President Donald Trump wants to meet with insurance company executives soon to urge them to follow pharmaceutical companies’ lead in bringing down health care costs, he told told reporters in the White House today.
“This is just an idea that I had standing here watching these great leaders saying that we’re going to have the lowest prices anywhere in the world, ” Trump said alongside pharmaceutical CEOs who have pledged to bring drug manufacturing to the U.S. and bring down prices for pharmaceutical products related to the flu, asthma, HIV, and diabetes, among other illnesses. “I’m going to call in the insurance companies that are making so much money, and they have to make less, a lot less, and maybe we can have reasonable health care without — without having to cut them out and let it all go awry.”
“I’m going to see if they get their price down, to put it very bluntly,” Trump said.
Since the record-long government shutdown, the administration has received pressure from the minority party to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that were created by Democrats and are set to expire at the end of the year. Congressional Republicans’ end-of-year legislative efforts on health care have stalled in recent weeks amid pushback from Democrats, who say that any bill must prioritize an extension of the expiring ACA subsidies.
Trump reiterated on Friday his preference for legislation that gives American patients direct payments that they can use toward health care, which was the basis of the Health Savings Account–focused Senate GOP bill that failed earlier this month.
“But there’s another way of doing it, and that’s getting the insurance companies to ease up and to cut their pricing way, way down, and stay part of the system,” Trump said. “So I’m going to call a meeting that could be in Florida this coming week, or it could be back in the White House the first week, not the second or third week.”