No part of Americans’ lives stands to change more fundamentally based on who’s elected president on Nov. 3rd than their healthcare.
Joe Biden supports further efforts to socialize American medicine, which would increase healthcare costs, reduce choices, and decrease quality. For proof, just look at what Obamacare has done to American healthcare over the past decade. Then amplify these negative results to costs, choices, and quality to get a sense of what’s to come if Biden is elected.
Democrats’ ultimate goal is Medicare for All — a single-payer system that would ban any healthcare choice and consign all Americans to the same top-down, government-run system. The public option is just one train stop en route to this final destination. More than 700 delegates at the Democratic National Convention last month said they’d oppose a party platform that doesn’t include Medicare for All.
In contrast, President Trump’s healthcare vision, which he lays out today in a rally in Charlotte, centers on personalized healthcare. Whereas Biden wants the government to control healthcare, Trump wants to leave care decisions where they belong: in the hands of the doctors and patients.
Personalized healthcare moves power and control away from Washington and insurance companies and toward an innovative, patient-centered system. This reform gives patients more control and better choices at lower costs while maintaining protections for those with preexisting conditions. Such an approach is the healthcare fix that the American people want and need.
Personalized healthcare prioritizes your health, your doctor, your wallet, and your choice. It saves you money on healthcare and drugs with price transparency for easy comparison shopping and more choices for health coverage. It ends unnecessary tests and procedures that increase the costs of care. Personalized healthcare allows you to keep your health coverage and doctors when you change jobs.
Personalized healthcare eliminates needless layers of bureaucracy and harmful regulations, letting doctors focus on their patients. Paperwork requirements are now so burdensome that physicians spend roughly half their time on busywork, not treating patients, thus raising costs and reducing quality.
Taken together, these personalized healthcare reforms reduce prices, increase choices, and improves outcomes. Last year, the Job Creators Network Foundation conducted extensive research on tens of thousands of Americans for its personalized healthcare reform plan, Healthcare for You, and found that the public supports the vision that Trump will release today.
President Trump has done what he can at the executive level to make this personalized healthcare vision a reality. He issued new rules to allow for Association Health Plans and Short-Term Health Plans, which significantly increased the affordable coverage options for small businesses and ordinary patients. AHPs and STHPs free patients from some of the most burdensome Obamacare regulations, such as essential health benefits mandates, to offer coverage at a fraction of Obamacare plans. STHPs are around 80 percent less expensive than their competitors.
Trump also issued rules to require hospitals and health insurers to disclose their prices so that patients can shop for care and identify less expensive options for treatments and insurance. These rules will allow patients to weigh their choices and pursue care and coverage based on price and quality, a process that consumers take for granted in every other sector of the economy. Price transparency will also eliminate surprise billing, which every American, no matter what their political party, hates.
Trump’s recent rules on prescription drug pricing, notably his efforts to redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of drug market rebates and kickbacks back to patients, will significantly reduce medicines’ cost.
President Trump will trumpet these personalized medicine accomplishments at today’s rally and use them to project his vision of broader healthcare reform that increases choices, decreases costs, and improves quality. This personalized approach is the direction that the country needs to move in, rejecting, not embracing, Obamacare’s failed elements. For voters, the choice is clear.
Alfredo Ortiz is the president and CEO of the Job Creators Network. Tom Price, M.D. is a former Health and Human Services Secretary and a Senior Healthcare Fellow at the Job Creators Network.