
5 Healthcare Takeaways From the State of the Union
Trump's calls for cracking down on drug prices and enacting right-to-try legislation bring a reaction on Wall Street, but speaking for less than a minute on on the opioid crisis brings a different response from Democratic lawmakers.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday delivered his first State of the Union address, and although he did not spend much of the 80-minute speech on healthcare, it did have its moments. Here are 5 takeaways on healthcare from the State of the Union address:
1. Reducing drug prices is one of Trump’s “greatest priorities.” The
2. “Right-to-try” legislation gets a push. The president’s call for Congress to pass a law, now pending in the Senate, that would give patients direct access to investigational medications was the only specific policy measure he mentioned in the speech. But in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care®, National Coalition of Health Care President and CEO John Rother said that a law would not address the problem of annual unjustified price hikes for expensive drugs for chronic conditions, such as insulin for diabetes and anti-inflammatory biologics for rheumatoid arthritis.
3. His mention of the opioid crisis drew criticism. The
4. Trump touted the end of the individual mandate. In highlighting the tax bill at the top of his speech, the president noted that the plan “repealed the core of the disastrous Obamacare. The individual mandate is now gone.” This is the provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that required Americans to buy coverage or pay a penalty for not having it. Based on the Massachusetts plan adopted under former GOP Governor Mitt Romney, it is designed to balance the insurance pool with young and healthy people, instead of leaving just older, sicker people buying individual coverage.
5. What Trump didn’t say makes news. Trump did not call for a full repeal of the rest of the ACA, after Republicans spent much of the year trying. Word out of the
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