Trump's Last-Minute Push For Legally Tenuous Prescription Drug Cards
In a gambit to boost President Donald Trump’s flagging poll numbers among seniors, the Trump administration is hastily assembling a plan that would put $200 debit cards for prescription drugs in the hands of most Medicare beneficiaries.
But the authority they’re using to bypass Congress is shaky at best, and illegal at worst, according to a number of legal and policy experts who spoke to HuffPost this week.
As first reported by Politico’s Dan Diamond, administration officials want to send roughly 39 million seniors a special debit card that can be used at pharmacies to pay for medications. The cards, worth $200 each, would go out between the end of October and the end of the year.
In case the political ramifications weren’t clear enough, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to spend about $19 million on letters — to be sent out before Election Day — informing seniors that they’ll be receiving this debit card as a result of Trump’s efforts.
The cost of the program — the money itself, as well as the costs of producing the debit cards, sending out letters, and building a database to track cards and health outcomes — is nearly $8 billion. The administration has indicated that it will cover the costs of the cards by dipping into Medicare funds, although the exact funding arrangement is not clear.
But if this seems like the government’s version of robbing Peter to pay Paul, just so Trump can claim right before the election that he’s lowering prescription drug costs for seniors, the White House claims the program could actually save Medicare money and improve health outcomes.
A senior White House official confirmed to HuffPost on Thursday that the administration had been working for months on a deal with the pharmaceutical industry to lower drug prices by Election Day, potentially including the distribution of one-time debit cards that the industry would finance. When that deal fell apart, as The New York...
