President Donald Trump started his first day back in the White House by issuing an executive order that rescinded many of former President Joe Biden's executive orders.
One victim was a Medicare project to create a list of drugs that could be offered to any patient with Medicare prescription drug coverage for a copay of just $2 a month.
Trump blocked the Medicare $2 drug project by canceling Biden-era Executive Order 14087. That order told the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, an arm of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to test ideas for making Medicare drug benefits better and cheaper.
Program designers wanted the Medicare $2 Drug List Model to include drugs that many Medicare enrollees use to control common conditions, such as diabetes, thyroid problems and high cholesterol. It was meant to be Medicare's answer to Walmart's effort to provide many common generic drugs for $4 per prescription.
Other new Trump executive orders seek to:
What it means: Clients with Medicare coverage may lose out on a chance to pay less for prescription drugs.
Medicare project details: Medicare managers have also been trying to come up with a way to encourage prescription drug developers to speed up the release of treatments for severe but relatively unusual health problems, through the Accelerating Clinical Evidence Model.
The $2 drug project seems to have been popular.
Some members of Congress, including Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., who is now chairman of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, have objected to the Accelerating Clinical Evidence Model project, arguing that it would unfairly cut payments made to some health care providers.
Other first-day Trump administration health policy moves: Some other rescissions of Biden-era executive orders included in the new Trump administration executive order seek to:
- End a Biden-era effort to use an executive order to start the process of capping the duration of a short-term health insurance policy at 90 days.
- Eliminate a Biden-era effort to use an executive order to start the process of making issuers of critical illness insurance and hospital indemnity insurance provide a standard warning when selling the policies. Marketers were supposed to use the warning notice to explain that that products were much more limited than major medical insurance. In December, a federal court issued a ruling blocking that requirement.
- Eliminate executive orders that the Biden administration used to launch COVID-19 treatment and vaccination efforts.
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