Donald Trump has talked about unveiling a health care plan of his own for about a decade, only to consistently miss self-imposed deadlines. The Republican famously assured the public in 2024 that he has “concepts of a plan,” but when it came to doing the hard work of crafting a policy blueprint, the president has never delivered.
After seeing the new proposal billed by the White House as “The Great Healthcare Plan,” it’s fair to say Trump and his team still haven’t delivered. The New York Times reported:
Under pressure to address affordability issues in the country, President Trump on Thursday released his long-awaited health care plan, urging Congress to pass measures that would codify steps his administration has already taken to try to lower drug costs and providing what a White House official called ‘broad direction’ to back health savings accounts.
The plan was short on specific details and left much of the direction for how to finalize it up to Congress. It amounted to a few paragraphs on a webpage.
To characterize the document the White House produced as a health care “plan” is overly generous. The entirety of the proposal — literally, from start to finish — is 386 words. For context, the blog post that you’re reading right now is roughly 650 words, and if your health care blueprint is quite a bit shorter than a blog post, then you don’t actually have a health care plan.
(An accompanying White House “fact sheet” is about 800 words, but a long-awaited presidential health care plan, a decade in the making, shouldn’t be the length of two blog posts, either.)
In a prerecorded video, the president said, “I’m calling on Congress to pass this framework into law without delay, have to do it right now, so that we can get immediate relief to the American people.”
But there is nothing to pass. There is no bill. The plan, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.
Moreover, the White House document is little more than a hodgepodge of conservative ideas, packaged together on a short website. A Washington Post report noted, “The administration released no legislative text nor timeline for related congressional action. … Asked how the proposal would advance in Congress, administration officials said it was a ‘broad architecture’ intended to guide lawmakers on next steps.”
“Broad architecture” is a nice euphemism for “we couldn’t actually come up with anything more than vague goals.”
At the heart of the proposal was a demand for one significant change: The administration wants federal funds that are currently going to insurance companies to go instead to consumers — who in turn would give the money to insurance companies.
Why would that be better than the status quo? I honestly have no idea, and neither the president nor anyone on his team have made any effort to answer questions along those lines.
If one were to stop here, one could simply conclude that Trump, after years of effort, has presented the public with a pitiful outline. But it’s actually worse than that, because of the context in which it was presented.
As much of the public knows, insurance subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage (known as enhanced premium tax credits, or PTCs) expired on New Year’s Eve, which has imposed drastic price hikes on roughly 24 million Americans. There are, however, ongoing efforts in Congress to restore the benefits, with the House passing a bill last week to revise and extend the subsidies for three years, as the Senate is at least trying to forge a related compromise.
The White House “plan,” however, throws a wrench into those efforts, condemning the ACA as a “scam” and excluding the subsidies from Trump’s “broad architecture.”
Which makes Trump’s gambit not merely a pitiful sham, but also a tactic that pushes the political process away from any solution that might actually help people.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
