare, and take any needed action to alleviate the burdens imposed on American families and businesses by the law.
But it does not put all the blame on the 2010 law. “The [incoming] administration recognizes that the problems with the U.S. healthcare system did not begin with — and will not end with the repeal of — the ACA,” the Trump statement said.
Not once does the page say “Obamacare,” nor does it mention the Obama administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative or the Cancer Moonshot 2020, spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden. We simply do not yet know the fate of those two programs, which are not part of any ACA initiative.
What is clear is that Trump is sticking to his anti-abortion stance, despite some claims on liberal blogs in the last couple of days that “pro-life” language had been scrubbed from various Trump policy pronouncements.
According to the statement, the president-elect is now promising to:
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Protect individual conscience in healthcare
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Protect innocent human life from conception to natural death, including the most defenseless and those Americans with disabilities
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Advance research and development in healthcare
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Reform the Food and Drug Administration, to put greater focus on the need of patients for new and innovative medical products
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Modernize Medicare, so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation — and beyond
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Maximize flexibility for states in administering Medicaid, to enable States to experiment with innovative methods to deliver healthcare to our low-income citizens
The country anxiously awaits specifics.
Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
