Policy Experts Weigh Healthcare Elements of GOP Platform
by Shannon Firth, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today
July 12, 2024
Earlier this week, the Republican party released its 2024 policy platform, which provides a glimpse of what the nation’s healthcare agenda might look like during a second term for Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee.
While short on details, the 2024 GOP Platform. speaks of protecting and strengthening Medicare, lowering healthcare costs, expanding choice and competition, and opposing late-term abortions, among other issues.
Grace-Marie Turner, founder and president of the Galen Institute, a conservative think tank based in Paeonian Springs, Virginia, acknowledged that the document was light on healthcare substance, suggesting that healthcare is “woven into” the discussion of the economy, and therefore, embedded into the overall vision of “getting families back into a position that they feel financially secure.”
In the past, Trump has focused on lowering prescription drug costs and increasing transparency, choice, and competition, which are all emphasized in the platform, she said. The party also pledges to protect Social Security and Medicare, and to support long-term care, chronic disease management, and homecare for the elderly.
What the party doesn’t say is “‘Okay, we’re going to tackle and reform the whole healthcare system,'” Turner said. “There’s no appetite for that.”
So rather than being prescriptive, this outline aims to broadly answer the question, “What would you do if you were the ones that they voted for, and that were elected,” Turner said.
Brian Blase, PhD, president of the nonpartisan Paragon Health Institute, said that a look at Trump’s first term suggests what he might do in a second.
As president, he expanded price transparency, increased healthcare options for small businesses, and sought to enact Medicare payment reforms — including reforming 340B payment policies, and site-neutral payment policies.
While there’s no mention of Medicaid in the platform, Blase argued Republicans still have “a lot of sympathy” for work requirements for able-bodied adults, and for equalizing reimbursement rates — i.e., ensuring that the federal government isn’t paying more for the Obamacare “expansion population” than for low-income children and people with disabilities, he said.
Joseph Antos, a senior fellow with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute in Washington, also weighed in on the platform.
“These are really general ideas … ‘Healthcare and prescription drug costs are out of control.’ I don’t think you could find anybody, any politician, who would disagree with that,” he said.
As for increasing price transparency, “Trump actually has a track record on that,” he said.
His first administration “pushed through” regulations mandating detailed pricing information from hospitals and from insurers, he said.
As for the affordable healthcare options mentioned in the platform, the Trump administration supported having “strong alternatives” to standard insurance. For example, short-term, partial-coverage plans. and other policies that don’t cover the full range of benefits required under the Affordable Care Act, as well as health reimbursement arrangements,. Antos said.
Andrea Ducas, vice president of health policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, in Washington, D.C., said the substance of the platform is “very light” and she thinks that’s intentional.
“But if you actually look at what’s in, for example, Project 2025. [a wide-ranging conservative plan for government reform] … there you get a much more explicit look at what the actual plans are for healthcare.”
She said its goals include “eliminat[ing] the Inflation Reduction Act, which would overnight increased prescription drug costs for America’s seniors … potentially capping Medicaid benefits, [and] stripping women of their ability to access no-cost emergency contraception.”
Project 25. is a consortium that includes the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks. Trump has attempted to distance himself from the group,. despite the clear involvement of many of his former top advisers.
Wendell Primus, PhD, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on Health Policy, called out the GOP for claiming Democrats planned to add millions of “illegal immigrants” to the…
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