A continuing look ahead at the possibilities for 2025 and a new president…..
I am an old fart so healthcare is a prime concern for me as I age…..I am not particularly impressed with some of the rhetoric around this issue coming from the Trump camp.
We could see major changes in a wealth of areas in the field….like ‘reform’ of the ACA, Medicare ‘reform’, changes in the CDC, and others…..let’s look at the overall picture…..
Donald Trump returned to the presidency last night, and the impacts for healthcare could be sweeping.
The 2024 election returns Republicans to the helm of health agencies, armed with plans to reshape federal health programs, reshape standards for healthcare, and push to lower prices. Trump said previously that he would allow some of his most outspoken campaign leaders, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to “go wild” on health, medicine, and food policy.
In addition to wanting to tackle rising costs, Trump has also said he wants to improve the performance of U.S. health agencies. The slogan “Make America Healthy Again” was a facet of his campaign. He touched on it again in his victory speech last night, also name-dropping Kennedy.
Trump will likely head into his second term with a supportive Congress, as the GOP has regained the Senate and the Associated Press has not yet called which party will lead the House.
Here are some of the healthcare priorities Trump mentioned on the campaign trail.
https://www.moneytalksnews.com/ways-president-elect-trump-plans-to-change-healthcare/
Medicare is a concern to this nation’s seniors and there is the possibility that major changes could be waiting in the wings…..
On the campaign trail, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are eager to portray themselves as guardians of Medicare. Each presidential candidate accuses the other of backing spending cuts and other policies that would damage the health insurance program for older Americans.
But the election’s outcome could alter the very nature of the nearly 60-year-old federal program. More than half of Medicare beneficiaries are already enrolled in plans, called Medicare Advantage, run by commercial insurers, and if Trump wins, that proportion is expected to grow — perhaps dramatically.
Trump and many congressional Republicans have already taken steps to aggressively promote Medicare Advantage. And Project 2025, a political wish list produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation for the next presidency, calls for making insurer-run plans the default enrollment option for Medicare.
Such a change would effectively privatize the program, because people tend to stick with the plans they’re initially enrolled in, health analysts say. Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025, though the document’s authors include numerous people who worked in his first administration.
Conservatives say Medicare beneficiaries are better off in the popular Advantage plans, which offer more benefits than the traditional, government-run program. Critics say increasing insurers’ control of the program would trap consumers in health plans that are costlier to taxpayers and that can restrict their care, including by imposing onerous prior authorization requirements for some procedures.
“Traditional Medicare will wither on the vine,” said Robert Berenson, a former official in the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton administrations who’s now a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a left-leaning research group.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/election-outcome-bring-big-medicare-experts/
None of this news strikes me as making the country “healthy again”….as was promised on the campaign trail.
But that is just me
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
It’s not intended to make the country ‘healthier again’. Just to increase the profits of the healthcare providers, big pharma, and the insurance companies. Many of the people who voted for Trump are going to get a huge shock when they are ill, or have an accident.
Best wishes, Pete.
Yes they will and they were warned and they ignored it. All I can say is ‘just suck it up’…..chuq
Chuq– the last link to ABC News on this post returns an “Oops, can”t find that page” notice…..
I got it as well….sorry about that chuq
Drop the lower two classifications from the VA Healthcare system entirely—-that catches me in the net and leaves me with no healthcare options)—make people work for their food stamps, make people work for their disability checks, make people work for their welfare checks, cut the alcoholics and the dope heads off the disability rolls, raise social security benefits age to 70 or 75, reduce social security benefits for married couples so that only the income of the head of household will be considered when granting benefits….stop allowing widows and widowers from collecting their spouse’s social security, get rid of vaccines, make every medical procedure dependent on a “Prior authorization” scheme, put a cap on social security that will cause benefits to stop when a person reaches a certain age… such as 100 years…. privatize all health insurance and do away with all the free stuff on Obamacare, Make everybody get their health care in some kind of network of providers, eliminate all regulations that would cap the cost of prescription medications and let Big Pharma charge whatever they want….stop all funding for scientific research into diseases (Goodbye CDC)…..Make hydrochloroquin the approved medication for covid-19, abolish all safety requirements during pandemics… no more social distancing, no more shut down of the schools, no more mandatory masking, no more remote work force, make every prospective patient at any hospital prove they have health insurance before admitting them…like was the case before ACA and other non-discriminatory regulations, allow hospitals to dump patients at will …. allow doctors to refuse patients at will…. shut down all federally-funded community health care clinics ….the list is endless. The right wing radicals obviously want to allow the really sick, the elderly and the poor to die and no longer be a burden on the hard-working taxpayers. That ought to reduce the national population by at least two million per year and save billions for the oligarchs to stick into their own pockets.
Sounds damning….but accurate…..chuq
Seems more and more people are rejecting advantage plans as the disadvantages avalaunche on them as policy holders and the restrictions in the fine print and rejections from doctors, pharmavies and hospitals emerge. Moving to privitized advantage plans could be a nightmare but I’m not very knowledgeable on this aspect. One change needed is some form of assistance to average and low income adults to help with impossibly high cost of elder care for parents. This lack of elder care seems to be ignored by legislators.
Advantage may become mandatory meaning out of pocket expenses will hit hard….I agree about elder care….neither party has a good plan. chuq
and it will be even MORE ignored by legislators after January 20— It seems the right wing wants to use advantage plans over government sponsored health care more and more and more….