‘Insurance companies are making a fortune,’ the president said.
President Donald Trump on Nov. 16 said he has spoken with congressional Democrats about a possible direct health care payment plan as insurance subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year.
Democrats had sought to push for an extension to the health care subsidies in a possible package to end the government shutdown that started on Oct. 1 and ended on Nov. 12. The funding package passed by Congress and signed by Trump, however, didn’t include anything on the subsidies, which went into effect during the COVID-19 pandemic and were later extended under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
“I’ve had personal talks with some Democrats,” Trump told reporters on Sunday evening at the Palm Beach International Airport in Florida before he returned to Washington.
While Trump did not say who he spoke to, he said that they talked “about paying large amounts of dollars back to the people,” referring to a plan that he floated last week during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
His idea to pay Americans for health care insurance was “picked up” by some of his supporters as well as Democrats, he told reporters on Sunday.
“People love it,” he said. “The insurance companies are making a fortune. Their stock is up over a thousand percent over a short period of time. They are taking in hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not really putting it back, certainly not like they should.”
Health care and insurance reform have been among the most difficult issues to resolve in Congress. Republicans on multiple occasions have sought to scrap the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare, which was passed in 2010.
This year, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) have proposed overhauling the ACA law to create individual accounts that would direct the money to people rather than insurance companies. Trump last week told Ingraham that he supports the idea.
When asked about the concept, Trump responded by saying that he wants “the money to go into an account for people where the people buy their own health insurance.”
