Trump Is Barely Trying With His New Health-care Plan
Amid the chaos of the endless ICE raids in Minneapolis, the capture of Nicolás Maduro, and the threats to seize Greenland, it was easy to miss that Donald Trump introduced a new health-care plan last week. For a president increasingly obsessed with sowing discord abroad, this was a bid to bring the focus back to domestic priorities. None should matter more than health care, with America’s byzantine system growing ever more unaffordable, thanks in part to the expiration of Obamacare subsidies that the Republican-run Congress has failed to renew.
Trump’s thinly sketched proposal, amounting to a few paragraphs on a website, calls for redirecting insurance subsidies into individual health-savings accounts, which could be used to purchase health-care services directly. Republicans have been debating similar proposals, with the details varying over how much money should be used. Trump’s plan would require insurance companies to provide more transparency on the prices they pay medical providers and their profit margins and force insurance companies to prominently post the frequency with which they deny care. The Trump plan also proposes more regulation of pharmacy-benefit managers, the behemoth middlemen companies like Express Scripts and CVS Caremark that manage prescription-drug benefits.
Some of these proposals, in isolation, have merit. The pharmacy middlemen........
