The "health care plan"unveiled Thursday at a Trump rally billed as a presidential address is actually worth even less than the paper he signed to "enact" it. Nothing Trump puts forward in the orders has the force of law. You can't hand your insurance company an executive order to make them cover your kid's asthma. The administration knows all that, and admits as much, in the order itself. This is about Trump having a lot of fanfare in saying he's doing something about preexisting conditions and drug prices, while in actuality he's making it all much worse. Given that the administration knows this, what was all the hoopla about? The bribe he announced for seniors.
Out of nowhere, Trump announced that every senior on Medicare was going to be getting a $200 card, a "Trump Card" to use to pay their part of prescription drug co-pays. This all started with an idea by chief of staff Mark Meadows during drug pricing negotiations with the industry. The talks fell apart when Meadows insisted that the drug makers fund a scheme consisting of $100 cash cards to Medicare enrollees to be mailed out before the election. With that failure, the Trump team decided to go bigger—$200 and make taxpayers fund it by stealing from Medicare, probably. TheWall Street Journal reports that the money—$6.6 billion—will come from savings from a Medicare waiver program that is definitely not intended to fund a program like this, and offset by a drug-pricing program that doesn't exist yet. So, yes, it's taxpayer funding for Trump's bribes as of now.
