What the Health? Still Waiting for That Trump Health Plan

Aug 06, 2020 at 04:20 pm by pj


 

 

President Donald Trump keeps promising to unveil a comprehensive plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, but it keeps not appearing. However, this week he did order an expansion of telehealth for Medicare beneficiaries and a program to help struggling rural hospitals.

Meanwhile, the administration still lacks a comprehensive plan to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., and Congress remains unable to agree on another round of COVID relief funding, despite broad agreement on the need.

Outside Washington, Missouri this week became the sixth state where voters approved an expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act over the objections of Republican governors and/or Republican-controlled legislatures.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Tami Luhby of CNN and Kimberly Leonard of Business Insider.

Among the takeaways from this week’s podcast:

Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read too:

Julie Rovner: Vanity Fair’s “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof Into Thin Air’,” by Katherine Eban

Alice Miranda Ollstein: The Atlantic’s “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” by Ed Yong

Kimberly Leonard: The New York Times’ “’The Biggest Monster’ Is Spreading. And It’s Not the Coronavirus,” by Apoorva Mandavilli

Tami Luhby: The Washington Post’s “Trump Keeps Promising an Overhaul of the Nation’s Health-Care System That Never Arrives,” by Anne Gearan, Amy Goldstein and Seung Min Kim

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