President Donald Trump signaled his support Tuesday for a Republican alternative to the pandemic-era extra Obamacare subsidies Democrats championed during the government shutdown earlier this year.
“Well, I like the concept,” the president said when asked about the bill, which Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Bill Cassidy, R-La., unveiled Monday.
“I don’t want to give the insurance companies any money,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, Newsweek reported. “They’ve been ripping off the public for years.”
“The current system is not working to deliver health care at reasonable prices for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “Democrats’ push to maintain these high prices by giving more money to insurance companies is not a real solution for President Trump.”
“The President has instead focused on lowering prescription drug costs by hammering out deals with pharmaceutical companies, as well as taking on waste, fraud, and abuse in the system to deliver results for patients, and will continue to deliver policy solutions that lower costs in the healthcare market for the American people,” Desai added.
The government shut down on Oct. 1 after Democrat senators refused to support a “clean” Continuing Resolution that would fund the government at Biden-era levels until Congress could pass annual spending bills. Democrats demanded an extension of extra COVID-19 pandemic-era subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year.
Democrats ultimately agreed to fund the government in exchange for a promise that the Senate would hold a vote on extending the subsidies.
The Health Care Freedom for Patients Act, the Crapo-Cassidy bill, presents an alternative to the Democrats’ proposal, which Crapo and Cassidy claim would “send billions of tax dollars to giant insurance companies without lowering insurance premiums.”
By contrast, they claim their bill sends money directly to patients via a health savings account, on the stipulation that the funds cannot be used for abortion or gender transitions.
They also claim the bill would lower insurance premiums by funding cost-sharing reduction payments, would allow access to low-cost catastrophic plans, would prevent illegal aliens from accessing Medicaid by requiring states to verify citizenship and immigration status, and would stop taxpayer funding for gender transition services under Medicaid.
“Giving billions of taxpayer dollars to insurers is not working to reduce health insurance premiums for patients,” Crapo said in a news release on his proposal. “We need to give Americans more control over their own health care decisions.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said of the Crapo-Cassidy bill, “their phony proposal is dead on arrival.”
“Democrats have put forward the cleanest, fastest, most realistic solution: a three-year extension of the current tax credits, no gimmicks, no poison pills,” he said Tuesday. He called the proposal “the only realistic path left to prevent premiums from going up.”
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, introduced another proposal, the “More Affordable Care Act.”
The Scott bill “takes a commonsense approach to fix Obamacare and lower costs by encouraging innovation at the state level, stopping fraud and abuse in the system, increasing competition in the health insurance and provider market, and giving the American people the ability to spend health care dollars in the way that best meets their individual needs,” a news release from Scott’s office reads.
The Scott-Pfluger proposal would create a “Health Freedom Waiver Program” allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines; Trump Health Freedom Accounts, a health savings account that would be available through the waiver program; enhance the Obamacare small business tax credit; and codify Trump’s executive order on health care price transparency into law.
Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Tyler O’Neil
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