The Patriot Post® · What's in 'The Great Healthcare Plan'?
“I am thrilled to announce my plan to lower healthcare prices for all Americans and truly make healthcare affordable again,” President Donald Trump announced yesterday. “We’re doing things that nobody’s ever been able to do. We’re calling it The Great Healthcare Plan.”
Healthcare has once again become a major topic of debate and resulted in a Democrat-caused government shutdown in recent months.
Hilariously, Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren placed all the blame for the veritable crisis created by Democrats and ObamaCare on Trump and Republicans. She falsely claimed, “Donald Trump’s new plan is a Band-Aid for the full-blown health care crisis he and Republicans in Congress created.”
Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden offered the same kind of gaslighting: “Every American should be asking themselves a simple question: are you paying more for your health care than you were a year ago? The answer ought to tell you everything you need to know about the Trump-Republican health care agenda.”
Back here in reality, I’ve rehearsed the history before: Zero Republicans voted to create the grossly misnamed Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) in 2010. Zero Republicans voted for the grossly misnamed and historically inflationary American Rescue Plan in 2021, which expanded subsidies for marketplace health insurance plans under the guise of the COVID emergency. And zero Republicans voted for the also grossly misnamed — by Joe Biden’s own admission — Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which extended those expanded subsidies.
Those subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Though the House passed yet another extension, it’s stalled in the Senate.
Enter President Trump. Yesterday, he said in a video message, “I’m calling on Congress to pass this framework into law without delay. We have to do it right now so that we can get immediate relief to the American people, the people I love.”
It’s built on a series of reform proposals related to executive orders Trump has signed. I’d distill it this way:
- Issues direct subsidies to consumers rather than insurance companies
- Locks in the most-favored-nations drug-pricing agreement to reduce costs for prescriptions
- Requires transparency from insurance companies on outlays for benefits versus overhead, as well as the percentage of rejected claims and wait times for routine services
- Requires transparency from medical providers in the form of publicly available price lists
So, let’s briefly unpack some of those things, and I’ll start with the bad news.
Direct consumer subsidies sound great, and they’re certainly a populist idea. As Trump put it, “The government is going to pay the money directly to you. It goes to you, and then you take the money and buy your own healthcare.” But subsidies won’t lower premiums. In fact, this falls into the same trap as other income redistribution in that subsidies drive up prices — in this case because insurance companies will just charge what they believe they can get in the form of transfer payments.
In a similar fashion, effectively imposing price controls on prescription drugs will constrict supply. Trump is right about the absurd prices for some drugs, especially when compared to other countries, and the system of kickbacks and expensive middlemen is hardly a well-functioning free market. But central planning doesn’t work.
The good news is that transparency would go a long way toward fixing what’s broken. “As the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Trump said. “That is why my plan orders all the insurance companies to publish rate and coverage comparisons in very plain English. It requires insurers to publish detailed information about how much of your money they’re going to be paying out in claims versus how much they are taking in in profits. … It forces them to release detailed data on how many claims are being denied and whether those denials are eventually overturned on appeal.”
From the provider standpoint, he said, “Most importantly, it will require any hospital or insurer who accepts Medicare or Medicaid to prominently post all prices of their place of business so that you are never surprised, and you can easily shop for a better deal or better care — and you’re going to end up doing both, you’re going to get a better deal and better care.”
To put it mildly, it’s infuriating to call the doctor and try to get a price for something, only to be told they have no idea until the insurance company reviews the claim. You often have no clue what the service will cost until weeks after the fact.
Nothing else works this way.
We have auto insurance, but we know what an oil change or a new radiator costs. We have home insurance, but we know what we’ll pay for furnace repair or replacing countertops.
Of course, those forms of insurance are actually coverage against catastrophic loss, unlike health insurance, which is something else entirely, in that everyone expects it to cover routine expenses. ObamaCare requires that it cover routine expenses. Guess what that did to prices.
There are other reforms Republicans look at. For example, offer insurance portability so it’s no longer tied to employment, whether in big or small groups. They should also enable Americans to put more tax-free money into HSAs and use it to pay premiums rather than only qualified expenses.
The best results for American healthcare and the consumers who need it would be achieved by reducing the government’s footprint.