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President Donald Trump unveiled his new “Great Healthcare Plan” Thursday, and urged Congress to create and pass legislation with the provisions included in an attempt to lower healthcare costs for Americans.
The plan, which comes amid a big push from the White House to focus on affordability issues for Americans, calls on Congress to get behind a series of provisions outlined in the plan that stem largely from previous executive orders the president has signed during this term.
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Specifically, the “Great Healthcare Plan” calls on Congress to codify Trump’s most “favored nations drug pricing” initiative that instructs drug companies to lower costs and keep them in alignment with what drugs in other developed countries cost, according to a White House fact sheet. Trump issued an executive order on the matter in May.
The plan also aims to maximize price transparency, and require providers or insurers to take Medicare or Medicaid to “prominently post their pricing and fees in their place of business and ensure insurance companies are complying with price transparency requirements,” according to the fact sheet.
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The plan also calls for ending taxpayer-funded subsidy payments to insurance companies, and instead of sending those funds to eligible Americans instead — a proposal that Trump has suggested previously.
“The government is going to pay the money directly to you. It goes to you, and then you take the money and buy your own health care,” Trump said in a video the White House released Thursday. “Nobody has ever heard of that before, and that’s the way it is.”
It’s unclear how the federal government plans to directly distribute funds to Americans, and an administration official told reporters Thursday that the administration is open to working with Congress on that front.
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“These are commonsense actions that make up President Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan, and they represent the most comprehensive and bold agenda to lower health care costs to have ever been considered by the federal government,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday. “Congress should immediately take up President Trump’s plan and pass it into law.”
Meanwhile, the Senate is prepared to vote on extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, which were a sticking point during the government shutdown in October and expired at the end of 2025. The House passed extending the subsidies for three years Jan. 8.
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