Washington: United States’ President-elect Donald J. Trump said this weekend that he was nearly ready to unveil a plan to replace President Obama’s Affordable Care Act with “insurance for everybody.”
Trump, in an interview Saturday evening with The Washington Post, said that health care offered under his plan would come “in a much simplified form — much less expensive and much better.”
“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”
Trump, however, offered no details about how his plan would work or what it would cost. He only said that it would be “great health care” that left people “beautifully covered.”
He also gave no explanation about how he would persuade Congress to pass his plan, though he indicated that it would have the backing of the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Trump said “I won’t tell you how, but we will get approval.”
The president-elect told The Post that his plan would be unveiled soon after the Senate confirmed Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, to be the secretary of health and human services.
Trump also told The Post that he would force drug manufacturers to negotiate better prices with Medicaid and Medicare, the government-run health programs.
Asked how he would force the drug companies to do that, he noted the public pressure that he had exerted on other companies, mentioning his Twitter posts criticizing cost overruns for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet.