White House adviser to pitch health care in Las Vegas
WASHINGTON — Chief White House domestic policy adviser Joe Grogan is set to pitch what he calls President Donald Trump’s “non-ideological” approach to improving health care and lowering costs on Wednesday at the 2019 HLTH Conference in Las Vegas.
The key, Grogan told the Review-Journal, is looking at health-care outcomes, not philosophy. One such decision is allowing insulin to be covered in high-deductible plans “because we’ve looked at data that says, if you keep people stable on their insulin injections and don’t have them sacrificing their treatments for economic reasons, then we can keep them out of the hospital and and save the system more money down the road.”
The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the new rule “reduces cost over time” and promotes healthy outcomes for patients.
“The president has given instructions to his team that he wants to the Republican Party to be the party of health care,” the former pharmaceutical lobbyist said. Grogan recalled Trump’s recent speech at the Villages in Florida where seniors went wild as Trump signed an executive order to expand private Medicare insurance plans.
“The politicians on the left are pushing Medicare for All. I say the result will be no Medicare at all. It will collapse under the load — the load of the system,” Trump told the group.
But the left-leaning Center for American Progress opined, “This executive order builds on other efforts that the administration has taken to accelerate enrollment in Medicare Advantage, which insurers profit from by selectively attracting relatively healthier enrollees and manipulating the government’s risk adjustment program to make their enrollees appear sicker.”
Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.
