Dems Set Trump Up for False Healthcare ‘Fail’

The Biden administration appears to have set a trap for the Trump administration with a federal provision for funding specialized senior healthcare.

The Trump White House is now weighing options for an allegedly “urgent” Medicare Part D issue tied to the Biden Inflation Reduction Act, which is to take effect on Jan. 1 of next year. The Senior Care Pharmacy Coalition (SCPC) claims that if the new policy takes effect, specialized long-term-care (LTC) pharmacies serving American nursing homes will not be able to remain open.

Advocates assert that numerous seniors won’t be able to access medications, and nursing homes might even close. The Biden administration set Donald Trump up to take a fall. Without passage of the “Preserving Patient Access to Long-Term Care Pharmacies Act,” which would create a temporary supply fee, SCPC insists that the cost to taxpayers through Medicare will become even higher.

An unnamed source described as close to the administration said, “The Biden administration left a number of trap doors of bad policies, and they were hoping President Trump would fall into them ahead of the election. Thankfully, there is a whole-of-government effort to fix and replace the broken, government-run health care system the Democrats imposed on America.”

The reality is that it is incredibly alarming that numerous pharmacies are so utterly dependent on the federal government that they would not be able to operate properly without this. The federal government should never have been involved in healthcare to begin with, and its involvement has been a disaster ever since. But Democrats love to get government involved because it means that they control healthcare when they are in power, and they can blame Republicans for healthcare crises when they are not in power. That’s what is happening here.

An SCPC press release shared with PJ Media explained:

The SCPC analysis, based on the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey data and the Medicare Fee-for-Service claims data, estimates that if utilization increased just 1% per year due to LTC pharmacy closures and service reductions and if medical inflation is 4.3% – the current CMS medical inflation rate for 2026-2033– Medicare spending will increase $1.9 billion over 10 years. If utilization increases 2.5% – a realistic possibility given the magnitude of the impact on LTC pharmacies– Medicare spending would increase $4.8 billion over 10 years. By contrast, the cost of fixing the problem now and averting this crisis is only $826 million over 10 years.

Hence, the SCPC’s sense of urgency.

As noted above, it appears that the taking effect of the previous provision set under the Biden administration was placed as a clever trap should the Democrats not win the 2024 election. It could therefore be weaponized against the Trump administration as a claim of abandoning senior citizens.

Besides the act mentioned above as a solution, which could be included in a year-end ACA subsidy package, the Trump administration could also choose to use Section 402 authority to set a temporary dispensing fee, according to the advocacy group.

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