Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
With Price Nomination, Trump Undercuts Campaign Promise To Protect Medicare
In tapping Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) to be his Health and Human Services secretary, [Trump] has elevated one of the most aggressive proponents of dramatically overhauling the government safety net for seniors and low-income Americans, a long-held conservative goal. Trump also took a step toward a potentially explosive political battle over the entitlements, which account for close to half of all federal spending.Such a battle — and the threat of benefit cuts to more than 100 million Americans — risks alienating some of the very working-class voters who fueled Trump’s unexpected victory. (Levey and Bierman, 11/29)
Donald Trump ran for president as a conservative populist, not a traditional Republican. He blasted free trade deals. He embraced massive government infrastructure spending. And he promised to safeguard two massive - and massively popular - safety-net programs for older Americans, Social Security and Medicare. “You can’t get rid of Medicare," Trump said in a press conference in the fall of 2015, during the Republican primaries. "It’d be a horrible thing to get rid of. It actually works." Those positions boosted Trump electorally, particularly among aging whites in the industrial Midwest, where he secured his Electoral College victory. (Tankersley, 11/29)
As chairman of the House Budget Committee, Price emerged as a top advocate of Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to transform Medicare from a program that supplies a defined set of benefits into a "premium support" model that would, similar to Obamacare, offer subsidies for participants to purchase health care directly from insurance companies. He also wants the Medicare eligibility age to rise to 67. (11/29)
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Rep. Tom Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services signals that the new administration is all-in on both efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and restructure Medicare and Medicaid. Price, a Georgia Republican who currently chairs the House Budget Committee, was among the first to suggest that not just the ACA but also Medicare are on the near-term agenda for newly empowered Republicans. (Rovner, 11/29)
