President Donald Trump said Friday that the “Great Healthcare Plan” framework will deliver “much better health care at a much reduced” cost and carry “tremendous reductions,” in response to a question from Breitbart News.
Trump went to Breitbart News for his first question before departing the White House on Marine One, en route to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend.
Breitbart News asked the president how his plan would impact Americans’ health insurance premiums.
“It is a tremendous plan,” he responded. “It’s called the Great Healthcare Plan, and we’re going to get tremendous reductions as you know, through — if you look at medicines and prescription drugs, they’re going to come down by numbers that have never been seen before, and we’re doing that by most-favored nations and other nations, whoever pays the lowest in the world, that’s what we’re going to pay.”
“Right now, we’re paying sometimes ten times higher than other nations. So, we have favored nations, that’s been approved. Other nations have, for the most part, agreed to it, and they had no choice. Otherwise, we were going to put tariffs on them,” he added.
Trump also noted that the plan would halt billions in extra taxpayer-funded subsidies for insurance companies and instead give the money directly to eligible Americans.
“The money is going to be paid directly to the people. So, it goes directly, not to the companies, not to the insurance companies. It’s going to go directly to the people, and the people are going to buy their own health care. They’ll get much better health care at a much reduced” cost, he added.
Lowering prescription drug prices and lowering insurance premiums are two of the four pillars of the Great Healthcare Plan, unveiled by the president on Thursday. The third aspect includes greatly broadening transparency by forcing healthcare providers and insurers who accept Medicaid and Medicare “to publicly and prominently post their pricing and fees to avoid surprise medical bills,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.
The fourth pillar, Leavitt said, is designed to increase consumer choice in health insurance, and aid Americans in making “the best purchasing decisions for them and their families” by requiring insurance companies “to publish rate and coverage comparisons up front on their websites in plain English.”
