The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in Cleveland. As they have been doing for months if not years already, all the pundits are punditing, perhaps pontificating, on what speakers will say on various issues.
STAT, Boston Globe Media’s online healthcare publication, presented a list of five health and medical issues to watch for during the GOP confab this week. Several are pretty obvious: the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump’s wishy-washy stance on abortion.
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On the abortion issue, as STAT points out, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, is staunchly anti-abortion and fits more with the traditional GOP platform than does Trump.
When it comes to the ACA, well, every Republican seems to be against Obamacare — especially the “Obama” part of it — but will delegates and the man at the top of the ticket embrace House Speaker Paul Ryan’s replacement plan? Trump, clearly not a fan of specifics in most of his stump speeches, hasn’t been as detailed.
STAT also asked whether Trump will discuss medical research, whether anyone will bring up the Zika virus and whether GOP leaders will bring up presumptive Democratic nominee’s plan to rein in drug prices. There are pitfalls associated with all of them, but particularly with the populist message about the soaring cost of prescription drugs:
To mainstream Republicans, [Clinton’s] plan — which includes letting Medicare negotiate drug prices and importing cheaper medications from other countries — is a big-government nightmare. As former Republican presidential candidate-turned-Trump-supporter Chris Christie put it in an October debate, “We don’t need Hillary Clinton’s price controls.”
There’s just one problem: Trump wants to do the same things. He talked several times on the campaign trail about how negotiating drug prices could save $300 billion (more than Medicare spends on its entire prescription drug program), and his website says he wants to let people import low-cost drugs from other countries.
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There’s a lot more that could be said in the area of healthcare, particularly in the wonk-heavy daytime sessions that can drill down on policy without having to be so soundbite-friendly as the prime-time speaking slots.
In the context of medical research, STAT brought up the Obama administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative and Cancer Moonshot 2020. Do Republicans dare offer even faint praise for these seemingly popular programs? Do they criticize either one as wasteful government spending and risk being viewed as anti-science or worse, insensitive to Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his son to cancer a year ago?
As a health IT reporter, I’d be remiss if I didn’t wonder if anyone will criticize the much-maligned Meaningful Use program. Through the end of May, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had paid out nearly $34.7 billion in incentive money for health IT usage, but electronic health records still mostly are not interoperable.
Going after that program, too, carries risks. Meaningful Use may be an Obama administration initiative, but plenty of Republicans had supported the idea of incentive money to encourage EHR usage. Notably, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — reported to be on Trump’s short list for running mate before Pence got the nod — once teamed with Clinton to push IT-enabled healthcare reform.
Of course, speakers at the Republican convention may conflate Meaningful Use with Obamacare because, well, Obama, and because it’s happened before. For the record, Meaningful Use is the result of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Affordable Care Act came a year later.
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