President Donald J. Trump talked about health insurance Wednesday during an address broadcast from the White House. Credit: White House
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that replacing some Affordable Care Act individual health insurance premium subsidies with contributions to people's health savings accounts will hurt health insurance companies but help the customers.
Trump talked about the ACA health insurance subsidies and efforts to reduce prescription drug costs during an address televised from the White House.
Trump is taking on "the gigantic health insurance companies that have gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people," Trump said. "The money should go to the people."
"I want the money to go directly to the people, so you can buy your own health care," Trump said. "You'll get much better health care at a much lower price."
Trump rejected the idea that the main goal of the ACA was to help the insureds.
"The current Unaffordable Care Act was created to make insurance companies rich," Trump said. "It was bad health care at much too high a cost, and you see that now in the steep increase in premiums being demanded by the Democrats. They are demanding those increases, and it is their fault. It's not the Republicans' fault. It's the Democrats fault. It's the Unaffordable Care Act, and everybody knew."
The ACA originally limited access to ACA premium subsidies to people with income under 400% of the federal poverty limit. Congress increased subsidy levels and made them available to higher-income people in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The temporary subsidy boost is set to expire Dec. 31 and create a "subsidy cliff," with out-of-pocket costs coverage rising dramatically in 2026. For some older, relatively high-income exchange plan users, annual coverage costs could rise to more than $30,000 next year, from less than $10,000 this year.
Democrats and some Republicans in Congress have argued that letting people's share of coverage costs rise so dramatically would cause too much pain, but analysts at the Paragon Health Institute and some other research centers have argued that the current subsidy framework is responsible for much of the pain, because it has given health insurers a strong incentive to maximize federal ACA premium subsidy revenue by pushing up the full cost of coverage.
Trump said he thinks letting the current subsidy levels expire is better than the alternative.
If the subsidy levels drop back to what they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, "the only losers will be insurance companies that have gotten rich and the Democrat parties totally controlled by the same insurance companies," Trump said. "They will not be happy, but that's okay with me, because you, the people, are finally going to be getting great health care at a lower cost."
TrumpRx.gov: Trump said the TrumpRx.gov prescription drug access website will be available starting in January and will give patients access to discounts negotiated by the federal government directly with the drug manufacturers.
"I'm doing what no politician of either party has ever done: standing up to the special interests to dramatically reduce the price of prescription drugs," Trump said.
One strategy, the "most favored nation" strategy, will push manufacturers to offer U.S. patients prices that are as low as the prices they offer in European countries, Japan and other rich countries.
Because of the use of that strategy with the manufacturers and the threat of tariffs "your drug costs will be plummeting downward," Trump said. "They stopped ripping us off, and it began as of four days ago. There's never been anything like this in the history of our country. Drugs have only gone up, but now they will be going down by numbers never conceived possible."
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