Last week, I evaluated President Trump’s healthcare platform. The problem is, he doesn’t seem to have one. At least, he doesn’t say anything about one on his official campaign website. This is in stark contrast to Joe Biden, who gives many details on his healthcare plan (see my evaluation of it here).
So, to help President Trump out, I decided to write a healthcare plan for him. Let me be clear from the outset that this is not my personal healthcare plan–it is just one of many possible ways to implement the principles outlined in the Healthcare Incentives Framework, and it’s a way I could see Republicans going about it.
One other reminder: The President doesn’t make laws! But the modern reality in this country is that people want to hear a President’s plan for fixing all sorts of problems, so there we have it. He does have the power to set the agenda and influence his party, so this is by no means a useless endeavor.
Ok, now on to his brand new healthcare plan, which I am pretending to write on behalf of his staff, with a little rhetoric mixed in just for fun . . .
—————
President Trump will address both of the major issues in our healthcare system: value and access.
The problem with policies designed to increase access is that they usually create market distortions that become barriers to improving value, so his plan starts by addressing how he will improve value, after which he will show how he has crafted a way to increase access that will not undermine his other efforts.
First, he intends to enable patients to act as consumers and make informed choices. This applies to their ability to shop for the best insurance plans and their ability to shop for the best providers.
Take the insurance side first. To facilitate patients shopping for insurance plans, he has a unique approach for each segment of the insurance market.
For Medicaid, which is administered state by state rather than nationally, instead of allowing states to create and administer a single Medicaid plan, he will require them to contract with multiple insurers to each offer a Medicaid plan. This gives Medicaid enrollees more choices, and their insurance is provided by private businesses rather than government beaurocrats. The good news is, more than 2/3 of all Medicaid enrollees are already such plans (known as Medicaid Managed Care), and when these policies are combined with the other policies described in this plan, they will start to generate significant savings.
For Medicare, President Trump will make a similar change. Instead of the government offering a traditional Medicare plan, Medicare will shift over to relying exclusively on private insurers to create Medicare-compliant plans, and Medicare itself will simply pay those private insurers for each enrollee they have. This is called Medicare Advantage, and 34% of Medicare enrollees are already on such plans. But, again, increasing this number to 100%, when combined with the other changes in this plan, will create greater competition and cost savings.
For the private insurance market, President Trump will continue to rely on healthcare.gov as the marketplace for private health insurance plans. Even though this website was poorly rolled out, it has become a well-known source for health insurance, and now it will rise to its full potential because Medicare Advantage and Medicaid Managed Care plans will be rolled into it, meaning every American who does not get insurance through their employer will be able to shop for their health insurance on healthcare.gov. This will simplify the experience of buying health insurance, and it will strengthen Americans’ ability to find the best plan for them.
On the topic of employer-sponsored insurance, President Trump will take a historic first step in decoupling health insurance from employment because someone who loses their job should not lose their health insurance along with it. He will take this step by extending the employer health insurance tax exemption to all people buying health insurance on healthcare.gov. Employers will also have the option to stop paying for health insurance on behalf of their employees and instead give that money directly to their employees in the form of a pay raise, which allows employees the freedom and choice to use that money to shop for an insurance plan that fits their needs better than their employer’s plan.
President Trump will also get rid of Obamacare’s innovation- and competition-destroying medical loss ratio rule, which will become unnecessary after the changes described here fix the broken insurance markets and allow them to start pricing more competitively on their own.
He will also instruct the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to sponsor bundled payment and reference pricing pilots. These are alternative payment models that enable patients to more easily compare apples to apples the prices of their healthcare provider options and then decide for themselves if they think it is worth it to pay more to go to a more expensive provider (which, in healthcare, usually does not mean better quality!). These pilots will help spread these new payment models as (1) insurers discover it saves them (and their enrollees) money and (2) providers discover that they can also make more money by lowering their prices and winning more patients.
These common-sense policies will transform the healthcare insurance market into one of honest competition and innovation.
President Trump will also make changes to improve the healthcare provider market and allow patients to more easily find the best providers.
First, he will build on the progress he has already made with healthcare price transparency by requiring all healthcare facilities to publish their cash prices for the most common shoppable services. The required price reporting will include bundled prices, when applicable. Over time, as more bundled prices become available, patients will have an even easier time shopping for the best deal because they will be able to compare up front, apples to apples, prices between providers for the same bundle of services.
In additon to price data, patients need quality data. President Trump will require healthcare providers to start tracking and reporting quality metrics that are more useful in helping patients be good shoppers. This means there will be a shift in focus away from aggregate quality ratings and toward the specific metrics that patients need to know most when deciding between different providers.
President Trump will make all those price and quality data publicly available so that entrepreneurs can use them to design creative and simple shopping websites, similar to what we see with flight booking websites.
All those changes to the insurance market and the provider market will help people become better consumers of healthcare. And when our nation has consumers shopping for the best value in healthcare, it will stimulate the kind of competition we have never gotten in healthcare–competition over value. In other words, these changes will shift insurers’ and providers’ focus of innovation onto ways to improve value for patients, and as a result quality and price improvement dividends will accumulate long after these policies have been enacted.
Joe Biden’s plan is costly, and it is fiscally irresponsible because it has nothing in it that will make a major dent in the cost of healthcare, which is the biggest contributor to our growing national deficit.
President Trump also wants to ensure everyone has access to affordable health insurance. How can he make affordable insurance to everyone without interfering with the market changes described above?
His solution is to take the guaranteed renewable insurance approach. Here is how it will work:
At the time of implementation, everyone in the country will have the option to purchase health insurance without their pre-existing conditions being considered. Insurers will only be allowed to set premium prices based on the individual’s age and smoking status.
As long as an individual maintains continuous coverage, they will always be able to continue with the same insurance plan or even switch to a different plan without any of their pre-existing conditions being factored into their premium price.
However, if an individual chooses not to maintain continuous insurance coverage, insurers have the freedom to take pre-existing conditions into account and charge them a different price. If the individual is healthy, they could still be offered a price as low as others their same age and smoking status who maintained continuous coverage. But if the individual has pre-existing conditions, they could be charged as much as the maximum premium, which would be the premium a 64-year-old who smokes would be charged.
Once they have again maintained 12 months of continuous coverage, the prices available to them will revert back to the continuous coverage price being offered to others their same age and smoking status.
This will encourage healthy people to make the choice to maintain insurance coverage without any draconian or unconstitutional big-government mandates. Personal accountability will be maintained.
However, for these changes to work, President Trump will have to solve one more problem that Obamacare created.
Currently, people up to 400% of the federal poverty level (FPL) qualify for subsidies to make sure insurance premiums are not financially grievous. What the middle class above 400% of the FPL has found, however, is that their premiums have rapidly become unaffordable.
President Trump will eliminate that 400% FPL limit and instead switch it to a flat limit of 9% of a family’s income, enabling anyone to afford health insurance if they choose to purchase it.
In summary, President Trump’s plan to fix healthcare starts by making changes to the insurance and provider markets to refocus healthcare competition on innovations that improve value for patients, which will lead to billions of dollars saved. And at the same time, his plan will encourage and enable all Americans to purchase health insurance at affordable prices in a way that does not create market distortions that interfere with value-improving innovation.
And he will accomplish these changes all for a much lower cost than Joe Biden’s foolhardy plan to strengthen the unpopular Obamacare policies and force more people onto government insurance.
—————-
Well, Mr. President, there you have it. A ready-made health policy platform, complete with rhetoric, to win over those last few independents and propel you into another four years as President. Let’s just hope you have congress on your side with this plan or it will go nowhere.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 